By Larry Felton Johnson

[Editor’s note: be sure to watch the video at the bottom of the article]

As I mentioned in a previous From the Editor column, I’ve returned to my practice of taking very long walks (very long in my case meaning four to seven miles).

My immediate motivation was a commitment to myself that I’d get back to my weight of my mid-20s (about fifty years ago). That would put me at 167 pounds, and I have about 14 pounds to go.

A good byproduct of these walks, though, is that walking puts me in connection with the surrounding in a way that driving never can. In walking, I am closer to the ground, and moving slowly enough to take in the environment.

For three of the past five days my walk has been to Nickajack Park. The round trip plus the walking I’ve done in the park amounts to about 4.25 miles on each trip (6.84 km) according to my GPS tracking app.

So it’s a pretty good workout.

But it also allowed me to scope out the aftermath of the flooding from Helene on Nickajack Creek adjacent to the park. While our metro area was spared the deadliest and most catastrophic effects of the storm, the cleanup from the flooding will be a long-term project.

The bridge that caught the trash pile

A bridge is near the tennis court on the park’s southwest side. The bridge needs some maintenance (the planks are rotting), but it’s a very attractive bridge, similar to the bridge over this same creek in Heritage Park:

Here’s a screenshot of the park boundaries from OpenStreetMaps. The bridge is visible as a narrow rectangle across the creek on the northwest corner, due south of Lindley Sixth Grade Academy and just north of tennis, basketball and pickleball courts.

Helene caused the creek to flow to the top of its banks, pushing a mountain of fast food containers, plastic straws, cigarette butts, plastic bottles, and other litter, along with a large tangle of limbs, vines, leaves, and other plant matter against the bridge.

Luckily for the portions downstream, the bridge caught the bulk of the trash, but the view upstream from the bridge is awful (the photos below don’t even do it justice. The tangle of limbs is saturated with litter).

On my second walk to the park, I took a contractor bag, gloves, and trash pickup claw. I filled the contractor bag with litter along Oakdale and Nickajack Park roads on my way to the park and dumped the first bagful into one of the trash barrels in the park (sorry, Cobb PARKS, but it was for a good cause and made the approach to the park much better looking).

These tools were inadequate for tackling the creek’s trash pile for reasons I explain in the short video below. The short version is that the sandy bank of the creek looked like a mudslide waiting to happen, and to clean up the area safely, wader boots and entering the creek from a safer place further upstream would be required.

I made good use of the trash claw and bag, though, and filled two complete trash bags on both legs of the round-trip with litter that accumulated along Oakdale Road and Nickajack Park Road.

Here’s a short video of my examination of the bridge and the trash.