Sat 4/4/09

A Daily Walk With DietPower

Walking is the best exercise for weight loss. And the things you see!

Beautiful as my neighborhood is, some of the people who drive through it are pigs. Every day I walk past candy wrappers, plastic bags, drink boxes, gum wrappers, cigarette packs, matchbooks, coffee cups, pizza boxes, plastic straws, slurpee cups, and a hundred other kinds of trash that people have apparently tossed from their cars.

Just for fun, I decided to count cans and bottles during my walk today. After the first couple of hundred yards, I was so amazed at the tally that I decided to begin photographing them, in case nobody believed me. Here they are, 280 of the 311 bottles and cans that I found. All lay within plain sight of what are generally regarded as some of the cleanest streets in my town.

I'm sure a lot more cans and bottles were hidden beneath the leaves, or simply escaped my notice. Adding 50 percent for that and doubling it because I was studying only one side of the street, I come up with 933 bottles and cans on a 3.5-mile route. In addition, I saw 209 juice boxes and paper or plastic cups. That's one empty drink container every 16 feet. In other words, every three paces, I encounter the remnants of somebody's swill.

Some of these pigs must be local. Certain brand names are over-represented, as if the same person is ditching his detritus on his way home from work every day. (Not surprisingly for a residential neighborhood, we do have a lot of repeat traffic. After years of walking the same circuit, I recognize many of the cars that pass, and even know some of their plate numbers.)

The favorite beer is Bud Light, but I also found inordinate numbers of Heineken bottles and more than a dozen little double-shots of Yukon Jack.

Ironically, Vitamin Water was another standout. Someone is apparently concerned over his health, but not over his neighborhood.

Strangely, Budweiser cans were seldom crushed, but Bud Light cans usually were. Are light-beer drinkers angry about something?

Stranger still, even though I found an abundance of litter in a supposedly clean neighborhood, a recent study ranked Connecticut among the least littered states.

You couldn't prove it by me.

About this page: Precisely at noon each day, I step out of my office for a 3.5-mile walk around my Connecticut neighborhood. I carry a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TX5 pocket camera with a Leica 10x optical zoom lens. My object is to make an interesting photograph of at least one thing that is different that day. I post the results here, hoping they will inspire you and your friends to walk, too.  —Terry Dunkle, DietPower founder and CEO.

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All My Yesterdays

Friday, April 3: Forsythia

Thursday, April 2: Skunk Cabbage II

Wednesday, April 1: Mystery of the Hanging Shoes

Tuesday, March 31: Downy Woodpecker

Monday, March 30: 300-Year-Old House

Sunday, March 29: The Broken Fence

Saturday, March 28: "You're Such a Delight"

Friday, March 27: Skunk Cabbage

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