The Saturday morning air nipped at my face as I left home to go pick up road litter with my family, but the sun had already begun to warm up the day. I wore my oldest boots, jeans, and two layers of ratty sweatshirts beneath a light jacket so that I could peel down if the temperature really did get into the high fifties. It took me a while to find an old pair of work gloves, but I still made it to Minnie and Seth’s before all the sausage biscuits disappeared.
Their kitchen was full of brothers and sisters-in-law who live out here on the farm as well as those of their children who are still at home. Daddy sat at the table beaming. He likes it when the family comes together on a project.
“Us Knotts, we’ve been keeping up this road for over a hundred years,” he said, waving away the extra biscuit Doris tried to press on him. “My granddaddy was a road captain back ’fore nineteen-hundred.”
“What was that?” asked Seth’s daughter Jessica.
“Means being in charge of a stretch of road. When my pa was a boy, he used to go help Grampa lay off his mile.”
He smiled down at young Bert, grandson of Robert, my oldest brother. “How you reckon they measured it, little man?”
“Drove his car down it?”
“Naw, won’t no cars out here back then.”
The child was old enough to know about odometers but too young to conceive of a world without cars, and his brow furrowed with the concept.
“What they done,” said Daddy, “was measure around the rim of his wagon wheel and tie a white rag on it. Pa kept count and when that rag come up five hundred times, that was one mile.”
“There couldn’t have been plastic bags back then either,” said Jess, “so what did they pick up the trash in?
Bushel baskets?”
“Won’t no trash,” said Daddy. “Won’t nothing much to throw away ’cause stuff didn’t come in paper wrappers like today and they won’t no hamburger places anyhow.
Folks using this road was all farmers who ate at their own tables and growed most of their food. You’d give your table scraps to the dogs or the pigs and you’d burn your trash in a barrel. What couldn’t be burned, you put on your own trash pile back in the woods. You surely didn’t go flinging it in your neighbor’s front ditch.”
“So why’d they need a road captain?” asked A.K., Andrew and April’s teenage son.
“ ’Cause the road won’t nothing but dirt. Soon as Grampa got his section marked, he’d call out all the neighbor men and boys to help. They’d come with their mules and plows and hoes and shovels and they’d work 8 all day cleaning out the ditches so the water would drain.
Then they’d smooth out the roadbed and fill in the holes.
’Course it never lasted long. Three or four good hard rains and it was a pigmire again.”
“Our road won’t paved till I was in high school,”
Robert chimed in. “Many a winter morning the bus would get stuck and we’d have to slog up the hill from the creek in mud higher’n the laces on our brogans.”
“That little hill?” scoffed Jess.
“That was before they graded it down and built the high bridge that’s there now,” Seth told her. “The road used to run right down to creek level and up again.”
“Everybody got enough bags?” asked Minnie, clearing away the last of breakfast. “Quicker we get started, the quicker we’ll be finished.”
Someone had dumped an old couch in the ravine by the creek, so A.K. and Reese volunteered to start with that. There was a time when Reese was so truck proud you had to wash your hands and wipe your shoes before he’d let you get in the cab. Now it’s just an old work-horse, and I rode with them down to where our road begins at Possum Creek. A small green-and-white sign noted that this road had been adopted by the Kezzie Knott family.
While my nephews wrestled the couch up the bank and into the back of the truck, I picked cans and broken beer and wine bottles off the rocks beneath the bridge. We filled two garbage bags out of the creek alone and slung them in beside the couch. Our efforts netted us two pieces of junk mail and a telephone bill with the names and addresses still intact, and those we saved in a smaller bag so that Minnie or Doris could report them to the county zoning department, who would call the offenders with the warning that a second call might mean a thousand-dollar fine and community service.
We found every kind of trash imaginable, from dirty disposable diapers and three hubcaps to a bag of wadded-up Christmas wrapping paper and a strip of chrome that Reese thought had fallen off a friend’s motorcycle. While we worked, I told them about the sackful of marijuana someone had found behind a tree on a ditchbank a few counties over.
“Better’n that dead dog I found in a box last summer,”
said A.K. “Remember?”
They had heard about J.D. Rouse getting shot in front of a woman picking up road litter Thursday evening and wanted to know if Dwight had found the shooter yet.
I was standing down in the ditch when they asked, and I glanced over my right shoulder to where young pines fringed the woods that bordered the road there. My head was barely level with the upper bank.
