What do you do on a beautiful December morning when the weather cooperates and one of our board members needs a project for her civics class? A cleanup along the path to Rainbow Bridge, of course! Sunday morning’s cleanup was simple, fun, and a breath of fresh air before our group tackled finals week at Oak Park & River Forest High School.
Since we’ve become pretty experienced at cleaning up local areas, Lily asked “what’s the craziest thing we’re gonna find today?” We reminisced about past cleanups and rattled off a few possibilities. But, we didn’t expect to find smashed dinner plates along the railroad tracks. Thanks, TikTok – your challenges clearly don’t consider the environment and the hazards to hikers and wildlife. Our board members painstakingly picked up smashed pieces of plates all along the path. To lighten the mood and break up the monotony of picking up chards of plates, we played a balancing game to lift our spirits!
As Audrey, Lily and Libby focused on plates and dumped construction debris, Frankie and Gia headed down to the bridge.
At first, it didn’t seem so bad – definitely less trash than expected. But then it became obvious that recent windstorms had concentrated the blowing trash in a single area. Frankie and Gia found the motherload trapped between bridge structures. On their hands and knees, using grabbers as arm extensions, they pulled out several bags of trash and recycling.
While this might not have been our biggest cleanup ever, it was definitely one of the most difficult.
Seething from the plate challenge and struggling to get everything that had accumulated around the bridge, it was nature that brought smiles to our faces again. Deer crossed the tracks. A woodpecker made itself known. The beautiful blue skies and mild weather were restorative.
The fulfillment from removing 85 pounds of trash from the forest’s path gave us the fighting spirit we needed to tackle this week’s final exams at school!
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