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Editorial
Spring is almost here, along with spring cleaning.
For the past nearly 30 years, Rockbridge groups and individuals have taken some of their spring cleaning outdoors by taking part in the Rockbridge Preservation (formerly RACC) Annual Community Cleanup.
People know they shouldn’t throw litter from their vehicles, but they still do it, and the cleanup – a truly communitywide effort – endeavors to return the grassy roadsides to pristine condition.
As a benefit to the cleanup volunteers, they get to spend a few hours outside in the newly warm air, as brightly clad in their orange reflective vests as the flowers and trees just beginning to bloom.
For more scheduling flexibility, in recent years the community cleanup has been extended through two Saturdays, that immediately following the first day of spring and the one after. This year, the event begins on March 23 and will continue through March 30. Participants are still signing up, using the online registration sheet found at RC’s website, www.rockbridgeconservation. org/cleanup.
The cleanup was envisioned in 1994 by a number of RACC volunteers, including Mollie Messimer, who died this past January, Kevin Donovan, Steve Richards and Chris Wise, with a the first event held the following year. The early focus was to clean up the many massive and illegal “rogue” dumps throughout the county, many on hillsides or in sinkholes and in inaccessible ravines. It was a tough job led by volunteer Pete Davis and others, including landowners. Canoe livery owner Glenn Rose also encouraged litter pickup by local college students, ferrying them around in his van to work at the most littered roadsides.
About a dozen years ago RC board member David Harbor picked up the coordinator baton from Messimer, prior to her departure from the local area. The cleanup continues to flourish today, Harbour reports, averaging between 50 and 60 groups each year, involving between 200 and 300 people, and removing from 10 to 15 tons of trash. “So Mollie’s legacy lives on,” he observed.
Under Harbor’s leadership, the cleanup has gone from signing up on a map posted at the Rockbridge Regional Library to going “full tilt digital,” which is only fitting for an anti-littering project, one of whose enemies is paper. “We took it off the paper world and now it’s on phones and the Web,” Harbor explained.
The digital process allows input and updating by Harbor, who receives the emailed signup sheets and places their proposed cleanup locations on a map. He’s also able to match people who want to clean up with places that most need the work. “They say, I’d love to help, but I don’t know where to go,” Harbor explained. He sometimes helps school groups needing ideas of where to clean up, taking care to direct students to locations with wider roads and less traffic.
He’s pleased with the high level of interest so far this year. By early this week, there were 29 groups who had signed up, representing up to 191 people. And more requests are coming in, as well as suggestions of places needing clean-up.
“It’s a communitywide effort,” Harbor notes, “involving lots of folks around the county. It takes a village to do this. I wish we didn’t have to do it, but we do.”
There are several participating groups and individuals who turn out regularly as clockwork, or in this case, the calendar change, such as the Coast Canoeists, who this year will team up with a group from Devils Backbone; a certain participant in his 80s who has never missed cleaning up the same section of highway and who jokingly claims that, given his age, his bags should be counted double; and a group of women from Glasgow who have signed up under different names over the years, Harbor says.
Everyone is eligible to compete for annual Litter Cup, a trophy cunningly sculpted by Mark Cline from a modeled trashcan, broom and no-littering sign. The piece rests on the squashed bodies of a few cockroaches. Last year’s Litter Cup winners were the Litter Eliminators, who clean up the stretch of East Midland Trail from Ben Salem Wayside to Lexington.
“I’m really proud of this event, which started very early among RACC’s initiatives and has sustained as long as it has,” said RC Executive Director Barbara Walsh. “I think that Rockbridge County can take some pride in that. I give credit to all the community members, from walking groups to Scout and church groups and employee groups, that make this happen.”
We applaud Rockbridge Conservation for leading the cleanup year after year, in partnership with the Virginia Department of Transportation and the county of Rockbridge. And we encourage all of those who can, and who haven’t signed up yet, to join in this effort to rid our roadsides of the trash that continue to mar our landscapes.
And then let’s celebrate all that spring has to offer.
