Keeping it Clean! - SFCC Spring Highway Clean-up

5/28/24

2024 Spring Adopt-A-Highway Report

South Dakota must have more nice days than bad. The weather once again delivered a beautiful day for a walk in the ditch. The date of May 4th was announced at the April membership meeting. Being eleven days out, the weather was an unknown. My weather app told me 5 days out that the rain and clouds where moving out Friday night and Saturday would be beautiful,…and darned if it wasn’t right! We live in amazing times.

Light jackets and yellow safety vests was the fashion for those gathering in Dareo’s Pizza’s parking lot. Waivers were signed, North and South teams picked, and the rules were reviewed. No getting wet! Those aluminum cans in the puddle will be just fine where they are until the next cleaning. You can keep anything you find. If it is biodegradable, leave it be!

Eleven of us took three vehicles down to our ditches. We got in some exercise with a one mile walk, checked off our good deed daily requirement, beautified four miles of ditch, bullshitted with friends old and new, and got free pizza when we were done. This Adopt-A-Highway thing sort of sells itself. 

Mike Skiles was our finder keeper this Spring. Two pairs of safety glasses and a rubber tie down strap with the metal hooks! Mike most famously won this award a few years back when he found a plastic battery box cover out of someone’s boat and announced, “You know you can’t buy just the cover!” Well now Mike’s boat has a battery box cover, the cover is out of our ditch, and somewhere, someone is finding out, “Hey, you can’t buy just the cover!”

Comments were made about the evolution of the trash we are collecting. Twenty years ago it was fast food wrappers, beer bottles, and empty cigarette packs. Now it’s 1 ounce and half pint liquor bottles, condoms, and vape cartridges. In writing this I also realized that 20 years ago we were 10 miles further out of town!

Thanks to the Club for buying lunch. Thanks to C & R Supply for letting us dump our trash in their dumpsters. Thanks to Kathy Miller, Mary Buri, and Mike Skiles for chauffeuring everyone back and forth to our ditches. The other members of the yellow vest team were: Dusty Miller, Lori Dyke, Paul Dyke, Barney Roling, Steve Johnson, Deb Johnson, Greg Johnson, and Cheri Beyer.

It wouldn’t be a party if no one came.

Respectfully submitted,

Dusty Miller