When I originally released my article “Trash Leaves Trash” for 9b.news on March 17th of this year, I did not expect it to branch off into a series.

But here we are.

To start, there is an update about Shi-, er, Sewer Lagoon. While I did go back and clean out some more of the makeshift fire pits, I was not able to hit them all before the water rose (of course, it is a frequently used place for such fire pits and people still continue to burn pallets and break glass all over the beach like imbeciles). The other day, my son really wanted to go to the beach and I had to reiterate to him multiple times that he will have to wear his shoes until we are done cleaning up. He was not happy about it, but once I gave him the basic childhood combo of a hand shovel and a pail, along with a colander for sifting the garbage (or treasures) out of the sand, he was more than happy to strap his feet into his sandals.

When we arrived, the beach was nearly nonexistent as the waters of the Kootenai were still quite high, but a few crude fire pits were visible under the sand and stone that were tossed on them to cover them up.

Side note about using sand to put out the fire, coming from a past wildland firefighter: while sand can be used to put out smaller fires, it is not the best thing to use to put out said fires. The coals under the sand can stay hot for a while and lead to burns, or as I have seen in the past, a good wind can whip those coals up and spread sparks around that could potentially start a larger fire. Plus, it seems kind of silly to throw sand on top of your campfire on the beach there to extinguish it when–and this will shock you–there is good, fresh water to use only a few steps away.

Two of the fire pits were clear of anything other than natural debris, but then we moved to the third one. After digging through the area of the fire pit and around it, we ended up removing over 200 rusted nails and a large bottle or two of broken glass. I walk this beach often. My son does. Many residents and visitors and their children come here to swim and enjoy the beach barefoot when the water is down, and it would be a pretty easy guess by anyone that they do not want to accidentally slice their foot open with a shard of glass or walk on the absolute nail bed that that beach has become. We ended up clearing that fire pit of all debris we could find, and pulled out about another 100 nails from the ankle deep water that was lapping the shores.

Now, I understand that many of the people down there burning in the evening are drinking, and I am no stranger to a bottle or two myself when I am having a campfire and going fishing. But if you are drinking enough that you do not care about the safety of others, you may want to take a break. Or just think of the consequences. I have been far past three sheets to the wind numerous times in my life and I will still find it in me to put away the glass empties into a bag or safer place, or just leave them whole and collect them on my way out. There is no excuse for shattering them into a fire or breaking them on a rock and leaving them there other than the fact that the people who do that are horrible human beings and probably even worse fishermen. Which brings me to my next area of complaint.

A local outdoor department recently cleaned out the large cedar grove, historically used for free camping spots for both families and the debauched, on Moyie River Road about a half mile after Meadow Creek Road crosses the bridge over the Moyie and made a new boat launch. Now, I understand that it is a pretty great place to pull your raft out after launching from the Eastport area in the morning, or launching your kayak to tackle the wild and rough river from there down to the dam. However, it has been a huge disappointment to me in many ways.

First, that camping spot was rather neat (and it was a great place for morels early in the year). Second, the area that was a bit of an adventure to get to in order to fish back in there (which doesn’t nearly provide the best chances at fish on the river even though it is absolutely one of the fishiest looking places on it) is now fully exposed, visibly clear, and very inviting for all folks. This can be a good thing, but it can also be a really, really bad thing. I went up last week to do a bit of fishing at this location, and I was first greeted by a broken bottle of Tito’s Vodka that was shattered on one of the larger rocks right next to where they expect you to launch or pick up your boats. As I was cleaning up the glass from the top of the large rocks and by moving around many of the stones below it, I came upon the neck of the bottle which had the remnants of a burned rag shoved into it. It is pretty easy to take from this that some numbskull was out here playing around with what they thought would be a good Molotov cocktail. Funny since it is not nearly high enough of an alcohol content to make it effective, but stupid because that is a really, really dumb way to get slapped with an arson charge. Most folks would see a lot of this trash along these areas and think it was a couple kids, but I don’t think so. After living in this town for as long as I have, being a wild little destructive brat myself, and knowing a lot of people in this neck of the woods, these are hands down all done by legal adults. I would hope that they would have some more smarts than they do, but beggars can’t be choosers.

After cleaning up the glass thoroughly and wading out to remove some large chunks of styrofoam from the river and loading it all up in my car to dispose of later, I was able to start some fishing. As I waded thigh deep into the still-rather-fast river and lay a elk hair caddis at the edge of a fishy looking bank undercut on the other side, a raft came into view from upstream. I finished my drift and reeled my line back up as I did not know whether or not they were coming through or pulling in. Of course, they were pulling in for pick up. Fine by me. I toss my line back out and fish to seemingly nothing as I couldn’t get a single rise at the end of the line. In the corner of my eye, I kept watching the father and his three kids as they beached the raft and started to unload gear. One of the boys took up a fly rod and started highholing me. This is also fine, the fish aren’t biting, and there is still a good distance between us–I am just not used to anyone else in this area fishing while I am here because after many, many years, this is the first time it has ever happened. But then he started moving downriver towards me, closing the gap with every cast. He may not know about the etiquette of fishing, he is out there casting into the void as I am, and he surely won’t get closer to me, right? Well, he ended up within twenty feet of where I was planted. I was about to say something when he told me “good luck” and got out of the water and went into the shade under what remaining trees there were after the shake up down here.

What you should draw from this is the question of whether or not more readily available and easy river access is a net positive or a net negative. While having more of the beautiful outdoors at one’s fingertips it also provides more convenient areas for people to come and use it at their disposal. There has been a large increase in garbage out there (not just what I picked up that day, but what I picked up the other two times I went up in the coming days), and with the city landfill dropping the recycling services with everything except cans, these slightly out of the way places are at increased risk to be turned into makeshift dumping grounds as many offshoot county roads have been used in the past. I am not directly correlating these two ideas here, but I am suggesting that when people have limited access to resources they may need, they find other ways of disposing of the things that were once provided by said resources.

All in all, each and every one of us need to treat the outdoors as just that–the outdoors. Please, I am begging each and every one of you to think about what you are doing to the single best thing about our area. Remove more trash from the areas you are swimming, hiking, fishing, hunting, camping, etc. than you bring in. Quit breaking bottles and burning pallets. Don’t sink cans into our lakes anymore (I could call a couple of you out by name here as I have seen you do it this year). In a place like the Moyie River, I want the only trash in there to be the quality of fishing. It makes getting skunked a heck of a lot more enjoyable when I don’t have to clean up the area every single time I am out there.