There's no such thing as 'away'.

"How did all this get here?" he asked me. 

The "here" was Lady Bird Lake and the "this" was litter.  Yard after yard of it, along the banks of Austin's urban lake (technically, an impoundment of Texas' Colorado River).

This man had hauled his double seater kayak and his young son down to where Shoal Creek meets the lake early last Saturday morning.  He was answering a call from Keep Austin Beautiful to help pick up trash in the water and on land where Shoal Creek enters the lake.  This morning, he was the only one on the water, but about 20 people answered the call on land.  After only two hours, we had piled up twenty-three bags of trash which the City hauled away.  To add to the landfill.






I answered his question haltingly and inelegantly, since I'd never been asked that question before.  Now, days later, my smart response can be summed up elegantly as "what starts on land doesn't stay on land".  The City's Watershed Protection Department has said it even better with this wonderful "Trash Travels" sign that was just a few feet down the path from where I stood.

Land sheds what's on it.  Wind, rain, the daily shuffle of life, move things around.  Mostly, 'around' means 'down' (because gravity).  And 'down' in a watershed means down stream.

An inch a day of movement for a burger bag blown away into the next clump of grass in the park. 

More than twenty blocks of movement in an hour for a cigarette butt (its plastic foam four and a half years old, having lost its paper skin just days into its journey).  It finds itself in the floodplain and is carried away by rising waters from 24th street, where the student flicked it away on the way to class.

Three month's worth of leaking oil, scarring an otherwise pristine blacktop driveway, get rained away.  The oil molecules do not mix with the rain drops.  Their hydrophobic panic pushes them every which way, but there's no escaping the storm drain three driveways away.

Like a bathtub drain, the storm drain does its work clearing rain water as quickly as possible from the street, then through pipes that empty directly into the nearest creek.  Here's how KXAN told the story recently:

The storm drain carries more than rain water.  The burger bag, the butt, the oil, hijacked, are forced to go along for the ride.  Down the slope of the park, down the floodplain, down the driveway, down the drain, down the creek.

Then down to the lake, where, last Saturday morning, a concerned father on a kayak wonders while reaching for the butt.  (By now, the bag has shredded into small, waterlogged pieces.  The oil has sheened on the surface.  Both are beyond his grabber tool's ambitions.)

Still at home that morning, the homeowner awakens to a gift - a pristine black top driveway, courtesy of last night's rain storm.  'The world is clean again!' they post, while inhaling the good wet smells of the morning. 'The storm took the oil away!'

But by now, you, the reader, know there is no such thing.