Not Litter

I disdain litter and will readily collect it when confronted with it. But at some point, cans and bottles stop being litter and become relics. Some even elevate to collectables.

The transition isn’t precise, but several decades must pass at a minimum. Vintage motor oil cans provide a perfect example. Collectors will pay over $1,000 for “rare,” well-preserved cans from the early 1900s. Antique purple bottles, in my estimation, qualify as beautiful. They were produced between the 1880s and 1914.

In the buckled hills surrounding my house, relics from bygone eras lie exposed amid splays of sagebrush, gnarls of juniper, and sun-bleached bunchgrass. Iron tidbits. Shards of brown and purple glass. Twists of wire. Occasionally, a can rusted to fragility. I chance upon these things now and then on my walkabouts and rarely disturb them.

Yesterday at midday, I paused over an old rusting beer can a few yards below my house. I’ve passed it many times in my life. I’ve never picked it up, nor ever thought to. I believe it belongs there now—weathered into place, a quiet marker of the past.

It is not litter.

I’ve posted a photograph of the old rusty beer can.

—Mitchell Hegman