HASSO HERING

A perspective from Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley

On Periwinkle Path, a big pile of trash

Written August 29th, 2021 by Hasso Hering

One short segment of the Periwinkle Bike Path looked like this on Sunday.

On Facebook last week, someone posted photos of a mess on the Periwinkle Bike Path in Albany. The mess was still there Sunday afternoon, when I went to take a look.

If you have a couple of minutes, you can follow my short look-see ride on the video below:

If you watched it, you saw that the mound of bike parts and assorted other items had been piled up along the side of the newest part of the path, the one constructed after Lowe’s built its home improvement center at Ninth and Oak in 2015.

When I went by there Sunday, another man had had just arrived on his bicycle. I asked him if the stuff piled there was his, and he said no, it was not. But he told me he planned to get the site cleaned up, so I should come back in a week and take another photo.

I didn’t hear or understand everything he said, but if he does intend to work on clearing the spot, I don’t know where he intends to take all that discarded stuff.

Scenes like this might be an argument against building any more off-street paths until vagrancy is no longer much of an issue. Why provide vagrants with an easily accessible place to mess up with their leavings?

But this particular mound of trash is not typical of conditions along Periwinkle Creek or Albany’s other off-street paths. On Sunday, the rest of the Periwinkle Path from Ninth to Queen Avenue was perfectly clean. All previous evidence of vagrancy or camp sites along the path and the creek was gone. (hh)





4 responses to “On Periwinkle Path, a big pile of trash”

  1. Gordon L. Shadle says:

    What’s the big deal?

    Government is obligated to give me everything I want and take care of all my needs. So it’s government’s responsibility to clean up my messes. It’s for the common good.

    The least they should do is put a garbage can at this location and empty it regularly. And if I happen to miss the can, pick up after me to keep the space neat and tidy.

  2. Bill Kapaun says:

    They clean this spot up and in a matter of 2-3 days, it’s trashed again. There had to be parts from at least 10 bicycles there when I rode through last week. That makes one wonder WHERE are they getting these bicycles from???

 

 
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