Cleaning the Caveman Bridge, Day 2

January 27th, 2014

I got a wild hair sooner than I expected.  Instead of continuing people litter pickup on Monday, I decided to really clean the bridge, starting with the dirtiest part, under the locust trees at the Southwest end.  The tree litter, dirt, and gravel attract litter like magnets; people naturally drop their ugly into ugliness.  I can’t clean up all such ugliness, but I can clean a bridge, and I can’t beat the location, apart from the way the arches and columns hide me.  I suppose the 7^th Street Bridge is next; it’s a lot simpler, cleaner, and wide open.

I realized, last night, that I have moved from protesting for a hobby to demonstrating for donations.  There is a difference, though the words were used interchangeably when I was a child.  I used to just complain about poor maintenance; I now demonstrate what needs to be done, using the advertising tunic to draw attention to it.

I parked in front of the disc golf course and got out my wheelbarrow and some tools: debris bucket; flat shovel; rake; hula hoe; broom; standing dustpan; and my litter grabber, hanging the litter bucket on the handle.  I also had to fold a bunch of leaflets to hand to passersby.  Advertising and work go hand in hand, and people appreciate my writing.  I hand out two-leaflet packets these days: a regular News You Can Use, Chickweed the subject this week, with an ad from Securing Our Safety  for their "Run For the Law" in March on the back; and Support Litter Cleanup in Grants Pass, so people can learn what I’m doing and why, with Grants Pass Property Nuisance Codes on the back.

I started cleaning from the SW stairs, first scraping the humus loose with the hula hoe, AKA scuffle hoe from its action, or stirrup hoe from its shape.  It’s a great tool for scraping ice from sidewalks as well.  I swept the loosened dirt into the dustpan from the first section and put it in the bucket, and repeated the work in the second section, up to where the arches start and the sidewalk goes around them. 

I stopped to take a photo of the chickweed growing in the accumulated humus in the corner, regretting that my camera phone was low on power and I had to use my talking phone, which doesn’t have a handy chip for transfer to my computer or internet capability.  But I later sent photos to my daughter, who used her i-phone to send them to my email.

I used the flat shovel to scoop out that corner.  That was the last time I used the shovel, and never used the rake.  I put them back in the truck when the bucket was full enough to dump.  The broom and dustpan were sufficient for cleaning up everything I loosened with the other tools, which might not be the case when the weather is wet.  Therefore, I won’t be cleaning the bridge when it is wet, so this might be a long-term project, looking at the weather this week.

At that point, I started using the hula hoe on the moss and humus above the pavement, where it had built up thick on the 2 lower portions of the parapet.  With the humus and dust blown into the moss at that level, it was not only thick, but dirty and ugly.  The hoe couldn’t get the dirt out of the corners, so I used my world’s greatest gardening scissors to detail it.

The cheapest broom at Walmart, a gray model with relatively few but stiff bristles, is amazingly effective on pavement, probably because the more widely space bristles get down into the pavement texture.  Between that and the standing dustpan, it was easy to scoop the dirt and moss into the big bucket, and sweep the dust along the bridge.

I had forgotten my blower, and at one point went home to get it and take a break.  On the way, I got that broken bottle I'd seen the day before, using that broom and dustpan. It's really good for broken glass.

By the time the sun was setting, I had managed to clean along the parapet to the center of the bridge along the west side.  Starting there, I got out my battery powered blower and started blowing the gravel from the edge of the sidewalk toward the parapet to sweep it up, as well as blowing the dust back toward the end, sweeping it up occasionally as it got too thick.  Between a new battery and an old one, I managed to almost blow off the area I had cleaned.  The day’s work took about 5 hours.

What did I carry the litter grabber and litter bucket for?  Picking up the fresh litter between my truck and the bridge, stopping my wheelbarrow to get it.  I like to keep a place clean once I clean it.