Walking the roads, you see the debris of the driving.

Litter seems the heir apparent to the king of beers, at least along this roadside. Cans and bottles crushed, shattered, whole, dented, chipped. All domestic beers. No import empties glitter in the grass or bob in the muddy culvert stew.

Most of the trash seems connected to liquids. Cola cans and bottles mark the right of way. One two-liter bottle’s cola has been replaced with something that is most definitely not cola … though it may have once been cola. It has been resealed and tossed out of some passing window as someone must have once discarded Aladdin’s lamp, but I’m no Aladdin and I have no plans to touch this bottle let alone rub it. 

I walk on by.

Many car folks seem to be in dire need to rid their cars of “stuff.” There’s the wrapped and packed baby diaper tossed into tall grass – some motorist apparently took the “disposable diaper” idea too literally.

A kingdom of fast-food residue can be found in crushed, stuffed, crusted, rumpled, smeared bags, boxes, cartons, papers, napkins and cups from almost every restaurant with a drive-through in the Greater Valdosta area. Tremendously convenient for the drivers who want to order their food, purchase it, eat it and dispose of the leftovers and waste – all without having to leave their cars.

Driving, you can see all of this trash as a blur. To the walker, the passing cars are the blurs while the trash has become part of the landscape. Unless a section of road has been adopted by some club, or it is a designated site for community-service workers, this stuff’s not going anywhere.

And before anyone thinks, well, why don’t you pick it up, Poling? Because I’m out for a walk, not a stop every other step and pick up trash. Besides, I would need a garbage bag that worked like Santa’s toy bag in reverse … a garbage bag that could hold more and more stuff then more stuff again.

Instead most of this trash will undergo a slow roadside evolution. The roadway and roadside stuff will be run over repeatedly until it seems a colorful swatch tattooed to the asphalt. Some of the bottles will be shattered and the glass shards ground into dust. 

Birds will risk their feathered lives to carry away the food scraps. Paper products will be weakened by rain and time, flattening into eventual nothingness. Other drivers will toss more debris from the windows of passing cars. Hurling objects landing as mired junk.

Occasionally, nature will repurpose some of this stuff.

A Bud Light can gleams like a cathedral in the ancient civilization of an ant hill. The ants may have built their mound around the can, or the can may have landed on the hill and the ants incorporated it into their community’s recovery. Either way, the can has become part of the mound. Its opening lost below the grainy surface. Ants may have built mazes within its curved metal interior. Maybe it’s the palace of the queen? Curious, I watch it for a while but never get a satisfying answer.

I walk away from it. Same as I walk away from everyone else’s trash. If I can’t save one civilization from its garbage, I’m not destroying the foundation of another civilization.

Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and editor of The Tifton Gazette.