One man’s trash is another’s growing collection of treasure
I am not sure why at the age of eleven I would need a beer can collection but gradually one had started to form on the wall of my dad’s garage.
The collection began quite innocently and was born from a daily clean-up effort.
As I traveled the trails and roads surrounding my Limekiln Lake home I would stop and pick up trash.
Much of it was cans and bottles.
So far I had collected about 40 different cans. They were brightly colored and their labels were truly works of art. I lined them up on a shelf and affixed them to the wall with fishing line.
The perfect time to find an abundance of litter/treasures was following a holiday weekend. And such was the case the week after Memorial Day.I headed out on my bike to scope the deep weeds along the roadside.
When I spied a find I would skid to a stop, lay the bike on the shoulder of the road, and give the can the once-over to see if it was a new variety or one I already had acquired.
Then I tossed it into my Army ruck sack that was wired to the handle bars.
On this particular day I spotted an odd looking can wedged between two rocks.
I climbed down the ditch and plucked it from its careless home.
It was a half-full Billy Beer.
Cool! A new can for the collection.
I poured out the murky, smelly contents, and submerged it in a small nearby creek. I had to fill and empty it about ten times before it passed not only my sniff test, but that of my mother’s.
However I was pretty confident that I had cleaned it out well enough to be considered garage wall-worthy.
Through experience I knew the capacity of my rucksack to be no more than 34 cans or 30 glass bottles.
Once the quota was reached I trekked back home to get a good look at my booty.
New cans were added to the collection while the duplicates were used for target shooting with a BB gun, bow and arrow, or slingshot.
They were also great to smush with a baseball bat.
My friend Eddy and I made up a game to see how many cans we could pound in a set amount of time.
It was amazing how two 11- year-old boys could fill an entire afternoon with two baseball bats, an egg timer and an unlimited supply of empty old beer cans.
My personal record was 41 full can smushes in 60 seconds.
Mitch Lee, Adirondack native & storyteller, lives at Big Moose Lake.ltmitch3rdny@aol.com
