Paulina Vives-Phillips moved to the Wakefield area of Marshall County four years ago and she has been making an impact on her community just about ever since. She lives on Murphy Hill Road and she noticed her road – which is something of a tourist area – was badly littered. Paulina set out to do something about it.
“I picked up the loop of Murphy Hill Road, Mt. Moriah Road and South Sauty Road,” she said. It took her a year of regular pick-ups multiple times a week to get it done, picking up small sections at a time. Her faithful beagle, “Lucky,” makes every step she makes on these litter cleaning journeys and it was actually Lucky who indirectly led to the litter pick-ups in the first place. “I took Lucky for a walk and saw the litter,” Paulina said. “That was the inspiration for it.”
Paulina initially thought she’d pick up the loop one time and things would change. She thought it would stay clean. She thought neighbors would see her picking up and start picking up themselves or at the very least stop littering. But that wasn’t what happened. It got littered again almost as soon as she was finished. But the subsequent rounds around the loop weren’t near as bad as the first one. The litter hadn’t had as much time to accumulate.
She expanded her pick-ups along South Sauty Road all the way into Jackson County, where it turns into County Highway 67. She also picked up along Highway 227 to the State Park. It’s a huge territory that she picks up litter on. So the clean-up job she started 4 years ago continues to this day. She picks up at least 2 or 3 days a week and picks up for 2 to 3 hours on each trip.
Lucky is a 15-inch beagle, not a large dog but certainly not a small dog either, and he can be bundle of energy. Paulina keeps him on a long leash when she’s picking up litter. For that reason, she doesn’t carry a large litter bag. She saves her small Walmart bags, carries them in a small backpack and will fill 17 or 18 of the small bags with trash on a typical pickup day. She doesn’t use a “litter grabber” stick either. She started out bare handing the trash she encountered. A neighbor who saw her couldn’t stand to see her doing that and gave her a pair of gloves. “I wore those gloves out and I am on my second pair now,” she said.
Litter clean-up makes a difference in how a neighborhood looks, but it’s no picnic on its best day. And it can be pretty bad on its worst days. Paulina has had at least a couple of scary incidents. “Another dog attacked Lucky one day, and put a hole in his side,” she said. There was no way Lucky could walk back home. It could’ve made the hole bigger. Paulina called her husband Ben and he came and picked them up. Lucky ended up at a veterinary urgent care to get stitched up. On another day, a broken bottle in Paulina’s bag brushed her leg and gashed it open. Again, she had to call her husband to come pick her up.
“He asked me once, ‘Why are you doing this?’” Paulina said. Her reply was that it’s good exercise for her, good exercise for Lucky and it helps the environment. She has never figured up the miles or the number of bags she has picked up, although she plans to start doing that. She is now part of PALS – People Against a Littered State – and they like to track the difference their cleaning efforts are making.
“I’m not able to catch up,” Paulina said. “My dream was to finish it. I am so naïve, honestly. I thought people were going to get motivated. If they don’t get motivated, I thought, they will at least feel sorry for us.” She finds all kinds of litter, plastic bottles, aluminum cans and fast food wrappers being the main offenders. “Mountain Dew bottles are my archenemy,” she said. “They’re green and you really have to look to see them in the grass.”
The most embarrassing material she found was “adult material” scattered on the roadside. “My 15-year-old nephew was visiting and that made it really embarrassing,” she said. The scariest item was one totally unexpected. She picked up a bag that was heavy and she had to look inside. There was a deer head in the bag. “It scared me to death,” she said.
Her imagination sometimes runs wild during her litter work. “I make up little stories about the litter I find,” she said. “Like the adult material. Was it an angry wife who found it in the vehicle and threw it out the window?” She regularly finds “99 Bananas” liqueur bottles on her route. “I don’t know who this guy is, but he likes it and you can track him by his bottles,” she said.
Has she found any money? “In four years, I have probably found $22 or $23,” she said. “When people stop by, they say, ‘Why are you doing this?’ I say ‘Because every time I come out here, I find a $20 bill.’ I’ve tried everything to get people to pick up.”
Cigarette butts are a bane to litter cleaners in town. Paulina said they’re bad in the country too. She is becoming more than just a litter cleaner now. She is becoming an anti-litter advocate. She addressed the Jackson County Commission, encouraging them to put out more roadside garbage cans, more signs and begin a campaign to encourage people to pick up in front of their own homes and businesses. She plans to speak to the Marshall County Commission about the same thing. “I lived in Japan for several years,” she said. “There, everyone keeps things clean in front of their own place. I don’t know why we can’t do that here.”