Running for Your Life: Plastic Bag Brigade

I’ve taken it upon myself to, while running, especially along the ultra-urban pathways that circumnavigate Green-Wood Cemetery, to pick up litter, i.e., plastic bags, which I then scrunch and run with.

It’s one of my personal measures to promote the idea of sustainability, as spurred by the reading of the review of the nonfiction book “Moby-Duck,” Donovan Hohn’s quest to follow the trail of the 28,800 bath toys lost at sea http://bit.ly/RA538s

Herewith is my mode of plastic bag selection:

• Just discarded and thus relatively clean;
• Being tumbleweed-like blown en route;
• And the rare occasion when it appears the bag is at least contentless

What limits me to these selections is the very real sense that for the seven or eight hours of pitch-black night, rats, not people, rule this domain. The prospect of scooping up a black plastic bag (inordinately the bags on this training route are shiny noir not the white with red logo variety that dominates my Park Slope neighborhood) and finding a rat in situ, having taken up temporary residency, deters me from this course of action.

Upon returning home I stuff the former litter and now reclaimed and functional bags in my early morning Thurber-walk string bag (also inside: Doggie Beach sticks, two squeaky toys, a small container of dried liver treats and a foul-smelling tennis ball). These bags are then used as pooper scoopers and disposed in the FIDO (Fellowship for the Interests of Dogs & The Owners) supplied trash barrels in Prospect Park.

Next: Running for Your Life: What? No Hockey?