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The Can-Counter

There is a deeply worrisome existential question about a weighty problem that has continued to dog me from my childhood. It stems from a bedtime story that my father mysteriously labelled an Aesop Fable (even though I later learned it wasn’t). The reading ended with a question, that troubled me: Who will Bell the Cat? I remember wondering with all the logical positivism a five year old could muster, why if there was a perfectly reasonable solution to a problem, nobody would volunteer.

Nowadays, as suits the wisdom accrued through a busy life, I have adapted the conundrum into a modern, albeit more prosaic version: who will recycle their cans? I mean everybody claims to want to, but like cat belling, so often it’s all talk and no do.

I’d like to think I am on the cutting edge of the issue now though, and that long after I myself have been recycled, I will be remembered for my work in exposing the pretend side of green: the out-of-sight, out-of-mind side. So as befits my age, I am now a counter of cans.

I walk the roads at home and abroad counting what many choose to ignore in the ditches: the beer cans -although I usually include the often more brightly coloured soft drink cans just to be fair.

I am by nature a modest creature, but I hope I am making a difference. I once heard myself sarcastically referred to as a Magister Ludi of cans, but it’s usually not worth the effort to transliterate that title for those who are not au fait with the works of Hermann Hesse; I am for them, despite the sniggers when I mention my avocation with an earnest face, just an eccentric but otherwise ordinary can counter.

Several years ago and with a nod to Canadian foreign policy, I figured I would expand my work overseas -to Fiordland, in New Zealand, in fact. I think it’s always helpful to understand how other cultures deal with their recyclables. In keeping with that, I was staying in repurposed railway station in a tiny little village there, and on a charitable whim, decided to can-count along a nearby gravel bike path that travelled beside the highway. It was an open-ended challenge to be sure, but I’ve never been one to shy away from an ecologically important investigation just because the road was long.

My methodology is predictably digital -which is to say I count on my fingers to remember the number of cans. Of course the problem starts when I get to ten, but I solved that long ago by putting a stone in my pocket for every ten cans each time I ran out of fingers. The count, of necessity, was monolithic however -it only allowed for cans. Not bottles. Not plastic straws or MacDonald wrappers… It was predicated on a single entity: cans. New Zealand, perhaps like the other inappropriately-named Five Eye nations to which it belongs, seems blind to its people throwing a wide selection of cans into their roadside ditches. I had to adapt by confining beer can stone-counts to my left hand pocket and soft drink ones to my right, even though after a while my pockets became heavy and rattled when I walked. You have to learn to adjust to these hardships, though; a Magister Ludi designation is, as you might imagine, a hardscrabble work in progress; I don’t think it is genetically aided.

Once the savvy counter catches onto it, though, other phyla emerge from a close scrutiny of the ditch: biological items like the occasional bird whose owner has long since departed for a better place; or the metallic detrita of a disintegrating truck, the sundry food wrappers mysteriously sucked from the open windows of a passing car; or, on one particularly arresting occasion, a little brown cuddly teddy bear with a missing ear and one button eye hanging by a thread.

So many stories in a New Zealand ditch… but I digress; I am only a can specialist.

Early in my count, I noticed an anonymous metal can almost completely buried near the path -something which, in a different country, might have worried me. But with only sheep and grass in the adjacent field, I assumed it wouldn’t have been a cost-efficient use of terrorist resources. So, I threw caution to the wind and risked a gentle kick to nudge it into the ditch in hopes of frightening whatever was hiding there to come out of camouflage with their labels up. A few curious birds immediately flew over to see if I had been scattering food for them, but then, evidently disappointed at my insensitivity, they carried on with their day jobs.

Across the road, several glassy-eyed cows studied me for a moment, mildly curious, and then turned their mindless attentions to something else; sheep in the field beside me ran away to a safe distance, and eventually realizing they were still alive, turned to watch what I’d do next -nothing interesting as it turned out. In fact, I think I let down both sides, because, already pocket-full, I couldn’t definitely ID the can so I moved on.

But I am only human, and eventually fatigue started to dim my senses and my count. When I realized the road was heading for a horizon I was never meant to reach, I began to see the whole of the day’s endeavour as simply a game  between different teams.

For the first kilometre or so, beer cans had outnumbered soft drink cans by a factor of ten to one, and I imagined they were probably from day-labourers who were decompressing after a day spent labouring in paradise; whereas at about kilometre seven, the sugar squad seemed to make its move, and almost tied the score.

The suspense was what kept me going -I mean, you don’t leave a hockey game in the last period, do you? Anyway, in the final stretch where it really matters, the cola team -my favourite by now- started to lag behind and eventually lost the game by a significant 1:2 ratio.

I don’t know why that disappointed me, but it did. I know I shouldn’t take sides; it’s not scientific but I couldn’t help but pull for the underdog. They’d given it all they’d had until, fatigued like me, they’d faded at the end. Still, a more tawdry realization began to dawn on me: both the beer and soft drinks cans had sold their souls, to the allure of easy disposability; ditch things had devolved into little more than aluminum, and I worried about it.

It’s a sad thing to attempt a paradigm shift to an entirely different way of life but I’m pretty sure the future is going to be in paper cans, which once emptied, could hang like tinsel from low lying branches or be crushed and recycled into paper towels. Compostable seaweed cans are also an exciting prospect… And yet, even though I’m a well-regarded can Magister now, I’d still like to think of myself as adaptable. The future beckons!

I’ll probably need to retrain, though…

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