Our Civic Duty

Boothbay Park

Arriving at 10 a.m. at Boothbay Park, I introduced myself to the other volunteers, three adults and two children.

It was Earth Day clean-up in Foster City, and Boothbay was one of the nine parks where residents gathered to pick up trash.

We were handed 32-inch trash grabbers, plastic bags, and orange Home Depot buckets to hold recyclables. A pleasant Saturday morning, I was prepared to stay till noon.

However, the Foster City workers said that they had to be done in an hour. No dallying if we wanted to cover the entire park.

Not bad for an hour's work.

The park's outward appearance was clean, but closer inspection revealed small pieces of gum and candy wrappers, foil, and popped balloons.

The bushes along the edge of the park yielded up more than half of the trash. The stiff winds that we had been having every other week were the culprit, and even tidy picnickers might be reluctant to wander into the moist foliage to do their civic duty.

The work was low intensity, but after an hour we had picked up more trash than I thought we would. Waste management is not my forte, as anyone in my household can tell you.

Everyone got T-shirts for their trouble. The compensation that gives the most pleasure sometimes isn't money.