Eleven cartons of Vendange Pinot Grigio, four large cans of Twisted Tea, assorted Bud Light, PBR and Coors bottles and cans. I’ve lost count of the Green Mountain coffee cups. This week’s take from the ditches and vernal pools along Ducktrap Road, and I’m only a third of the way done. Like many of us around town who regularly walk our neighborhoods I’ve started carrying a couple of plastic grocery bags on my daily walk, filling one on the way to Maplewood Cemetery, and the other on the way back.

These early weeks in May with the snow gone, the roadside ditches beginning to dry up, and before the weeds and leaves come out and cover it all up again, is the perfect time to pick up the winter’s harvest of used food and drink containers, heedlessly tossed out the window by motorists who must think of the outdoors as their own garbage pail.

After spending days driving across the Southwest and up from Florida this past month, eating meals in the car and snacking along the way, I’m well aware of how many wrappers, bottles, cans, and Styrofoam containers we generated. Tying one of those vilified one-use, plastic grocery bags on the door handle was the perfect way to keep it all contained and easily disposed of whenever we stopped. (By the way, if you haven’t read Camden Select Board member Alison McKellar’s piece in defense of plastic bags, it’s quite provocative).

I tsk tsked to myself all across Texas, for wherever there were fences along the Interstate the amount of trash blown up against them was astounding. Roadside litter is everywhere you go, on town streets and country roads. In several states we saw crews of prisoners – yes, signs were posted telling us this was a Department of Corrections operation – picking up stuff, filling large bags along the road. I think they do it in Maine, as well.

Our granddaughter, a freshman at Camden Hills Regional High School, spent spring break in Guatemala on a service trip with the high school’s Midcoast Interact Club and Safe Passage, a nonprofit based in Yarmouth. The group “works in Guatemala City to bring hope, education, and opportunity to the children and families living in extreme poverty around the city's garbage dump.”

Her observations are chilling: families live on the edge of this dump in appalling conditions, scavenging the pile every day with their bare hands. And right next to it is the school funded by the Safe Passages where some 550 children, ages 2 to 2l from the families living at the dump, attend.

It’s no exaggeration to say we’ve managed to trash much of this beautiful world.

But back to those 11 cartons of wine. They’re those small boxes – 500 ml = 3 glasses – and all but two were on the same side of the road. Hmmm. Somebody with a taste for white wine, kind of fancy white wine, a certain brand of white wine, has apparently been drinking quite a bit of it while driving on Ducktrap Road.

My inner Nancy Drew/girl detective kicks in as I conjure up a picture of the person tossing, maybe night after night, an empty Vendange Pinot Grigio carton out the window of her car. Her car? Somehow, I assume women drink white wine and men are drinking the Bud Light. Anyone could be knocking back the Twisted Tea, but these are big cans, so I’m thinking a man.

The cartons aren’t new. They appear to have spent the winter under the snow, so maybe the Pinot drinker was a summer person, perhaps kicking back on the way home from work late at night. To have finished the three glasses worth of wine by Ducktrap Road, she must have started somewhere miles from there, Belfast maybe, or Camden.

It isn’t very reassuring is it, picturing this wine-drinking driver on our roads? Or for that matter a guy with a Twisted Tea between his legs, barreling along Ducktrap. Those cans, by the way, appear to be current, clean, recently tossed.

This isn’t my first roadside mystery. Several years ago I picked up some two dozen plastic nasal spray bottles, same brand, same general spot on Beach Road not far from our house, and all in the span of a few months. Somebody either had a bad allergy with a runny nose or what? It seemed weird at the time. Finally, whoever was tossing them stopped doing it. Or maybe changed their route home.

HAL (Hope-Appleton-Lincolnville) baseball team plays at Oceanside in Rockland at 3:45 p.m. Tuesday, May 8.

Library

The Lincolnville Center Indoor Flea Market, held at the Community Building, starts its sixth season on Saturday, May 19, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. The market, sponsored by United Christian Church, is held the third Saturday of every month, May through October. You’ll find a wide variety of things for sale including antiques and collectibles, arts and crafts, value-added products, and household goods.  Breakfast, baked goods, and beverages will be sold by members of the UCC.

A bedraggled little bird washed up on Lincolnville Beach the other morning and lay panting on the sand. Two women who’d set up chairs and were enjoying the sunrise, picked it up and wrapped the shivering little thing in a t-shirt. They asked me, emptying a trash barrel nearby, if I knew the local birds. Seagulls, I thought. Loons. Ducks. Geese. That’s about it.

Well, this bird, clearly a youngster, was certainly new to me. It was fearless, had probably never encountered humans before, and sat before us preening its feathers and gathering its strength, apparently uninjured. It had two peaks of russet colored feathers on its head, red eyes and the oddest feet I ever saw. The women googled “birds with red eyes” on their phones and came up with “horned Grebe”. It mentioned their paddle feet, and that’s exactly what it had, three distinct paddles instead of webbed feet or toes.

We debated what to do, then called Avian Haven which recommended via a recorded message, that an injured bird be wrapped in a towel and put in a box and they would pick it up. We were about to do that when our young Grebe stood up and waddled (they don’t walk very well apparently) right into the water again. Best leave Mother Nature to take care of it, we agreed, and reluctantly left it swimming up and down the shore.

Later, though, messages on the LBB indicated that Avian Haven might have been involved, that others saw it later and contacted them. I don’t know how it came out, but this morning I wasn’t surprised to find our little Grebe was gone, whether to rehab or out to sea I don’t know.