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By EUGENE J. McCARTHY
Rappahannock Newt Gueit Columniat
In recent years the three-mile stretch of Rt. 618 from the site of the old Land’s Mill to the Hazel River was possibly the best kept, litter-free stretch of road in Virginia, principally, almost exclusively, because of the care and attention given to it by Hoppy Hopkins, a retired or semi-retired professor and his wife, Jane.
This summer, because of illness, Hoppy has not been able to come up from Norfolk. Both the litter along the road and the increase in the ground-hog population, testify to his absence. For along with his concern over litter, Hoppy is an unrelenting ground-hog hunter.
I and other neighbors have begun to note the slowly accumulating litter, and, out of concern for the beauty of the road, and also because of guilt over having neglected a duty which we had come to leave to Hoppy and Jane, we have even begun to talk about doing something about it. We have postponed our undertaking, waiting for the honeysuckle to recede a little, and especially for the poison ivy to die. Meanwhile, we have conducted an objective, socio-psychological survey of the litter.
First, we noted that the traffic on the road is relatively light, and we assume that the vehicles are driven by persons who know where they are and where they are going.
We have not yet checked our findings with Hoppy, and are not sure whether or not he kept statistical records. If he has, we may be able to point out the beginning of a trend in Route 618 litter patterns.
We acknowledge that these figures are somewhat tentative, in that some of the litter items undoubtedly are still concealed by honeysuckle, poison ivy, ferns and other plant growth, and that later figures will be more accurate. We submit our findings as within the range of about 4 percent margin of error, one that seems to be the standard for television network projections.
Our first significant observation was that at the extremes of the range of drink containers, we found only one brandy bottle and one milk carton. The heavier concentrations, or number of litter items, range from beer to diet drinks.
By a clear margin, the m^jor litterer was the Budweiser beer drinker, casting both bottles and cans at the roadside. Not only do the Bud containers outnumber any other single brand of cast-off containers, but outnumber all other
84.4%