Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

One learns a lot by walking around town and I came across a couple of good citizens recently who we all should appreciate.

Four years ago while working with the Buckthorn Brigade in Barsness Park I could see the need for doggy bags for owners to use to pick up their pet’s droppings.

I got permission from the city to put up four such dispensers and have been keeping them stocked with bags ever since.

The bags come in rolls of 50 and when they run out they need to be replaced. So I would check the four dispensers every week. But sometimes I would be tied up and didn’t get to check them or missed because I was out of town.

A year or two ago I figured out that someone had to be helping me, I was almost never seeing a dispenser that didn’t have a bag hanging from it. Each dispenser holds and extra roll or two and someone else was putting the rolls in place when one ran out. I kind of assumed it was someone from the city crew that spends time in the park.

A little over a month ago I saw a man over checking one of the dispensers and later stopped and thanked him for doing so. He kind of grinned and explained he had been doing it for quite a while. Mystery solved!

And in addition to keeping the doggy bag dispensers working properly he was also wandering around picking up trash around Barsness Park and down by the beach as well.

That person is Dan McCrory.

Also on my walks I would see a young (compared to me anyway) man walking in Lake Minnewaska picking up cans and other trash from the bottom of the lake.

I’d see him on the Sunday morning walks I take after church.

Some of those days it looked pretty cold to be in the lake but he was there picking up trash. He was usually out in the lake far enough that I couldn’t get close so I shouted thanks a couple of times and waved every time I saw him. That was cold work some days!

One day I asked Dan about him and he, too, had met him and he joked that one of them was the dry land picker upper and the other the water picker upper.

That water picker upper is Scott Christianson.

I ran into Scott recently at Lakeside when Mary and I were grabbing a bite to eat and thanked him again and said it was good to meet him, and it was.

It is really nice to see people who are volunteering to help keep our city a little bit nicer without any expectation of reward.

Thanks Dan and Scott for what you do to make this city a cleaner place!

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There are getting to be plenty of doggy bag dispensers. The Girl Scouts added some on Barsness Park trails and by the museum and The Pearl has a couple of dispensers along the sidewalk by the lake in front of The Pearl. Unfortunately not everyone chooses to use them.

It is nice when dog owners do their duty and pick up after their pets.

One other thing I think helps keep the area cleaner is the garbage cans the city has placed in good places where people can dispose of their dog bags and other litter like coffee cups and snack wrappers. There’s one on the “loop” around Barsness Park and one along the sidewalk in city park across from Lakeside. And there are more downtown.

Knowing those cans are there makes me more interested in grabbing some trash off the street or sidewalk because I can dispose of it right away and not have to carry it all the way home.

Of course the real answer is that we just don’t create a mess in the first place by not picking up what we or our pets drop!