Bag of puppies found in trash clean up along north-end Hamilton tracks
It was Earth Day Saturday; apt time to clean up garbage. In this case tons of it from the north-end tracks, by Birge Park, both as a practical measure and as a symbolic pledge of good faith with our poor planet.
Who, though, cleans up the garbage inside? Who cleans up the rot at the heart of something - our very systems? - capable of so fouling the sense of who we are that the volunteer cleanup crew could find what they found, as they combed through the waste?
I must warn you, it's hard to hear. It sure shook me.
Some 15 to 20 people, all adults, turned out for the Earth Day Cleanup, a joint project of area residents Stefan Spolnik and his wife Taylor Mawdsley, the Beautiful Alleys volunteer organization, and CN Rail.
The scene that unfolded as they worked through the grasses, undergrowth and thickets was one that could both fill you with pride and hope in the human experiment on this planet; then dash those hopes almost at the same time; and - I have to believe (though at the cost of much effort) - build them back up again.
There's a lot of garbage," Spolnik said. We cleaned up 10,000 pounds of it last fall and now I think there's even more." The boat alone, he added, would be a thousand or two thousand pounds.
The boat? Yes. On the bank of the rail corridor, the part they were cleaning up, between Wellington and Cheever. A 14-foot fibreglass pleasure boat. Engine gone.
Someone must have dumped it in the alleyway and it slid down into the corridor," Spolnik speculated.
It was a kind of weirdly amusing absurdity, amid much individually smaller but collectively much larger items of garbage most of which spelled out a sad portrait of human, animal and environmental tragedy.
The crew, known as the Track Gang, uncovered hundreds of needles, Sharps containers, countless ripped open garbage bags, naloxone kits, endless debris, tons of it, from the comings and goings of different kinds of populations. Yes, transient communities but also so-called everyday people who just dump stuff in this area because of its isolation.
After telling me about the boat, Spolnik revealed another find. If you're easily upset or triggered, please show this to someone else you trust to handle hard content before you read it.
A bag of puppies," he said. I had to throw my mind around what he was saying.
Please, I resisted in my thinking for the smallest part of a second, be a misunderstanding. No, it's what you think.
That must be so hard to deal with," I suggested.
I'm a paramedic," he replied. The whole time we had been talking he didn't really smile and I think now I understood possibly why. He told me unflinching but also with the most soulful eyes.
A short time later, they/he found one more puppy. They hadn't even rigored yet," he told me.
Again, I had to process. Rigor mortis, I assumed. He was telling me that this had happened to them that very morning or the night before.
The cleanup crew reported the incident to Hamilton's Animal Control.
We left our number with them," said Mawdsley. They said they would try to send an oficer to locate the puppies in the bin," to determine if they could investigate.
A spokesperon for Animal Control said the course of action will depend on whether they can find the dogs, and they won't know until office hours.
The people there in the cleanup crew, with their garbage grabbers" (trash pickers) and their gloves, worked diligently on a cold Saturday morning, against a seemingly endless tide. They got it cleaned up.
Oh, we're having fun," Margie Kneulman, a nearby resident, told me, tongue in cheek.
It's stunning how much there is. We clean up twice a year." As good a job as they did - and they and many other good people like them are why I still have to hope - she knows it'll pile up again almost as soon as they leave.
As Mawdsley, a Hamilton nurse, said, It'll start coming back tomorrow." She and her neighbour Allyson van Kessel cleared out loads, including discarded drywall and other construction material. They also found a very well fed dead skunk. Lots of garbage there for such animals to feed on.
Const. Matt Davidson, a CN police officer working closely on CN's behalf with Beautiful Alleys and Spolnik, says, It is getting better. Basically, it's a team effort. It makes the area safer."
Indeed. For all. The CN employees, yes, but also the whole neighbourhood. The area is right between a children's play area, a community pool and, on the other side of the tracks, a candy factory.
I do it for the kids," said Kneulman, but she added, There's some real hopelessness out there."
You can tell a lot about a city, a world, a system, from the kind of garbage it creates. You can also tell a lot by the quality of the people who clean it up.
Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator.jmahoney@thespec.com