Gone Fishing:
This past weekend I went down to the Urbanna area of Virginia with my Brother to do some fishing along the Rappahannock River. The drive down in the morning was quiet with not many folks on the roadways and no bottle necks in the usually troublesome sections of Interstate 64. As we made the transition from highway to local roads and crossed the bridges through West Point, the fog was thick and blanketed the water over the Pamunkey. We made a pit-stop in Saluda to fill the cooler and got a quick magic show from the local gas station attendant who was practicing his slight-of-hand. Hitting the road for the final push, we rolled through the small town and surrounding farmland, following the backroads to my Brother’s In-law’s house along the final river bend before it connects to the Chesapeake Bay.
Launching the Boat:
As this was the first weekend getting the fishing gear out for the season, we had some work to get things together. A few years ago, my Brother got himself a Portabote which coins itself as, “The revolutionary folding boat designed to make your outdoor adventures easier and more exciting than ever.” It’s a pretty cool little vessel that’s made of a thick plastic shell that folds out like origami to form the hull, is stabilized by cross members that serve as seats, and can either be rowed with paddles or driven by a small, mounted motor. We pulled it down out of the garage and carried it down to the waterfront, which is where the real fun of assembly began. As my Brother regaled his trials and tribulations of assembling the Portabote by himself, I found it was surprisingly easy to assemble with the two of us. But, as we finalized the boat and got the motor mounted, something else caught my eye that had me thinking about We Clean Our Streets while out on the water.
The Barnacle Bottle:
While my Brother ran back up to the house to grab lifejackets (safety first!), I briefly walked up and down the small beach where I found a single use plastic bottle covered in small barnacles pictured above. It was nestled into the corner of their bulkhead separating the neighbor’s lot and I began to wonder what that bottle’s journey had been to wind up on that particular beach staring back at me. Had this bottle been simply blown away by the wind in an unfortunate gust that carried it into the water? Had this bottle been a passenger aboard a vessel sailing along the river that accidentally found its way into the water? Maybe this bottle had been tossed into someone’s recycling bin and it somehow popped out of the collection truck as it made its rounds. Maybe it had been discarded in a city up river and a storm washed it into the river and it had floated all the way downriver to the coastline. Or, maybe it originated in a far away land and had drifted many, many miles across the ocean to end up washed ashore in that exact location. We will never know.
How Can We Make a Difference?
As we fished the day away and admittedly didn’t get a single nibble the entire time, I kept thinking about how that bottle ended up on the shore; knowing that I’ll never find the answer to my day-dreaming question. It had been in the water long enough to be covered in barnacles and possibly had been a short-rental home for small critter along its journey. I know my efforts with We Clean Our Streets is just one small piece to a really big puzzle of solving the problem of plastic waste polluting our oceans. But, if one person can pick up that one barnacle bottle off the shoreline, a hundred people can pick up a hundred bottles, and a thousand people can pick up a thousand bottles, and so on and so forth. That’s what drives me some days; the hope that my work and inspire others to come together to make a difference in our community that will ideally grow and grow to more and more people making the choice to make a difference in their communities as well.
