On country drives and empty beer cans
Not that I don’t appreciate the extra income, but I have some questions ...
I need help figuring something out. You see, I live in a rural area and there are always beer cans at the side of the road. I don’t mean one or two, either: I took one of the dogs for a walk recently and after five minutes, I had 22 cans in a plastic bag. These were fresh cans, lying on their sides on the snow. The next day, my daughter walked one of the dogs in the opposite direction: after five minutes, she had 24 cans in a plastic bag. In the past four years, we’ve collected over 700 cans.
Don’t get me wrong: as a frugal environmentalist, I appreciate the opportunity to A) make money, 10 cents at a time, and B) show breweries and the province at large that there is an appetite for bottle returns. There have also been times when the kids have been climbing the walls and I’ve been able to thrust an empty garbage bag at them and yell, “Go find cans!”
But I have questions.
First: why are the cans only on the north side of the road? This would mean that a driver would have to launch a can past the passenger seat and out the passenger side window in order to land a can in that particular ditch. Fine. Perhaps the driver wants a challenge. But it seems like more work than necessary, particularly for someone who’d rather use a window than a recycling bin.
Is there, then, a passenger who’s been given defenestration duties while the driver drives? Is this a fun game?
Second: I’ve noticed that the cans are often spaced evenly, and are of the same variety. Busch has been popular lately, about 15 paces apart, one after the other. What does this mean? Who could drink consecutive cans of beer while driving and defenestrate them so quickly? Therefore: has someone sat in their car, guzzled a six-pack of Busch, and then set off down the road, throwing the empties out at regular intervals? OR (see previous paragraph) did a passenger do this?
Third: let us consider the location of the local village’s LCBO: if one was to purchase beer at this establishment and drink it in the parking lot, and then turn RIGHT onto my road, and then defenestrate the empties via the north side of the vehicle, that would indicate that the car is headed home in less than two kilometres, or else headed straight to one of the deadliest highways in Canada. Which means that either that person is making sure to be drunk before getting home, or is making sure to be drunk before hitting the 100 km/h mark.
These questions haunt me. As I drive the country roads in and around my neighbourhood — the rolling hills, the paddocks, the fields, the groves — my eyeballs roam the ditches, skipping from can to can. This isn’t just a matter of littering: these are the roads that my friends and family drive every day, and their juxtaposition with evidence of alcohol consumption is deeply unsettling. Why doesn’t this happen in the suburbs too? Or are they just better at cleaning it up? Or is it just a countryside affliction?
If I were a poet, I might suggest that
the cans are there to remind us that nothing is what it seems. The fresh country air and stratospheric house values can’t cover up the truth: here there be drunk drivers. Here there be alcoholics who can’t face their families sober; who need to get rid of the evidence before they pull into their own driveways. Here there be kids joyriding and drinking and flinging empties around, in a futile and ironic attempt to feel less empty, themselves.
Or maybe the poetry is in the children scrambling in and out of the ditches, holding up the cans in victory: “I found another one!” They don’t understand just how much human emptiness these roadside empties reveal.
But then again, this much waste — this kind of waste — is hard to understand, even for grown-ups like me.
Latham Hunter is a writer and professor of communications and cultural studies; her work has been published in journals, anthologies, magazines and print news for over 20 years. She blogs at The Kids’ Book Curator.