The Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) is a voracious eater. It is a grazing animal which brazenly gathers en masse to do three things: eat, complain, and relieve itself. The Canada Goose is paranoid, convinced there are hungry predators lurking in the tall grass waiting to devour it. Thus, it primarily restricts its movements to manicured lawns and wide open spaces. They honk at each other incessantly, spend the entire day eating and leave prolific amounts of filth in their wake … sort of like the patrons of Swartswood State Park.
Unlike park patrons, the geese leave behind only their scat. These are small, green pellets about the size and shape of a packing peanut. They’re whitish on the ends, consist mostly of digested grass, and change from sticky to dry and brittle as they age. Prior to being a teenage garbage man, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you any of that, but time working for the state has a way of providing interesting life skills.
For each of the four summers spent working at Swartswood, the first day was always the same. We’d gather in the maintenance building lunchroom for an orientation from Doug, the aging park superintendent. Sounding like Bob Newhart, he’d slowly review rules and regulations, procedures and policies, then hand out copies of the State Park Seasonal Employee Handbook, or "Trash-Picker’s Bible." The TPB was our list of do’s and don’t-get-caughts, and contained a special appendix listing hazardous items we were never to touch. Among these were body parts, dead animals, and most importantly, fecal matter. We were never supposed to touch fecal matter, even if it offered us a quarter to rub its feet.
Scat was off-limits to us garbage pickers, and was only to be handled by the maintenance crews. They had fancy latex gloves and carried bleach, and we were glad to let them do it. We watched the maintenance crews pick up after little kids who couldn’t make it from the beach to the bathhouse, and bigger kids who just didn’t want to walk that far. We watched maintenance crews clean unspeakable things out of water fountains after disgruntled campers were told they couldn’t park six Camaros in one camp site. We even watched them repeatedly scrape clean the pit toilet lids after my friend Carl began a "Phantom Dumper" campaign while on daily litter patrol.
All of that changed when the old park super retired at the beginning of my fourth summer, and Big Stan arrived. Noble, honest, physically fit, clever and likeable, fashionable in a well-fitting uniform—none of these terms accurately described the new superintendent. The only thing he was super at was straining the buttons on his brown state-issue uniform. To our horror, his first act of duty was to wage war on the geese, enlisting our garbage picker crews as his foot soldiers.
Big Stan’s war on the geese began after putting himself in the shoes of the average park visitor, and finding the soles of those shoes covered in poo. He knew that when a guest arrived for a day at the beach, that patron would first pay an entry fee at the gate house, then drive their IROC-Z through a large open lawn often filled with geese. They would park on the acres of hot asphalt, and upon approaching the bathhouse, realize their way was blocked by an army of little green men. Lot, lawn, and beach–even the concrete area under the bathhouse breezeway–it was all occupied territory.
We quickly learned that while our handbook specifically forbid our crews from coming into contact with fecal matter, in Big Stan’s eyes, the geese were chronic litterbugs and not just poorly housetrained. "Stay out of this, kid," he said, pushing me and my copy of the handbook aside, "You’ll pick it up, or you’ll be out of a job." So we picked it up. We used snow shovels and filled garbage bags. We used little brooms and tip-over dust pans. We used long aluminum pickers, and we used our imaginations to make games out of it.
"Hey! These little green men are having a picnic..." as we stacked them in neat piles on each long wooden picnic table. "Check out how many little green men are on the roof of the bathhouse..." as we launched them by the dozen onto the brand-new facility. "Little green men sure like the beach..." as we buried them in shallow graves. With our snow shovels, we excavated quick holes where footpaths ended at the beach, then backfilled them with poo before covering them with a thin layer of sand. It wasn’t really fair to those who got green ankles, but Big Stan had said "pick it up" and never specified where to put it down.
Little green men began to appear everywhere. They liked to play in the water fountains, hide in park vehicle glove boxes, and even in the lunchroom microwave. We played spirited games of lacrosse using our little brooms as sticks. We played baseball, using our pickers as bats. Bags of them made fabulous parting gifts, as Big Stan would learn later that year.
Big Stan’s thank you note arrived on October 7th, exactly 5 days after discovering my other going away present. I had returned to Meraki College at the end of August, but before leaving, had posted a small pencil drawing commemorating him as the new park superintendent. It depicted a balding man with bulging buttons and a name tag that read "S. EMMETS" storming the beach, ordering his troops to "Pick up those feces...er...I mean, that LITTER!" while trash pickers threw gobs of the stuff in the background, and it had been carefully glued to the October section of the lunchroom calendar by a pair of little green men.
Unlike park patrons, the geese leave behind only their scat. These are small, green pellets about the size and shape of a packing peanut. They’re whitish on the ends, consist mostly of digested grass, and change from sticky to dry and brittle as they age. Prior to being a teenage garbage man, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you any of that, but time working for the state has a way of providing interesting life skills.
For each of the four summers spent working at Swartswood, the first day was always the same. We’d gather in the maintenance building lunchroom for an orientation from Doug, the aging park superintendent. Sounding like Bob Newhart, he’d slowly review rules and regulations, procedures and policies, then hand out copies of the State Park Seasonal Employee Handbook, or "Trash-Picker’s Bible." The TPB was our list of do’s and don’t-get-caughts, and contained a special appendix listing hazardous items we were never to touch. Among these were body parts, dead animals, and most importantly, fecal matter. We were never supposed to touch fecal matter, even if it offered us a quarter to rub its feet.
Scat was off-limits to us garbage pickers, and was only to be handled by the maintenance crews. They had fancy latex gloves and carried bleach, and we were glad to let them do it. We watched the maintenance crews pick up after little kids who couldn’t make it from the beach to the bathhouse, and bigger kids who just didn’t want to walk that far. We watched maintenance crews clean unspeakable things out of water fountains after disgruntled campers were told they couldn’t park six Camaros in one camp site. We even watched them repeatedly scrape clean the pit toilet lids after my friend Carl began a "Phantom Dumper" campaign while on daily litter patrol.
All of that changed when the old park super retired at the beginning of my fourth summer, and Big Stan arrived. Noble, honest, physically fit, clever and likeable, fashionable in a well-fitting uniform—none of these terms accurately described the new superintendent. The only thing he was super at was straining the buttons on his brown state-issue uniform. To our horror, his first act of duty was to wage war on the geese, enlisting our garbage picker crews as his foot soldiers.
Big Stan’s war on the geese began after putting himself in the shoes of the average park visitor, and finding the soles of those shoes covered in poo. He knew that when a guest arrived for a day at the beach, that patron would first pay an entry fee at the gate house, then drive their IROC-Z through a large open lawn often filled with geese. They would park on the acres of hot asphalt, and upon approaching the bathhouse, realize their way was blocked by an army of little green men. Lot, lawn, and beach–even the concrete area under the bathhouse breezeway–it was all occupied territory.
We quickly learned that while our handbook specifically forbid our crews from coming into contact with fecal matter, in Big Stan’s eyes, the geese were chronic litterbugs and not just poorly housetrained. "Stay out of this, kid," he said, pushing me and my copy of the handbook aside, "You’ll pick it up, or you’ll be out of a job." So we picked it up. We used snow shovels and filled garbage bags. We used little brooms and tip-over dust pans. We used long aluminum pickers, and we used our imaginations to make games out of it.
"Hey! These little green men are having a picnic..." as we stacked them in neat piles on each long wooden picnic table. "Check out how many little green men are on the roof of the bathhouse..." as we launched them by the dozen onto the brand-new facility. "Little green men sure like the beach..." as we buried them in shallow graves. With our snow shovels, we excavated quick holes where footpaths ended at the beach, then backfilled them with poo before covering them with a thin layer of sand. It wasn’t really fair to those who got green ankles, but Big Stan had said "pick it up" and never specified where to put it down.
Little green men began to appear everywhere. They liked to play in the water fountains, hide in park vehicle glove boxes, and even in the lunchroom microwave. We played spirited games of lacrosse using our little brooms as sticks. We played baseball, using our pickers as bats. Bags of them made fabulous parting gifts, as Big Stan would learn later that year.
Big Stan’s thank you note arrived on October 7th, exactly 5 days after discovering my other going away present. I had returned to Meraki College at the end of August, but before leaving, had posted a small pencil drawing commemorating him as the new park superintendent. It depicted a balding man with bulging buttons and a name tag that read "S. EMMETS" storming the beach, ordering his troops to "Pick up those feces...er...I mean, that LITTER!" while trash pickers threw gobs of the stuff in the background, and it had been carefully glued to the October section of the lunchroom calendar by a pair of little green men.
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