By Mary-Justine Lanyon
Editor
On Saturday, Oct. 19, I joined 26 other volunteers on a community-wide cleanup day in Crestline, stretching from Lake Gregory to Top Town.
Organizer Rick Dinon of the Lake Gregory Yacht Club broke the area up into sections and sent the volunteers off armed with trash bags and trash pickers.
In addition to the yacht club, there were representatives from the Crestline Chamber of Commerce, Lake Gregory Company, the Crestline Lions, the Rotary E-Club of World Peace and the Crestline-Lake Gregory Rotary Club. All the volunteers this year, Dinon noted, were local residents, including a family who came out in force to help clean up the town.
“We’ve been doing this for 10 years,” Dinon said. The first year, he said, volunteers filled 2-1/2 truckloads with trash. That number went down each year until there was only half a truckload. At that point, the decision was made to expand the effort from just around the Lake Gregory shore to Lake Drive and up into Top Town.
“The real plus of this cleanup day,” Dinon added, “is that walkers and anglers see what the volunteers are doing and then step up and pick up any trash they see on other days.”
This year a total of 29 bags of trash were collected, weighing 377 pounds. About 53 percent of the trash was plastic, 35 percent paper and the rest “other.” Some of the odd items collected were a sweatshirt, shorts, panties, gloves, socks, three cans of dusting spray, a five-gallon bucket, a real estate sign, a turtle and a partial shirt sleeve. The most common items were cigarette butts and water bottle caps.
As I covered my assigned section from the Lake Gregory Education and Community Center to Leisure Shores, I encountered Rosie, a volunteer who had just moved to Crestline in March. She had seen the notice about the cleanup day on Facebook and was eager to participate.
Rosie and I encountered many anglers – some fishing by themselves, others with their families. We asked them all if they had any trash they would like us to take for them. The universal response: We are going to take all our trash out with us. One young boy chased after us with a clump of fishing line he had found by the water’s edge.
Along the way, Rosie and I saw several pumpkins, which had been carved and then left by the shore. All had already been partially eaten by animals so we left them there for future enjoyment.
Dinon organizes this cleanup day twice a year – in the spring prior to the summer season and then in the fall to clean up after a busy summer. He expressed his thanks to Goodwin’s for providing donuts and coffee “to thank (and bribe) the participants.” In addition, Lake Drive Hardware donated some daffodil bulbs which Dinon had several volunteers plant around the lake.
Paddle to untangle
This coming Sunday, Oct. 27, the Lake Gregory Co. is holding an on-the-water event from 1 to 3 p.m. Volunteers will paddle out onto the lake in kayaks or paddle boards to collect fishing line and other trash they may find floating on the lake.
Participants will be asked to sign both a volunteer waiver and boat waiver. There will be no charge for use of the kayaks or paddle boards.
For more information, call Anneke at (909) 723-3716.
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