How many of us take the time to look beyond the beauty strip? How many of us really want to? Aren’t many of us, much of time, content to avert our eyes? After all, what you find around and beyond the strip of natural beauty can be painful. If you ride a bike on our public roads, hike the trails, walk to do your shopping and pick up mail, or paddle on public waterways, then maybe you’re less likely to look the other way.

I’d like to encourage everyone to look through the beauty strip. To that end, every third Monday Outside Up North publish a new Beyond the Beauty Strip feature. Here’s this month’s edition.

 
I’ve been exploring my Surly’s capabilities on unimproved roads and forest trails all season. Rough riding can take you to beautiful places that offer a perspective not found from the paved road, such as this sandy fire road with a carpet of pine needles:

 

 
The air was scented with the heady perfume of pine sap, the sun warmed the woods to a pleasantly warm degree, and birds sang me on my way. I spent half an hour exploring the maze of woods roads before turning back toward the start. As I approached the paved back road which marked the entrance to this piece of public land, I saw this just inside the trail entrance:

 

 
Because this pile of household trash was set back away from the woods road, I didn’t notice it on my way in. The trash was dumped about a pickup truck-length from the trail. I can imagine someone backing in there one night, heaving their garbage out of the bed, and speeding out in a cloud of silt. Ironically, the blue bag is an empty 50-pound sack of black oil sunflower seed. Someone likes feeding the birds but doesn’t like birds well enough not to foul their wild habitat. This pile of crap was a little further back than the other rubbish:

 

 
An old couch cushion, a twisted exhaust from a large truck, a plastic warning barrel used by road crews, trash bags, and miscellaneous scraps of lumber and plywood make up this mess.

The sad thing is that it’s free to use recycling centers in this area. Even the cost of trash haulage is very low. The only conclusion I derive from this befouling of the landscape is that the people who did this are proud of being slobs. Either that, or they enjoy destroying beauty because they’re so devoid of the ability to recognize it that they resent others who can. Until the law has teeth and police are willing to arrest people who see the landscape as their private tip, this sort of antisocial behavior will continue to be common in rural areas.

 
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