Tracking trails of trash
I once found a coffee cup so far into the wilderness that I couldn’t even figure out how it had gotten there
I’ve invented a new, non-linear measurement for travel: it uses a calculation of time, speed and consumption instead of something as simple and plodding as distance.
Think of it like this: the small town of Adam’s Cove , NL — well, actually, now one-quarter of the amalgamated towns of Small Point-Adam’s Cove-Black head-Small Point — is 24 kilometres or so from the Conception Bay North town of Carbonear.
And you could stick to that linear measure, if you like. Ho-hum.
But my new measurement system is based on something more esoteric than metres or kilometres.
No, given the prevailing speed limits, I can accurately tell you, using Tim mo-metres, that Adam’s Cove is almost precisely “one medium double-double” from Carbonear. How do I know this? Because the ditches in Adam’s Cove are regularly filled with medium-sized Tim Hortons cof- fee cups. The large coffee cups, I expect, must end up a little further out, like Western Bay or Ochre Pit Cove, towns that are closer to being one large doubledouble from the Carbonear drivethru window.
All joking aside, though, it’s remarkable how willing we seem to be to flick coffee cups out the window. (As my own recent informal beach survey of the Atlantic provinces shows, coffee cups on the shore are overtaken only by cigarette butts, the ubiquitous waste that no one seems willing to ever carry away. Cigarette butts, at least, have just been on fire. Coffee cups are merely inconvenient.)
Cups litter highways, sideroads, rural roads, dirt roads. The only thing the drop sites seem to have in common is that the coffee has run out.
Late November 2014, leaving Pictou, N.S., I wrote this in my notes: “I’m 30 seconds down N.S. Route 6 and already there are two brand-new Tim Hortons cups rolling their concentric circles in the middle of the road.”
I remember thinking, as I watched the cups rolling around the pavement, that if their rolled lips had been inked, they might be drawing a pattern much like an intricate Spirograph design on the asphalt.
Last week, in Bishop’s Falls, NL, I was deep into the woods on an abandoned rail line heading towards Grand Falls, the spruce shouldering in on both sides, the morning a cool damp, when a quick glance into the summer green on the edge of the track offered up another example of the boorishness of those willing to carry a coffee into the woods, and nothing back out.
If I took a picture of every tossed, placed or shed cup, I’d fill my phone. A few weeks ago, it was a large cup perched on a guardrail post at the Chedabucto Bay lookoff on the road to Canso, N.S.: I suppose the post was preferable to the other place a coffee cup had been deposited at the same lookoff — nestled down inside the portable toilet, floating around in that mysterious blue liquid.
I once found a Tim Hortons cup so far into the Newfoundland wilderness that I couldn’t even figure out how it had gotten there. The effort of having one hand filled with a cup for the six or seven kilometres into the bush that it would have taken to get that cup to where it was made it the outlier for my entire Tim-mo metre measuring system.
It might be tempting to look at the cups and simply blame Tim Hortons for the endless flow of trash. It is their brand, their cups, their lids — but they didn’t put the cups anywhere but into our hands.
If Tim Hortons wasn’t selling the majority of takeout coffees in the land, someone else would be.
And a good percentage of us would be dropping those cups out the window, too, out of simple laziness.
Want someone to blame? Look in the mirror.