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Doing battle with garbage

Beer bottles and other odd finds await Jean Myers, Washington Grove volunteer

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Susan Whitney-Wilkerson⁄The Gazette Jean Myers of Washington Grove picks up trash in her neighborhood on a recent Friday.

‘‘I can tell you that Corona beer is our favorite,” the 67-year-old Washington Grove resident said with a chuckle last week, ‘‘followed closely by Heineken.”

Myers’ observations don’t come from any interest in her neighbors’ drinking preferences, but are instead among the nuggets of wisdom she’s garnered in her weekly battles with discarded rubbish and other stinking matter that litter some parts of the small, canopied forest preserve near Gaithersburg.

Until early last week, when leaders began organizing a long-planned ‘‘trash brigade” by agreeing to start calling for volunteers in the town newsletter, and with Myers volunteering to oversee the effort, the town had been a place with its share of street litter but no organized manner in which to rid of it.

Since January, Myers, a 30-year resident, has taken several hours out of her Fridays to patrol the lengths of the town’s two main arteries — Washington Grove Lane and Railroad Street — in search of trash.

She is among several residents who have over the years tried to clear parts of the town — celebrated as a rural refuge from the swiftly developing area surrounding it — of eyesores that many people see but do not wish to touch.

‘‘This is not a favorite activity of most people,” Myers said. ‘‘But it needs to be done.”

While the town has a contract with Houston-based Waste Management Inc., which has a Gaithersburg outpost and does residential trash pickups in Washington Grove every Wednesday, there had been no organized effort to rid of the inevitable bits of garbage that don’t land in bags or cans but along streets.

So Myers, a former employee of the National Institutes of Health who estimates she has so far spent about $30 of her own money on garbage bags and other tools, has headed out about noon each Friday with a garbage picker, provided by the town, and went to work.

She has filled bags and buckets, carefully keeping recyclable items together, often making several trips back to her house because she knows she couldn’t handle it all at once.

She loads her hauls into the back of her car and takes them home, storing them in her carport until the Wednesday pickups. She says the smell hasn’t been an issue — yet. But summer is just around the corner.

‘‘I try not to hold it too long,” she said of the piles of trash, which she assures are kept under tight lids.

Mary Challstrom, the town’s treasurer, lives near the often litter-strewn streets and says she has appreciated what Myers and other volunteers have done.

‘‘The amount of trash is terrible and nobody else really picks it up,” said Challstrom, whose husband, Charlie Challstrom, would often pick up garbage at the nearby train station. ‘‘People just throw things out of their cars.”

Residents and town leaders point to another couple that has fought the war against rubbish, and another resident is also known to work up a sweat in the name of a litter-free town. None of them was available for comment.

Washington Grove Mayor John Compton says the town has in the past tried to provide volunteers with orange vests, cones and other materials to make the effort safer given the traffic on the town’s busier streets.

They have also discussed establishing a central place to store refuse for pickup. On April 10, the town’s maintenance yard was cited as an option.

The town had also hoped to name a leader in the project to oversee volunteers, ‘‘so somebody like Jean Myers wouldn’t have to feel like they’re the only ones,” Compton said.

On a recent Friday, Myers headed out to face the bottles as usual, with no end in sight to her routine.

‘‘I just can’t bear to see this trash lying around,” she said, explaining that gardening and other light maintenance work around the town has kept her in shape and equal to the task despite her age. ‘‘I think it’s demeaning to the town.”

Besides, to her, it’s been about more than maintaining her strength and the aesthetics of the town; it’s about maintaining the town’s philosophy of volunteerism.

‘‘That’s just the way we were raised and that’s just what you do,” she said. ‘‘And the town thrives on it.”