Thoughts from the Bottom on Earth Day

First appeared on April 22, 2015
in The Lebanon Reporter

Anniversaries have a way of creeping up on us like a Russian sniper or unexpected gas. And so you sit, surrounded by the soft clinking of silverware on porcelain, candlelight shimmering off a glass of Merlot as the misses considers her plate of Linguini Alfredo. You toast before turning your attention to a delicious plate of Pickled Herring when a man in an army jacket, Woody Allen glasses and pair of hush puppies made of hemp, stops at your table with the warning that your precious dinner grew up ingesting micro-particles of plastic in the Pacific Ocean.

It may seem overly simplistic to believe the Earth’s problems could stem from something as simple as throwing a Little Debbie wrapper out the window because you can’t risk smudging your well pressed pants on the way to work. After all, your bosses boss is in town and even though you made him enough dough last year to buy a vacation home in Cabo for his second wife, a really nice bungalow just down the street from the one his first wife now owns, everybody still has to look like they just walked off a GQ photo shoot or heads will roll.

So Little Debbie zips out the window and out of sight and a small part of you aches for knowing its wrong, but you find balance in the fact you’re not texting and driving. Besides you don’t have time to think about carbon footprints or the death of future generations, you drew the short straw and have to tell Crazy Bob in accounting he’ll have to put the Hawaiian shirts away for a week since the Big Kahuna is flying in. And normally this would be no big deal except in this case “crazy” isn’t a term of affection.

So Little Debbie flutters away in the morning breeze before falling to rest gently on the double yellow line you just left behind. And as a single solitary ant inches his way towards a surefire glucose induced coma, an eighteen wheeler thunders past sending the wrapper swirling into the air. Debbie tumbles helplessly over the Queen Anne’s Lace and Purple Aster twisting and turning like a Monarch butterfly until falling to the bottom of the ditch where she finds herself in a stream of muddy water snaking from the interstate.

Slowly she winds downstream before plunging into a larger river. On a rippling current wide and deep, Little Debbie swirls through a city where the water grows congested with displaced gasoline residue, a gift from overflowing storm sewers, and various unwanted bi-products generated during the assembly of that 55 inch flat screen your wife surprised you with on Father’s Day. The one you first watched An Inconvenient Truth on.

So she twists and turns and bobs along, crossing state lines and dodging old car tires, and the occasional set of rusted bed springs, until the river grows wider still upon reaching the delta where it gives all it has to the sea. On the ocean your wrapper joins the tide as dolphins chitter with curiosity at Debbie’s faded smile and the occasional sea turtle nibbles at her curly locks.

And after a month or two, Little Debbie finds herself joining a garbage patch wider than 50 football fields, locked in a South Pacific gyre, circling for perpetuity. And there she stays, riding the waves and floating in the sun for years and years and years. An artifact from a busy morning and a relic that will tell future archaeologists what made us tick, the little Debbie wrapper from the N and Out, the one with your fingerprints on it.

Wednesday is Earth Day. Take a moment to do your part by checking out 50 things everyone can do to save the Earth at: http://www.50waystohelp.com/


© 2015 Eric Walker Williams