On Saturday, a group of Bowen Islanders spent their day picking up plastic, cigarette packages, candy wrappers, and empty beer cans (mostly Budweiser) from the shoulders and ditches of several of the islands main roads.
Sam Knowles initiated the clean-up, she says, “because the rubbish was becoming so pervasive and really bugging me. I wanted to make it an island-wide exercise.”
Her family, with the help of Karen Heath and her son Rex, started at their task at 9:30 a.m. from Adams Road travelling down Grafton and reaching Charlie’s Lane by 1 p.m. Knowles and her son Milo continued picking up garbage along Mt. Gardner Road from BICS to the gas station, wrapping up at 5 p.m.
Publicized on the Bowen Island Phorum and Facebook, a number of other islanders joined in the clean-up as well.
Tom Carchrae and his family took on Adams Road and found, among other things, a pair of waterproof overalls with a bottle of wine in each leg. Brenda McLuhan also cleaned the ditches on Adams on both Saturday and Sunday. Sigurd Sabathil collected 50 lbs of debris from the ditch along the road from Charlie’s Lane down to the ferry line up.
Knowles says that for her, the best part of her day was realizing that her husband Dan was totally accepting that his Saturday was being dedicated to picking up garbage.
“That is love manifest,” she says.
