It took me nearly an hour to clean up the mess.

And what a mess it was: raccoons had crawled into the barrel, clawed and gnawed through double-thick Hefty bags, then dragged them over and out, spewing garbage trails which fanned out, barrel-side to pond-side. Six wheel-spokes were intact, the rest had been overlaid with criss-crossing paths, courtesy of other hungry creatures of the night.

When performing my self-appointed civic duty, I abide by my own rules. Rule #1: Don't go looking for trouble. That is, what happens in the woods, stays in the woods--so long as you can't see it from the street. Corollary, alas: If you see it, you gotta go after it--and everything else you see once you get there.

There was no way I could NOT see the football-field of filth, short of spinning my head Linda-Blair-style. I donned a pair of surgical gauntlets, hoisted my trusty spear, and yelling my poignant battle cry--This job SUCKS--charged forth into the muck.

While such work is underway, I am wont to pass the time reflecting upon the character of the culprits who thoughtlessly toss their trash--coffee cups and candy wrappers from car-windows--or who hurl mattresses and sofas over embankments. After careful consideration of the sundry subtleties that serve to motivate these misguided souls, I invariably conclude that they are suffering from WADS. Rather, the rest of us are suffering as a result of their having What A Dick! Syndrome.

It is also customary for me to fantasize about catching these WADS-guys and making them pay for their heinous crimes against nature. I propose a punishment of community service. Not some cushy, keep-your-hands-clean volunteer work--but down-and-dirty in the trenches--with me, whip in hand. I figure one week's worth of hard labor per piece of litter, or per pound of dumped upholstery.

Until I came upon this latest-and-greatest garden of garbage, the single most foul thing I'd encountered was a sack of dead fish. That stench paled in comparison to the dozens of soiled Depends and their sidekicks: stained disposable mattress pads.

With each nasty piece of business I was obliged to retrieve and re-bag, I grew increasingly disgusted. And frustrated to boot--after all, I couldn't even entertain myself by coming up with a creative punishment protocol for raccoons. They were just doing their regular raccoon-duty.
So who could I blame? The obvious choice, seemed to me, would be the person who had dumped the bag of baddies there to begin with.

But, the more I thought about it, the less that made sense. First of all, the original, sturdy, trash bag was placed in, or beside, the barrel. True, the barrel is intended for passersby--not for residents who won't be bothered to wait for trash day.

But what if, say, you're tending a demented, incontinent parent--day-after-day-after-day--the last thing you need to top off that tasty treat is a house that reeks between rubbish-retrieval respites: Week-after-week-after-week. And, after all...

It took me less than an hour to clean up the mess.