Hansel and Gretel had bread crumbs, Dorothy walked the yellow brick road, and American Folk Festival-goers had only to follow the trail of napkins, paper plates, cups and other debris on the ground to find their way this weekend to food vendors and stage areas.

But by Sunday morning, trash that had been littering the ground when the crowds dispersed Saturday night was just a memory.

The 93 portable toilets belonging to Blow Bros. of Old Orchard Beach also were emptied and cleaned in the wee morning hours.

“This is not our normal job,” Wayne Winn, who runs the company’s septic division, said early Sunday morning as he and two others worked to finish cleaning the portable toilets. “It gets us out. It’s something different.”

It’s hard to imagine cleaning toilets as fun work, but Winn, Derek Brichetto and Seth Watson weren’t complaining as they vacuumed waste from the toilets into their tank truck, then cleaned and wiped down each unit.

The process takes three or four hours, and is done three times during the festival.

There was no mistaking who Winn represented in his gray T-shirt stamped with the company’s slogan: “We’re #1 in the #2 business.”

“Super Potty Man,” wielding a roll of toilet paper, was printed on the back of the T-shirt.

The guys’ sense of humor goes beyond their motto and company apparel.

As Brichetto opened the door to a lone portable toilet and leaned to pour in the bright blue sanitizing liquid, he made sure to keep one foot firmly planted on the ground outside.

Winn, illustrating his technique, walked behind the portable unit and showed that it’s harder for someone to pull the classic prank of tipping you over if you’ve still got a foot outside.

“I’ve been under a couple toilets,” Brichetto said with a grin.

The most frequently used toilets, it turns out, are located near the entrance, while staff toilets are the cleanest, according to Winn.

Although the workers try to keep each unit stocked with Purell hand sanitizer and toilet paper, it’s an impossible task.

“The toilet paper, it’s like water,” Winn said. “They use so much toilet paper it’s not even funny.”

He also said that many people use the restrooms as garbage cans – proof of which could be seen in the beer and soda cans and bottles left behind in the portable toilets near the festival entrance.

To handle the large amounts of garbage left behind – a grand total of 11.5 tons last year – Bangor Public Works and Parks and Recreation Department employees are on hand throughout the weekend.

But it’s what happens overnight that’s especially impressive.

The graveyard shift (11 p.m. to 8 a.m.) workers strap on leaf blowers that look like jet propulsion packs, hand-pick trash off the ground, empty all the garbage cans and sweep the streets to prepare for another day of music and dancing.

“During the festival, at all times I have eight people that are pulling trash bags and putting new ones in and cleaning up any mess there might be,” Public Works Director Dana Wardwell said last week. “We try to stay right on them and empty them as soon as they fill up so they’re not overflowing.”

That can be a difficult task when there are 175 55-gallon drums to be emptied throughout the festival grounds.

The crews do their best to keep up, but some areas, such as the beer tents, are hard to stay on top of.

Steve Smith, who has worked the overnight shift, headed up the team Saturday to make sure everything was ready to roll Sunday afternoon.

At about 11:30 p.m., Stan Grass and Jeff Bragg began picking larger items, such as cups and plates, off the ground at the Kenduskeag Dance Stage, which along with the beer tents generally is one of the dirtiest areas.

Throughout the waterfront area, items such as a grocery list, lawn chair, a full pack of Marlboro menthol cigarettes, one child-size, pink-and-white sneaker, a red Maine hat, and a water bottle with the name Mrs. Fisk written on it had been left behind.

But by daybreak, all the garbage had been picked up and hauled away to be compacted and taken by Evergreen Waste Systems of Bangor to the Penobscot Energy Recovery Co. waste-to-energy plant in Orrington.

The streets were swept, the grounds picked up, and the night crew was ready to head home.

“We finish up around 6:30 or 7 in the morning and then take a sweep back through after the sun comes up to see what we might have missed,” Smith said.

Keeping it clean

. 11.5 tons of garbage last year

. 175 55-gallon garbage cans on festival grounds

. 8 city employees work 8-hour clean-up shifts throughout the festival

. 93 portable toilets are emptied three times

. 3,000 gallons of waste is pumped from portable toilets