OUTDOORS COLUMN: Freeing trees from refuse

I stood on an island in the James River at the intersection of human and game trails, my dogs at my side. I came here for sheds - antlers dropped by whitetail bucks starting in midwinter - but realized, standing in this spot, that my mission had changed.

Littering the forest floor all around me were sheds of a different kind: human sheds, so to speak. Decades of deciduous detritus. Years of careful profligacy. That is to say, litter, junk, trash. First a flip-flop, then an ancient Diet Pepsi can, shards of glass, plastic bags.

I call this waste careful because scattering one's castoff consumables is a willful act. It gives the actor too much credit to call it careless.

Immediately, I called my dogs and we trotted home. I needed two things: a book and a giant trash bag. The book was a compilation of the best writing Outside Magazine had to offer from its first 20 years. In it was a fondly remembered article from 1995, which I quickly reread. In "Keeping America's Trees Safe From Small-Curd Bubble Wrap," author Ian Frazier detailed his weeklong journey with friends along the Mississippi River removing plastic bags and other refuse from trees.

"Trees from which bags have been removed are prettier than trees that never had any to begin with," Frazier writes. "In a bag-free landscape, imagination can pick its century."

I reread Frazier's quirky tale partly to enter the proper frame of mind for my own trash-removal undertaking. It's easy, and not wrong, to rail against those who don't care enough about the natural landscape to put a beer can in a receptacle. But I didn't want to carry that attitude with me into the woods.

I knew from my own experience, and from reading Frazier's tale, that focusing on the obvious negatives of littering blinds the litter remover from the obvious good being done.

Writes Frazier: "As a companionable outdoor pastime, bagging is ideal. It carries a bit of the willful excitement of vandalism, yet is its opposite. It lets you go places where people would otherwise stop you. . . . It establishes small pieces of the country - the particular places where you have snagged bags - firmly in your mind. You feel differently about a place once you have snagged there. And when you take a big piece of plastic from a tree, you affect the look of the landscape in a dramatic way."

Humans being what we are, litter always will be with us. That's not to say I celebrate its existence, just that I know that removing it might be the single easiest way to make the world more beautiful and is, to boot, a darn good excuse for a walk in the woods.

So, bag in hand, the dogs and I retook the island. I brought gloves and the determination to pick up every last piece of trash I found out there. The dogs brought their instinct to roll in raccoon carcasses.

I wouldn't call my approach methodical. We just walked and picked up trash until I couldn't find anymore. I was amazed at how many beer and soda cans looked like they'd been there since the 1980s or earlier. Those felt the best.

There were bags and shards of bags in trees marking former floods on the James. These were the kind of items Frazier was after on the mighty Mississippi, remnants of the 1993 flood that demolished whole towns and left garbage 20 feet up trees.

At the end of his adventure, Frazier and his friends find the mother lode in an elm grove along the river: yards and yards of bubble wrap, the small-bubble kind with not a bubble left unpopped, woven into the trees' branches. It takes them most of a day, but they eventually free the elms from their cocoon of plastic.

"After we had unbubble-wrapped the elms," he writes, "we stood around admiring them. The next day, we came back to admire them some more. I could have sat among them all day."

When I could find no more trash on the island and the dogs smelled nothing dead left to writhe on, we forded the narrow river channel bank to the mainland. I turned and looked at the sycamores and pines and sweet gums and tulip trees on the island.

I guess I didn't save the world that day, but heck if it didn't feel like it.