Saturday has arrived and all is quiet in the house. Just the usual roaring of the fans as they exchange the bad air for good. And I’m sitting in the study, looking out the window and waiting for the first hints of the sunrise to come. It’s coming later each day; so sad.
Yesterday was spent in an interesting way, as we took a bus ride to Oroville with the volunteers that work at the Senior Thrift Store here in Orland. Two or three times a year, the volunteers are recognized for their efforts and the board hosts a special event for them. I became a board member just this month and I didn’t want to pass up a chance to see what had been planned. Also, it had been quite awhile since the last time I had taken a bus ride. The thought of someone else doing the driving sounded attractive.
The bus was fairly new and had comfortable seats. So far, so good. But once we had started down the freeway, it was the view that had me fascinated. Sitting quite a bit higher, I could see things along the road that I hadn’t seen before. Sad, but most of what I saw was trash. Sitting in a car, you can’t see into the depression along the edge of the freeway, but from our viewpoint it was apparent that there is very little that won’t be thrown from passing cars. You name it; it’s in the ditch.
We had a great tour of the Oroville Dam, the fish hatchery and then, after lunch, a look at the Chinese Temple in downtown Oroville. Of course there was the obligatory stop at an Indian casino.
Some things I didn’t know…Oroville Dam, completed in 1967, is the highest dam in the US at 770+ feet. They were still using dredges to mine for gold below Oroville in the 1950’s. That if you wanted to know what a cubic foot of water looked like, think of the box that a new basketball would come in. And in the flood of 1997, the flow into Lake Oroville could be represented by 300,000 cubic feet per second. When the spillway is operating at full volume, the road across the canyon from the spillway is closed because there is so much water in the air (mist) that the oxygen levels aren’t high enough to support life.
You might be interested to know that much of this trash attracts rodents that then become meals for raptors, reptiles, and predatory mammals. Raptors are frequntly killed by cars as they take off from the side of the road. It is not uncommon for me to find snakes under this trash. It is more difficult to see but often the trash extends into the fields and streams further off the road.
ReplyDeleteWhile road cruising for snakes (between 11 pm and 2 am) I have come across a number of people dumping trash.
I guesss I will never understand the mental process that allows someone to fling trash out the window of a car without any feelings of guilt.
ReplyDeleteDisney understood that trash attracts more trash and his attention to the problem made headlines at the time (1950's) but we seem to have forgotten his lessons.