Brett Haymaker is taking us on a walk in the woods where trash, abandoned newsprints relate the story of people we discarded.
Brett is a promising young writer who lives in West Philadelphia.
Read on…
People walk a lot. Sometimes, I walk, too. To drink a coffee somewhere, in some one room coffee shop that is not my one room apartment. To place a letter in a mailbox. To sit in a park and watch people walk. Sometimes, I walk to meet a friend, to go for a walk, because, by God, walking is the means and the end, the journey and the desired destination. The action and the result.
There was once a time in our lives when walking was the culminating achievement. When I walk, I don’t feel like an achieved person. Like a learned person. I see trash and treasure lying on the street. Sometimes it is just trash, though, gathered along the curbside or stuffed in sewer grates. Grocery bags. Newspapers. Cigarette butts. A swollen mitten. A shoe lace. Things that people threw out. Things nobody threw out. Some call it “trash.”
I like to think it’s more like “left-overs.”
The act of noticing, stopping, observing, and then picking up these items is coined as, “trash-picking.” An act that is hardly different than hunting or gathering if we are to save appearances. It’s a way of being that, dare I say, “governed,” existence for millennia. For countless years before civilization told us, “You need me to survive,” just like that guy who tells you the same thing, and beats you when he gets home from work because he had a bad day. We love to rely on abusers, don’t we.
But if I think that finding a scarf on the street is like gathering, say, blackberries in the forest, that does not give the comparison significance or truthful validity. However, if I believe that the act of “trash picking” is synonymous to hunting and gathering behavior, well, that is another subject entire, and one that is protected by a form of relativism – protected by what we are taught as children. That the individual is supreme and validated by his or her thoughts.
One can not be sure unless the hypothesis is tested and someone participates in the gathering act.
And so, as chronology follows, I took up the challenge. I walked through a forest every single day for ten years. Each time I saw something that I did not notice before, if I saw an object that seemed out of place, or had moved since my walk the day before, I picked it up and I carried it home (assume I have a large tribe who likes eclectic, earthy treasures).
(Also, make a double assumption, and assume that by “tribe” I mean, “family,” or, in some cases, “network.”).
I saw. I gathered. I called myself, “The Deer-hunter.”
Again, it is as I say it is – I did this for ten years. The path became worn, beaten down by my consistent, prescribed treading. Day up. Day down. The landscape changed and the leaves began to blow away, the roots became polished by countless soles, and the lichen and moss sat just south of the sun. Sometimes it would rain, and the earth became mud. I used sticks to lie across the path. Sticks led to mulch, then from mulch to stone. This made walking easier, and cleaner, being that I no longer had to trudge in the mud.
Each time I saw something I did not see before, I picked it up and carried it back home.
With ten years up, the forest had transformed into a city. The path became many paths, which became roads. A city filled with trash cans and trash trucks. Newspapers for people to read. Shoelaces from broken shoes. Swollen mittens. Organized chaos. People can often be seen on the street. Most of them have a destination in mind, most likely to meet someone only to walk somewhere else.
Others don’t have a destination at all.
Sometimes a person may pick through the trash. They notice a scarf flattened on the road. They pick it up. Examine it. They take it home with them. It becomes, by a process of cleansing, reorganization, and mental attachment, theirs.
Sometimes they think it’s more than just a scarf. As if they are taking home more than just an object, but a consecration, perhaps even, a homage to our nature. Our past. Hell, even a kind of thrift economics. But don’t make a mistake. They are participating in an act, exploiting a knowledge, exploiting a curiosity. What they see is a process, designed for an older version of humanity that has been thrown out: hunting and gathering.
Some call that trash because they only see a dirty object associated with a dirty class of people that someone else discarded. I think it’s an improvement in literacy – a literacy of ourselves.
You know how to read, don’t you? Of course you do. You probably read the newspaper everyday, just before you throw it out. You read about all the jobs lost, the people killed, the babies thrown in the garbage shoot.
You read about the people that experience tragedy. The people that experience injury. Earthquakes. Car accidents. Over-doses. Addiction induced homicide. The people that are told they will never walk again who don’t listen to a damn thing the doctors tell them and continue on.
Those people who learn to walk, all over again.
