At 5 a.m. on Aug. 16 I was fighting off sleep wondering why in the world I’d volunteered to drive to New Brunswick to pick up trash. Spending the first two days of my vacation in a foreign country seemed like a good idea when I first considered it, but in the fog of early morning I was having second thoughts.

But I had committed to the trip, and Dave Morrill of Orrington, one of my paddling/island cleanup buddies, was going to be waiting for my headlights to be headed down his driveway any minute.

Morrill and his wife, Deb, are active members of the Maine Island Trail Association, who volunteer along with many others each year to help with the annual spring and fall cleanup on the roughly 100 islands in the water trail.

The concept of getting volunteers to pick up trash and act as stewards for both public and privately owned islands is one MITA has fostered and exploited for 10 or so years, and now the Nature Trust of New Brunswick has adopted the practice. There are nine New Brunswick islands that have been added onto the Maine Island Trail. They are privately owned but are under conservation easements with the Nature Trust of New Brunswick.

This is the second year the trust has organized cleanups thanks in a large part to MITA’s influence, said Margo Sheppard, executive director of the Nature Trust of New Brunswick.

“They certainly gave us the courage to tackle the cleanup this year by coming up last summer and taking charge of things. We copied many of their tactics – after all, they are the pros – and we did it successfully I think, ” Sheppart said.

The Morrills told me about last year’s cleanup and suggested that it would be a great trip this year and an even better experience. When Deb couldn’t go on this year’s outing, she offered her spot to me.

It all sounded idyllic until I realized that we’d have to leave in the middle of the night to get to the Deer Island Ferry landing at L’Etete, New Brunswick, at 10 a.m. (Atlantic Daylight Time) to meet up with the 21 other volunteers who were signed up for the cleanup.

Things didn’t look promising for our rendezvous along about the time we got east of Amherst and the fog settled over us like the wet blanket it had been for the previous two weeks. A parade scheduled for later in the morning in Calais had that city’s main drag sealed off at 8 a.m. and the border agents in Canada couldn’t quite figure out how to deal with us. We had to pull over and visit the Customs and Immigrations folks and explain (for the second and third time) we were doing volunteer work (no, we were not getting paid) to clean up trash from some New Brunswick islands (no, there was no money involved, we were volunteering). It was a concept that was foreign to them, I guess. We simply should have said we were going camping (which was true) and left it at that.

We got though to them eventually and we were on our way eastward along New Brunswick’s Route 1, headed for the eastern side of Passamaquoddy Bay.

At St. George we left the main drag and wended our way down Route 172 to L’Etete where the Deer Island ferry docks. We were early enough to meet some of the other volunteers, including Jon and Charlotte Lawton of Orrington (their second New Brunswick island cleanup), Sheppard, and Andrea Brewer, an assistant with the trust. They briefed the gang on the day’s plans and pointed out our ride for the day.

Tied to the dock was the 75-foot motorized salmon barge “Double Barrel” donated for the weekend by Heritage Salmon Ltd. of Blacks Harbor, New Brunswick, complete with skippers Dale and Preston Hooper and their crew of three. Heritage also threw in a launch (as well as a lunch) so we could get to and from shore. Sheppard later told me that vice president of Heritage Salmon, Ken Hirtle, is very supportive of environmental causes in New Brunswick. He served on the provincial round table on environment and economy and is on the Nature Trust of New Brunswick’s board of trustees.

Among the 21 other volunteers was Peter Wilson, from Cambridge, Mass., who owns Barnes Island, one of the islands under a conservation easement held by the Nature Trust. Wilson and his wife, Susan Lapides, were our hosts for the weekend. Their lovely summer home, located just a stone’s throw from the ferry landing, was opened up for a dining hall for friends and the five of us who camped on their bayside property Saturday night.

After assembling clothing and plastic bags for the day’s cleanup, we boarded the launch. Our intrepid gang huddled on deck, swathed in fog, as “Double Barrel” churned its way through the swirling currents to Barnes Island. After passing through great rafts of floating seaweed peppered with debris we caught a glimpse of Barnes through striated fog, its subtle purple and green ledges rising out of the mist. Off shore, beyond the ledges, half of our raiding party scrambled onto the launch and headed to shore under the watchful eye of a harbor seal. Shortly afterward, the rest of us were shuttled to nearby Mowatt Island.

The plan was to gather trash until lunchtime and then head back to Barnes were we’d eat. Our party dragged fishing ropes, polystyrene foam, barrels, a lobster trap, bleach bottles and oil containers, cups and plastic of all sorts to the shore where we could load it aboard the launch. I opted not to pick up the dead seal I stumbled across next to a beached and abandoned salmon pen. Our haul amounted to a couple of launch-fulls from two beaches.

Back on Barnes we lunched, then launched an all-out attack on a couple of south facing beaches. The debris was amazing. There was so much wood debris that we opted not to pick it up. There even was one bicycle (minus it’s front wheel) a couple of barrels and one huge plastic float cube (about 5 feet on a side). It took three launch trips to haul debris to the barge where it was packaged in huge plastic bags.

And so it went through the afternoon. We formed long lines and passed bagged debris over the slippery seaweed to the launch. Around 4 p.m. we quit to return to the ferry landing and unload our booty. The barge’s crane came in handy because the 25-foot tides put us yards below the dock. Between Saturday and Sunday’s efforts the volunteers had managed to fill a huge metal trash container with 3,526 pounds of trash and debris! While it sounds like a lot (it was) the discouraging part is that there was probably 10 times that in uncollected lumber that had washed up.

On Saturday evening, our trash neatly stowed, we turned our attention to setting up camp at Wilson’s summer home. We had many acres, all with an ocean view, to consider. Then it was “Miller time,” social hour and chow time. There was enough food for Cox’s Army (Heritage Salmon donated burgers – the beef kind – and buns), and everyone brought something for the table. Wilson furnished a pile of pies for dessert. We all waddled away unable to eat the table clean.

The extra food and a few drinks helped a little in the sleep department. I think I got a few winks in between the fog horn just up the bay, Morrill’s contented snoring and the armada of mosquitoes trying to get through the netting next to my head.

Sunday, after a generous breakfast at the Wilson’s, we headed back to Barnes to scour a few more of the large island’s beaches. The results were similar to Saturday’s. Several of us wound up crawling up under overgrown spruce-covered banks to fetch bags of empty bottles, cans, foam plates and cups. And there was the usual bounty of ropes and line associated with fishing. The most discouraging event of the day was returning to a beach we’d all thoroughly cleaned to find at least three newly washed-up plastic jugs!

They were added to the day’s haul which finished filling the huge refuse container back at shore to overflowing.

Our return trip across the border, by the way, went without incident. We chatted with the U.S. Customs officer for a few minutes and he sent us on our way, saying he wished MITA would send a crew out to clean up St. Croix Island.

Jeff Strout can be reached at 990-8202 or by e-mail at jstrout@bangordailynews.net.