By Marla Boone
Contributing columnist
If Lady Bird Johnson weren’t already dead the state of the unbeautifulness of our side ditches would be the end of her. For those of you who caught up on your sleep during history class, Lady Bird Johnson was the wife of President Lyndon Johnson. Like all First Ladies, she had a pet project. Unlike all First Ladies, her project was logical, functional, and doable. She advocated for legislation to protect natural and scenic beauty along America’s highways. The legislation outlawed certain kinds of billboards and mandated that other billboards be a minimum of six hundred feet from the highway. If you can see even one tree from I-75, thank Mrs. Johnson.
Mainly because long-distance bike rides can get a little boring, I find myself perusing the contents of country ditches to see what sort of things people are tossing out of their cars. I’m grateful many of the fast food places have replaced Styrofoam to-go boxes with cardboard. The ditches used to be just teeming with colorful ketchup-stained Styrofoam containers. Styrofoam takes about five hundred years to decompose. (I am not making this up.) As it does, it releases harmful chemicals that eventually leach into the groundwater. So, lose/lose. Now the ditches are rife with colorful ketchup-stained cardboard. Cardboard takes only two months to decompose, so we are four hundred, ninety-nine years, and ten months ahead of Styrofoam. Perhaps the only thing littering up the place that is more disgusting than items that aren’t going to disappear until the year 2524 are diapers. Not gently-used diapers, mind you: diapers that have withstood the ravages of strained peas. I fully understand that people do not want to drive around with reeking diapers in their cars. I just wish the diaper-tossing crowd would be self-aware enough to realize the rest of us don’t wish to wade around in their detritus.
There are also an amazing, not to mention disturbing, number of shoes in side ditches. I’m trying to imagine the scenario in which shoes are repeatedly thrown from multiple cars. None of these scenarios make sense. Along with the shoes, there are also lots of socks being hurled out of vehicles. Why not just go shoeless to begin with rather than shedding your footwear all over the countryside? But think about if they have to negotiate, on (bare) feet, a stretch of road containing those diapers!
Somewhere far below soiled diapers and a little above orphan shoes on the scale of frequently and inappropriately discarded articles are those dental-floss-on-a-little-plastic-holder things. They are everywhere: in the ditches, on the streets, strewn around parking lots, dotting the sidewalks. It’s the very definition of good news vs. bad news. First the good news: apparently, people are taking their dental hygiene and gum care seriously. The American Dental Association should give itself a pat on the back. Now the bad: apparently people are going about the aforementioned dental hygiene in public places and then cavalierly chucking the tools of their ablutions right where they’ve finished with the last molar.
My highest truth is, I’ve used these things. For two terrible months in 2020, my right arm wasn’t working so well and by not working so well I mean it was paralyzed. Having a non-functioning arm is no excuse, of course, for easing up in the fight against pyorrhea. So I bought a package of the dental-floss-on-a-little-plastic-holder things and managed to keep flossing. Watching me try to cope with a steak using just one arm wasn’t very appetizing, definitely not Lady Bird-esque beautiful, but I had the flossing part down pat.
Marla Boone resides in Covington and writes for Miami Valley Today.
