In Mid-October of this year, I received a text from one of the members of my school’s environmental club that I help lead. He sent me information about a service opportunity through the Napa County Resource Conservation District (RCD). It was a trash cleanup at the Oxbow Commons, and I was instantly interested. I know Nick Cheranich, Chair of the Napa Sierra Club Group, participated in one at Kennedy park and liked it a lot. Furthermore, the club and I took part in RCD’s Green Friday oak planting day, and we all loved it. So, I decided I would share this trash cleanup event with the Environmental Club so people could join me and clean up our river while having fun, and it could also be one of my internship projects. Win-win. Right?

Fast forward to the morning of the cleanup. Unfortunately, only the member who sent me the information and I ended up showing up. I thought this was because everyone was too busy, but several minutes into the cleanup, I realized why, and realized what I had agreed to take on.
 

You see, I assumed this would just be cleaning up random litter in the commons area on the concrete. What I didn’t realize, however, is that we would be exploring the entirety of the riverbanks in the area and looking for trash specifically along the riverside. This meant stepping through tall grass, random deserted areas, and most of all, mud. Thank goodness I listened to my dad and wore my hiking shoes!

I usually love participating in environmental-related service projects, but cleaning up trash really disgusted me, even though we had gloves, a bucket, and a grabber. One of the RCD’s interns, Ines, and I found a tire that had been partially destroyed, leaving bits of pungent rubber goo everywhere. We tried to pick up its remains and put it in the bucket, but Ashley (the leader/coordinator) stopped us, fortunately. Eventually, when we walked all the way up to the tracks near the wine train, I found semi-degraded plastic bags that were partially buried in the ground, and had to pull them out. Doing so made me a little sick to my stomach, and after a while I had to take a quick break until I felt better.

But that wasn’t the craziest part. Around 11 A.M., Ashley called us back to our meetup spot, where a trash, recycle and compost bin were laid out around a large tarp. We had to dump all the buckets of trash we found onto the tarp, sort them into trash, recycle, and compost in small bins, and weigh them before putting them into the larger bins. Some interesting (and by interesting, I mean disgusting) finds included a tube of toothpaste, a lot of liquor bottles, an unopened bottle of melatonin pills, two lighters, a broken-down piece of a car engine, and two shopping carts. The latter three of that list could not go in any of the bins and had to be specially disposed of, somehow. Overall, if my memory serves correctly, we collected over a hundred pounds of trash/recycle/compost in total, a number which would later be added to the RCD’s database. After this was over, I finally went home and rested, after washing my hands multiple times. For the next few days, I would be mildly grossed out if I even saw a wrapper lying around somewhere.

But my experience with the cleanup was not a negative experience. For one, I made friends with Ines, the RCD student intern I mentioned. We had good conversations and exchanged numbers. Secondly, I did some good for the environment. The work we volunteers did prevented all that trash from going into our watershed once the rainy season started. Finally, I had an important realization. Over the years, I only manifested my passion for the environment through educating others, organizing club activities, and doing political activism through Schools for Climate Action and the Napa Sierra Club Internship Program. I did a lot of talking, but I never fully “walked the talk,” as some may say, until I got knee deep in mud and trash, seeing in real life the impacts of human activity on our planet. In a way, this cleanup helped me be a better activist because it taught me that hard work is a requirement of being a true environmental steward, and reminded me about what I’m truly fighting for: a clean, livable earth.

Reflections and reminiscences aside, I will still be going to Green Friday on November 29th at Alston park. This, fortunately, only involves digging in soil and planting nice, green oaks, not dealing with rancid trash, so I am looking forward to it, especially since some of my friends are coming.

Still, if another trash cleanup comes up, I will probably volunteer for it, this time being more mentally prepared. After all, everyone needs to be humbled so they can be down to earth (or in my case, down to the muddy riverbed) from time to time. :)