Message In A Bag

Message In A Bag

Someone just upstream from Camp Salmen is routinely tossing their carefully prepared bags of trash into Bayou Liberty.  I’ve found many of these over the past year or so – seven on our property in just one week. They must be strewn up and down the bayou on our neighbor’s property too.  Because these bags contain mostly empty soda pop cans they float until they hang up on the bank.  They don’t travel long or far before the sun rots the flimsy bag and everything spills out to multiply this sin against nature.

The bags are all the same. The person doing this fills a standard plastic grocery bag with Diet Coke cans. They might add a couple of empty food containers – cranberry products, juice, snack cakes, junk food du jour - and lots and lots of white cigarette butts, usually packed separately in the bag. The bag’s handles are neatly tied together and the package consigned to the beautiful bayou.

If you dissect a few of these bags, they become little, floating mini-autobiographies. So what does this person say about themselves? Well, they’re actually pretty neat and organized, for being such a slob. They’re self-centered, only wanting neatness in their own surroundings and not caring for the world and the others who have to share it with them. They must think enough of themselves to try to keep the weight off with the diet drinks and they try to eat something healthy with an occasional fruit-based snack. However, their copious cigarette consumption and their bizarre form of littering betrays the fact that while their wheel may be turning, the hamster is dead.

So who is it? I can’t imagine anyone with property on the bayou doing this. There’s too much investment for living in such a beautiful place to turn around and trash it. Maybe it’s a thoughtless workman on a long job? A homeless person camped out somewhere upstream? Whoever it is he or she has an extreme contempt for nature and God’s creation and a certain poverty of their soul.