With the moon still out and fresh with footprints, we rouse from our beds at the Shady Lawn Motel and are on the road before dawn on this Monday morning, heading for Minnesota. The Impala wagon is butterscotch with a butterscotch interior. Its menacing seat belts are safely tucked in the crevice between the bench seats and the backrests so that no one will be struck by a swinging buckle if Dad has to swerve at eighty miles an hour, which is the speed of traffic on the highway, where the posted limit is seventy-five.
“What’s the best thing to come out of Wisconsin?” Dad asks before answering his own question: “Interstate 94.”
I am bobbing on Mom’s lap in the front seat, so in the event of an accident in these days before the air bag, I will be the thing deployed to save the lives of my mother and unborn sister.
Motorists happily heave their donut bags out their windows on the interstate. Jelly-roll filling spatters the faces of motorcyclists unencumbered by helmets.
We drive, and our windshield wipers sluice off the remains of a paper cup of Tab jettisoned from a tractor-trailer. The median of every American highway is a riot of crushed cans, mateless socks, and windblown burger wrappers. In a single afternoon in the spring of 1970, the Marsh family of Bangor, Wisconsin, will collect 389 pounds of litter along just 4.5 miles of Highway 162 in America’s Dairyland, a haul that includes, by their account, “beer and soft drink containers, old hubcaps, iron bars, plastic bags, and whatnot.”
It’s the “whatnot” that is endlessly diverting on long car trips—the baby buggies and toilet seats and aluminum lawn chairs blown free from roof racks, all the stuff we spy on the side of the road in what will become a game of Garbage Bingo. In 1969, half of all Americans admit to intentionally littering. By one estimate, 20 million pieces of litter are loosed on the streets and sidewalks of America this year, and they consist of almost every conceivable object. In Maryland alone in 1969, an estimated 160,000 abandoned cars litter the countryside.
The most commonly discarded object is the cigarette butt. At a time when smoking is legal in all places, and compulsory in many of them, cigarette butts are ubiquitous. Dad doesn’t smoke, but stewardesses hand him promotional four-packs of cigarettes whenever he boards an airplane. He gives them to a grateful seatmate, who blows the smoke into his face for the duration of the flight. Nobody finds this arrangement the least bit disagreeable. On the contrary, smoking cigarettes is necessary for the production of cigarette butts, our grossest national product, found snuffed out in beach sand, afloat in street gutters, or flicked out car windows and throwing up sparks as they hit the pavement. Our carful of nonsmokers even has armrest ashtrays that somehow smell of cigarettes and polished metal, if I put my nose right into them and draw deeply, which I will later do often.
The ashtrays also smell of ABC gum. “Want some ABC gum?” America’s third-graders are fond of asking each other, my brother Jim included. When one of them replies in the affirmative, their eight-year-old interlocutor will remove a wodge of gum from his mouth and say, “Here—it’s Already Been Chewed.” One will also learn to decline the offer of a Hertz Donut, which consists of a punch to the biceps and a rhetorical question: “Hurts, don’t it?” Nor should we ever say yes when one’s big brother approaches with a deck of cards and says, “Wanna play 52 Pickup?”
And one should never, ever accept the following invitation: “Open your mouth and close your eyes and you will get a big surprise.”
The butts, the cans, the ABC gum—this is the American roadside in 1969. “We are a nation of pigs,” the Roanoke Times editorializes this summer. “And anyone who says it’s not so hasn’t left his house in years.”
In Indiana, two trucks collide on I-65, scattering to the breeze thousands of copies of a forthcoming Playboy centerfold; Miss July 1969, Nancy McNeil, wears little more than a bouffant hairdo and a look of mild astonishment, as if she were just noticing the photographer snapping away as she lounges around the house in the altogether. To any Indiana farm boys downwind of the accident, the naked lady falling from the sky must seem miraculous. A Playboy centerfold is certainly one of the few pieces of litter a citizen will even consider collecting voluntarily in 1969.
“Next time you throw an empty beer can out your car window,” a writer for the Chicago Tribune will admonish readers, “remember it will cost Illinois taxpayers 63 cents to pay for collection crews to pick it up and dispose of it.” In other words, shotgunning a beer while at the wheel of a massive American automobile is fine, in and of itself, so long as you don’t then hand-crank the window down and toss out the empty, which is more costly bereft of beer than when full. Beer, after all, is very nearly free. A six-pack of Ballantine can be had for seventy-nine cents, or thirteen cents a can, half a buck less than it costs taxpayers to retrieve the empty can on its own.
The solution is not to reduce the production of beer and soda cans (by imposing onerous bottle-deposit laws on Big Soda and Big Beer) or to discourage the consumption and concomitant production of cigarettes. Rather, Philip Morris and Coca-Cola, among other companies, fund a nonprofit organization called Keep America Beautiful to urge individual consumers to stop littering. Keep America Beautiful will place the onus of litter squarely on the American consumer, who in turn doesn’t know—and likely won’t care—because the organization will produce a surpassingly effective piece of commercial art and artifice.
Keep America Beautiful commissions a public-service announcement featuring what appears to be an American Indian chief, Iron Eyes Cody, paddling a canoe past belching smokestacks, making landfall on a littered riverbank, then standing beside a highway just as a motorist throws a sackful of fast-food leftovers onto his moccasins. In what Ad Age will later call one of the top one hundred ads of the twentieth century, Cody turns to the camera and sheds a single tear from an iron eye in despair for his native land.