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Monday, August 12, 2002
River runners clean up campers' messes
Copyright © 2002 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. | ||
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The Four-Part Series: Saco River: Source to Sea | |
FRYEBURG — The deerflies are fierce. The mosquitoes are hungry. The trash is ripe - sometimes it moves. And the details about the piles of human waste and toilet paper in the woods just aren't fit for print.
All of this is in a day's work for the river runners of the Saco River Recreational Council. The mostly high-school-aged youths spend their summers cleaning up after the the hordes of people who come to paddle the Fryeburg-to-Brownfield section of the Saco River.
They work an endless, thankless job pulling bagloads of trash out of the river, scooping maggot-infested food off the sandbanks and dealing with the numerous piles of human waste in the woods.
"They're supposed to bury it," says 15-year-old Dan MacLean, shovel in hand. "But they never do."
The Saco River Recreational Council was founded in 1983 when the canoe liveries and local landowners got together to do something about the uncontrollable amounts of trash piling up on the shores and in the water.
The council is funded in part by the livery owners, the Appalachian Mountain Club, summer camps, grants and donations from private companies.
On summer weekends, the council embarks on a public awareness campaign. Council members patrol the banks of the most popular canoe launching sites and take-outs, reminding paddlers to take their trash with them, directing traffic and asking the people to make sure they have a fire permit before starting down the river.
They pass out brochures about river etiquette. They remind people to dispose of their bathroom waste by digging a hole, and to use only dead, downed wood to start fires.
Then, on the weekdays, the river runners clean up after the people who did not heed their advice.
On July 9, beginning at 8 a.m., nine of them picked up after the Fourth of July crowd along the busy stretch of river, between the Walker's Bridge put-in and the Brownfield Bridge.
Four boats slid into the water to embark on what 19-year-old river runner Ian Fair calls "can spotting."
While Fair and Maggie Wilkins, 21, dived into the water to pull garbage from the bottom, the other canoes pulled over at sandbars, where the river runners bagged the trash. Two of them, MacLean and Arik Nelson, both high school students from Fryeburg, applied for the job because they wanted to be outside for the summer. The work, they said, has its ups - the river runners are a close group of young people who have a lot of fun together. They get to swim a lot. But it also has its obvious downs.
"You get pretty mad sometimes that people just don't care about what they do," MacLean said as he shoveled trash left in a fire pit into a bag, a swarm of deerflies buzzing around his head. "That they think they can leave their trash and it will just go away. If we weren't here, (the river) would be nasty."
Not everything they find is trash. They have on occasion found L.L. Bean tents, left on the shore, water guns and toys. Sometimes there is money on the bottom of the Saco River.
But for the most part, it's a lot of cigarette butts, toilet paper, beer cans, food wrappers, broken beach chairs, propane canisters and plastic products.
The job was so gross last year that 17-year-old Allison Bailey vowed she would not come back. But as the summer of 2002 approached she remembered how much fun she had with the other river runners and how much she enjoyed being on the river. And so, she came back.
"Yeah, it's nasty and disgusting. It smells like urine, trash, campfire and feces," she said as she plucked beer bottles from a river bank. "But you get a good feeling at the end of the day."
Staff Writer Giselle Goodman can be contacted at 324-4888 or at:
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