It’s been three years since we at ECCA began organizing volunteer teams to clean up trash on Highway 14, a notoriously messy and plastic-strewn roadway that (at least at the time) was depressing to even drive down. We’ve worked hard on this road, collecting tens of thousands of pounds of every kind of trash you can imagine, and some you probably can’t. But one thing we’ve learned is that there’s no end to the cleaning: if you start, you can’t stop, or things will quickly revert back to their original terrible state. Which is why, at the end of April, our volunteer teams will be out on the highway again. We’ll clean twice a month through November with teams both large and small, each one made up of people who might be different in lots of ways, but who are all passionate about one thing: our lovely PNW environment and the delicate watershed we all share.
We do our Highway 14 trash cleanup work under the state’s Adopt-a-Highway program, and up until now, we’ve cleaned four miles of highway, two in Washougal and two in Camas. The big news this year is that we’ve added a third segment — 192nd Street to 164th Street. The official “adopter” of this section of road is Mark Silliman, a super-volunteer who’s been with us since the beginning and who, when he’s not with us, goes out cleaning on his own. Mark’s a pretty amazing guy, and his interest in restoring our roadways to their natural beauty goes way back. How far? I asked him that. This is what he wrote me:
I’m sure it all started when I was a kid. My father trained us from an early age. He always said, “When you go and visit a place, leave it cleaner than you found it.” It was like a religious maxim for him, one of the 10 commandments.
I got married very young. I was 21. I had two daughters right out of the chute by adoption, and I wanted to set a good example for them. In those days I was still going to church. So we’d go to church and I had a little Volkswagen that my father gave me. The top of it was crushed because he rolled it one night after drinking too much. So the roof was kind of flat and it was perfect for loading trash onto it from alongside the road. So we’d be on our way to church, we’d leave early and we’d load the top of the car. We’d get a mattress up there and I’d sling a rope over the top and feed it through the windows and tie it over my head where I was driving, and then we just piled trash on top of that mattress. And when we got to church I’d just shoved everything off the car into the parking lot. After a month of doing that, there was quite a pile of trash.
I had been encouraging the congregation to start a recycling center and got no response. I said, “This is what our roads look like,” and the pastor said “Well, why don’t you start it?” So I did, and after a year or so, they started to see that it made some money. So they took it up and got a huge dumpster and had a real recycling center going. So that’s my background with the whole issue. Just always found trash on our roads an eyesore and just enjoyed the beauty all around me so much.
If you want to join Mark and a bunch of your neighbors in our Highway 14 trash cleanup work, click on this form. You’ll find lots more information and get the chance to sign up for any or all of the cleanups at one time. We look forward to seeing you!
Top photo: Mark near the easternmost roundabout in Washougal with a discarded sofa cushion and plastic tub of kitty litter — the usual fare.
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