Trail, Trash, Anger and Togetherness
I started taking photos early this time, not just at the end when the Camino gets a bit crowded. People think orange peelings are okay to toss because they’re organic, but they take at least months to decompose; their purpose, after all, was to protect the fruit from harm. Scraps of foil and plastic were beside the trail too, and sometimes the wrapper of an energy bar, and a variety of other things.
Many people work positively on this: bags are given out at various places for pilgrims to pick up trash and take it to a proper trash bin—which might not be until the next town. But I was grumpy nonetheless. Why (I asked myself) would someone go to the trouble of getting to Spain and doing all the preparations in order to walk for weeks, only to trash the Way? Then I remembered: the Camino is not an escape from the world; it is the world in a sort of concentrated form.
The whole world is our path, and we drop trash all the time.
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On the Katy trail the past several weeks, there have been problems with the surfacing of the running/walking path. It has buckled quite severely in some places. Indeed, one morning I went flat on my face from a piece that had risen up a few inches. (No harm done; just scratches and scrapes. Indeed, yours truly was rather amazed that he’s still able to fall without fracturing.) So the trail organization has put out various yellow tapes at the worst places, to warn walkers and runners. Those of us who are there frequently probably don’t need them, but they are helpful to people unfamiliar.
Yet every day: runners and walkers remove those yellow tapes. Sometimes they are put into a nice pile on the side of the trail. And sometimes the action is more violent, the wooden sticks being snapped so that the ribbon can’t be re-tied easily. One morning I saw an elderly woman (maybe my age) removing the ribbons. I told her I had fallen before they put them up. She said they should fix the trail rather than put up the ribbons.
Of course that response makes no sense: the problem, clearly, is not going to be a simple fix nor a quick one. But I marvel at the oppositional stance. Clearly she had not tried to contact the Katy trail people; she was just destroying their work. More broadly, I marvel at the lack of gratitude amongst my fellow walkers and runners for the organization that cares for the Katy trail. Every day they pay someone to go out again and put up the yellow safety ribbons. And within an hour, runners and walkers have taken those ribbons down. What are we all thinking? Why can’t we imagine a point of view other than our own?
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Then I remembered God speaking to Job. “Do you do well to be angry?” And within days I read an essay by the editor of The New Atlantis, “Open Wallets, Empty Hearts.” Referring to “the humble paper towel problem,” he writes: “if you’re in a public restroom and see a paper towel on the floor, you should throw it away even if you weren’t the one who dropped it. Why? ... Public displays that minor violations of social trust are acceptable will eventually lead to major violations. Also, I am in a good position to pick up that one towel, whereas an epidemic of littering is beyond my power.”
He goes on to say that not only is it the right thing to do, but that everyone else passing by will have the same choice, and if we pick up a towel on the floor, they will be encouraged to do so also. “If the ordinary person takes responsibility just over what he happens across, it may be enough to coordinate others to do the same. Whether our shared life holds together or crumbles comes down to small choices like this” (my emphasis). It’s not that some vague “they” owe it to me to keep the bathroom clean; we all need to do a little bit ourselves to promote civic order.
I can’t fix the problem of the vandalization of the yellow ribbons, but I can pick up a bit of trash from the floor, or the side of the trail. A Christian might even think of it in terms of, what?, maybe loving your neighbor as yourself.
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Out & About: The Good Books & Good Talk seminar is to resume on Sunday, September 22, on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Subsequent fall discussions: October 13 on Russell Kirk’s Old House of Fear and November 10 on Marly Youmans’s Charis in the World of Wonders—all in Garrett Hall at St. Matthew’s in Dallas, from 5 to 6:30 p.m.
I am to be one of the speakers at “The Human Pilgrimage,” a conference for clergy and lay people sponsored by The Living Church at All Souls’ in Oklahoma City, Sept. 26-28. They have asked me to speak on friendship through life’s changes; my title is “Friendship: The Long Game.” There are four other speakers, all brilliant and interesting—it should be a very good time. Here is the info page online: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-human-pilgrimage-tickets-825402530187
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On the Web. The article I mention above, “Open Wallets, Empty Hearts” by Ari Schulman, can be found here: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/open-wallets-empty-hearts