Clean up after yourself
When you are a 60-year-old male, pee pit stops are frequent. So even though I’d just done my bathroom business at lunch less than an hour earlier on our drive back to the Valley from LAX, I needed to go again when we stopped at the big truck stop/ convenience store/restaurant complex off Highway 86 in Mecca.
The restroom there was trashed. There were urine puddles in front of several urinals. Paper towels and toilet seat covers, many wet with … whatever, were strewn across the floor. Toilet paper, some smeared with feces, littered the linoleum. The sink counters were covered with trash and water puddles.
“Welcome back to the Imperial Valley,” I thought as I looked at the quagmire.
Yes, I know Mecca is not technically in the Imperial Valley. I hadn’t been working overseas that long. Mecca, though, is only about 15 miles from what often is considered the northwestern reaches of the Imperial Valley, and culturally, topographically and meteorologically, it’s much the same.
I had lingering minor medical issues that needed treatment, so I had appointments over the next couple days. I had to use the restrooms — 60-year-old male, remember? — in those places and I found trashed facilities, again not out of negligence but out of apparent, well, malice. We can see such deliberate thrashing in almost every public bathroom in the Valley, most particularly, and strangely, in medical facilities.
While I’m always appalled, I also am baffled. I’ve asked my students and other Valley residents about this and most were equally disgusted and saddened by this local constant. Some, however, seemed almost amused by it, responding along the lines of, “The people who do it just think that someone has the job to clean it up, so they’re providing work for that person. Hee-hee-hee.”
As someone who worked in convenience stores and fast-food joints in his younger days and had bathroom cleanup among his many duties, the last thing I needed was some idiot, or idiots, making latrine-cleansing activities any more onerous or disgusting. It’s one thing to have to scrub sinks and mop bathroom floors. It is another thing altogether to have to pick up used toilet paper and mop up deliberately created pee puddles.
Along with the smarmy, “Someone has a job to clean it up; I’m just giving them work” attitude, I think this restroom-trashing syndrome has a lot to do with the “out of sight, out of mind” mindset many Imperial Valley folks have. Instead of taking their used couches, mattresses, tires, toilets and such to the municipal dump, and maybe having to pay a small fee, many locals just dump that refuse by the side of the road and drive off without another thought beyond, “It’s not my problem anymore.”
Then there are the people who leave their babies’ dirty diapers in shopping carts in parking lots around the Valley. Imagine the toxic stew brewing in those soiled diapers while they sit in the Valley sun for a couple hours, particularly in July or August. Imagine the poor employees on cart-collection duty who have to remove those steaming diapers. (I’ve known a few such cart-collectors.) Imagine putting your groceries into that cart afterward. E. coli, anyone?
If you drive through neighboring communities, including San Diego, the Coachella Valley and even Yuma, you don’t see such wanton littering and such blatant disregard for the community.
While walking my dogs and driving, I’ve confronted people doing illegal dumping. I’ve told folks what they’re doing is against the law and disgusting. Usually they tell me go to hell … and those are the nicer illegal dumpers.
Still, I’m not going to stop confronting such lazy, inconsiderate folks.
We in the Valley need to stop the trashing of public restrooms.
We also need to start picking up after our damn selves.