Lazy Sunday Afternoon

For the second of our back-to-back cleanups this weekend, we headed out to the Speed River on Sunday afternoon. With the sun out, it felt like an early September day, which is unusual this late in the season.

The debris, meanwhile, has kept up with the news. Ontario’s municipal elections are today, so it was no surprise to find campaign signs in the river, made, like most of what we pull out, of plastic. The signs, though plentiful, were easy to deal with.

The fabric was much harder.

Duvets, coats, sweaters and assorted textiles were caught in the deadfall or scattered along the shoreline. Mixed in with them was the usual run of bike tires, beer cans, tire sidewalls and rubber gaskets, along with some things I’m not allowed to mention, which seem to have been returned to the river instead of the Stag Shop up the bank.

We made it only about 500 metres upstream before we had more on our hands than we could easily handle, so we ran the Faster tub up and down the channel several times until that stretch was clear.

Go out and vote today. And if you have a sign, take it down once the results are in, because fishing it out of the river is a lot harder.