FAYETTEVILLE — After seeing trash tossed to the roadside time and time again on his daily walks, one Fayetteville man decided to make a habit of actively cleaning up all the litter in his path.
Before retiring, Hugh Gunnison worked with two-way radios and passive filter products, spending a total of 32 years as a bench technician for United Radio. Nowadays, though, you’re likely to find him with the handy reacher grabber tool he received for Christmas in 2023 that he uses to pick up everything from banana peels to pieces of styrofoam.
On his walks from the Crystal Tree Apartments where he resides to the East Genesee Street Circle K and back, Gunnison also tends to come across discarded beverage bottles and cans, cotton swabs, emptied condiment packets, and candy wrappers, as well as certain “strange, unexpected things” like a stray lottery ticket or a dirt-covered State Fair wristband.
The bane of Gunnison’s existence as a trash collector, however, would have to be the cigarette butts he finds by the dozens in a given day, which “take the cake” by sheer numbers, he said.
All year long, and with gloves and a mesh safety vest on, the 74-year-old walks that same stretch of road almost every single day, the main exceptions being when it’s thunderstorming or subzero temperatures outside.
It comes out to about a mile and a quarter one way, and it takes him about an hour or longer to trek to the gas station and back altogether when factoring in the task of trash pickup.
Despite needing to sometimes climb over the guardrail to retrieve refuse while also keeping an eye and an ear out for passing vehicles, Gunnison said he stays careful and “doesn’t go overdoing it” on the wish of his wife of 50 years, Diane, but that there’s thankfully a wide enough shoulder on the straightaway.
At this point, he said it’s become almost entertaining in a sense to spot the variety of rubbish, which in his words is “half the battle,” and he finds added enjoyment in chatting it up with other walkers, enlisting the help of friends willing to volunteer with him, and taking in the fresh air on an otherwise calming walk.
Gunnison said if there’s one certainty, it’s that there will always be bits of garbage scattered about no matter what with every new morning, all of it adding up little by little.
At the end of his walks, the bucket he uses as a temporary trash receptacle before heading over to the Town of Manlius Highway Department dumpster is usually filled right to the brim, sometimes overflowing.
“My philosophy is that you can curse the dark or you can light a candle,” Gunnison said. “This is my way of lighting the candle.”
Even if Gunnison can’t get all the ever-accumulating garbage and the guaranteed sight of it becomes discouraging, the day’s work he puts in is at the very least a drop in the bucket, he said. Plus, as he’s learned, there’s always another day ahead when he’ll be back at it again.
In the meantime, if people driving by see him out and about cleaning his section of the community, he encourages them to honk their horns and give him a wave.
