The Accidental Litter-Bug

If you know me, you know I am not a litter-bug.  Far from it.  On my first date with that girl a couple years ago, we hiked into Crow Creek Falls.  I ended up filling my backpack with litter I picked up along the way in and on the way out.  On our Sunday drive a couple weeks ago, I stopped on the backroads and pitched a few littered cans and bottles into the back of my truck.  On Friday of last week, that girl, I, and our cabin neighbors picked litter from a mile stretch of Highway 200 near Lincoln, Montana.

Yesterday, the tables turned on me.

I became a litter-bug.

I have an explanation.  It was not technically me.

While driving home along the Frontage Road, I rolled down the windows on both sides of my truck to allow the sweet new-grass-and-spring-tree scent to swirl around me.  What swirled around me—instead—was a loose plastic grocery bag the wind picked up from someplace on the floor.

The bag circled right around me, snapping, and was then violently sucked outside.  I saw the bag in my review mirror as it whipped across the road, sailed over the barrow, sailed over an irrigation canal, and sailed over a fence into a field of new green.

No retrieving that.

A pox on my record.

--Mitchell Hegman