Island friends make amends

The place had been pretty well picked up before we arrived with our garbage bags, gloves, backpacks, binoculars, sweat shirt jackets, and lotions of bug spray and sunblock.

Actually, the early birds had beaten us to the island: the eagles with their nest on a smaller outcropping of ledge nearby; the always-circling ospreys and gulls; the cormorants; the terns; the guillemots; the petrels, falcons and ravens.

Not to mention the machinations of weasels, porcupines, shrews, squirrels, chipmunk or white-footed mice, let alone juncos, nuthatches, chickadees, warblers and finches.

Why, they’d just about scoured the entire island, leaving behind for us scavengers only empty urchin homes that resemble brittle pincushions, occasional periwinkles or bits of clamshell ground fine enough for garden mulch.

At first glance, this part of the park looked pristine; no need for a band of volunteers to tromp across creeping juniper or bunchberry dogwood in search of litter. The damage a dozen and a half people can do to an ecosystem is often greater than their good, no matter how well-intentioned or carefully they proceed to canvass an area.

But there we were, shooting off in different directions like a fireworks display … with the common purpose of ridding unsightly and unnatural debris from a portion of a natural park where sedum fills crevices between rocks and clumps of golden heather are in bloom.

Where Northern bayberry is aromatic and where lichen – in shades of gold and softer teal-colored – cover the granite rocks as if painted on by an artist with a palette difficult to replicate.

Most of us worked quietly as in reverence to the island we cherish – and visit at low tides during summer and fall months when the cobblestones are not slippery with ice and the wind is not brutally cold.

We combed the tide line where in the seaweed or in rocky inlets we indeed plucked plastic soda bottles, nylon rope and styrofoam. You name it: styrofoam parts, pieces, blocks, circles, cups, floats, bubbles; white, colored; bits, whole. Lots of styrofoam. And plastic. Empty motor oil containers and milk bottles, plastic bags, anything lightweight enough to float and be carried like spindrift to the shoreline.

In less than three hours, a group of island friends had piled 20 or so 100-gallon bags of litter on top of two wooden palettes also dragged off the island. Added to that was a tire rolled from the mucky cove where it was mired, more poly-rope, more plastic totes, more rubber gloves or shorn carryalls.

We had tried not to interrupt the “interrupted fern,” nor stomp on the haircap moss or liverworts indigenous to the island. We did not presume to be as welcome on the island as native wildlife.

But we did come as friends. And it was incumbent that we tried to clean up the mess we’ve all made.