On Memorial Day, as I took my usual morning run through Forest Park, I came upon an unusual site. Setting by the curb between Post-Dispatch Lake and the construction on Government Hill was a neatly arranged pile of paper trash. Not that it is unusual to see trash in the park; but this wasn’t tossed, it was placed. This pyramid of cups and bags and Styrofoam fast food detritus was all the more remarkable by its placement not 25 yards from one of the many trash barrels that line Government Drive.
I was reminded of another run on a summer morning in Chicago a couple of years ago. My wife and I had gone to Chicago to see the tall ships moored along the river and found that we were there the weekend of Venice Night. This is a Saturday in August when boats in the basin become literal floats in a parade of light and color and sound. We had seen families headed for the lake towing large coolers starting in mid-afternoon, and standing in the crowd watching the show in the evening it was easy to believe the estimates of 100,000 observers.
But early Sunday morning, as I took my run along the now deserted shore, I was amazed to see that all of the trash had been cleared. I imagined the army of sanitation workers who must have come out before dawn to clear the mess. There were a couple of things they missed. Here and there were neatly tied bags. As I ran, it slowly dawned on me that this was not the work of paid city employees. The people of Chicago had done this themselves. They had cleaned up after themselves.
And so, encountering the monument to trash on Memorial Day I wondered, “What would it take for the people of St. Louis to begin to clean up after ourselves?”
