At least you didn't encounter any maggots, I hope. (Sorry Andrew, didn't mean to stir bad memories). Since you and Kiki have served as scouts, give us a good point to rendezvous for the next round. I see the weather forecast is reporting showers for this coming Wednesday, so maybe we need to play the date of the upcoming by ear. We don't want Crusty up to her neck in the water while it is raining! We probably have a couple more months of good daylight and nice temps before we, like the wily Fetid Lake of Doom caimans, will have to hibernate for half the year as trash pickers.

I found it strange that some of the people who have stopped to talk to us during the last two cleanups assumed we cleaning up as some form of court-ordered punishment. "We do this for fun!" we happily replied. And I felt so cheerfully subversive while doing so. So why is that as a volunteer cleaning up a public area, I feel this way? We filled up several garbage bags of junk, some of it had obviously been there for a very long time. Big plastic pipes, shoes, cigarette lighters, lots of plastic and glass bottles, sandals, Frito-Lay bags for various products, a nice coat, a rubber duck, a couple of real dead ducks, styrofoam in a myriad of forms, a plastic garbage bin, part of a swing set. It goes on.

When I first released the caimans into the FLOD, I was sort of leaning to keeping that body of water as it is. But in the last year I have seriously thought about it, and now support the idea of returning the estuary to the way it was before 1949. Cleaning up around the FLOD has converted me. That lake really is FETID. I can't help but admire Crusty's willingness to jump into it. She is a very brave person and I now count her among my heroes. Also Kiki, as Andrew pointed out in an earlier thread, dove right into the worst part of stickers to extract ancient junk. Perhaps we should've donated our bags to the Olympia Historical Society, that's how long some of that trash has been down there.

Also, at low tide if the place was an estuary, all the junk tossed into the FLOD would be revealed for all to see. Plus, the caimans would have great difficulty in finding a more ideal place to hide. So you can now count me among the bring-back-the-estuary supporters.