Recordpub.com - A calling to clean up litter

By Deborah Guziak

Record-Courier staff writer

SUFFIELD -- A suitcase filled with cat litter. Two guinea pigs. A gas tank. A refrigerator filled with thousands of field mice.

These are just a few of the things resident Vicki Vincent finds on her thrice-a-week walks with her dog, Ashley, on Wingfoot Road.

With plastic grocery bags in her hands, Vincent stops to pick up every piece of trash -- down to the last gum wrapper.

"This is our home, and we need to take care of it," she said, adding that the sight of litter on the quiet road bothers her.

A cat named Hope started Vincent on her trash-cleaning endeavor about 17 months ago. A gray and white cat, Hope lives on a farm on Wingfoot Road. Hope's owners had taken the kitten from Vincent after Vincent had received the kitten from another farm. After Vincent had gotten the kitten medical care, she found it a home. Today, Hope lives in a barn and earns her keep by chasing birds out of the barn.

Visiting Hope is a stop on her walk. Vincent brings the cat a treat as well as a treat for Hope's close friend, the family dog. Both show excitement when Vincent visits. After some petting, Vincent says goodbye to the dog and cat, and she and Ashley go on their way.

There are about seven homes and the Goodyear Blimp Base on the four-mile stretch of road. Although the road is somewhat desolate, it is a popular road to cut through, and apparently, there are regulars who travel the road.

Vincent has names for them based on what they pitch out of their cars' windows. There's the lottery person; the Canadian Molson and Busch people and the Wild Irish Rose person. She repeatedly finds the remains of these items along the road.

"The lottery person rips the cards into pieces and then throws them out the window," she said, saying the person spends $20 to $30 a week on the lottery. The beer drinkers drink more than one beer on their trek down the road.

There are numerous people who dump their trash alongside the road, and it's not restricted to bottles, cans and paper. Vincent also has pulled tires, a gas tank, carpet tiles, motorcycle helmet and lots of other large items from spots beyond the road.

One of those items was a suitcase filled with kitty litter, another a refrigerator. She knew of someone who would want the refrigerator for scrap, so she called him.

"When he opened the door, thousands of field mice came out of it," she said. Vincent said she's not scared of mice, but would have been taken aback by all the mice running out of the refrigerator.

One day in January when the temperature dipped to the mid-20s, she came across a small box. Inside the box were two Guinea pigs.

"They were huddled together," Vincent said. "In the box with them was a soaking wet towel and a little food that looked really old."

She immediately called the Animal Protective League, but they wouldn't come for the tiny animals.

"I called from along the roadway because I thought if I took them home and called, they'd think they were mine and that I was trying to get rid of them," she said.

She took them home, tended to their needs and started making calls to find them a home. On the fifth call, a pet store at Chapel Hill Mall in Akron took them. A day after the store took them, one of them had gone home with a new owner.

Another time, she found 35 dead fish at the railroad tracks. There was nothing she could do with them, and the county wouldn't come out and remove them.

"The smell was terrible for two, three days," she said.

Her trash removal doesn't stay at the side of the road.

"I see something, and when I pick it up, I see something beyond it, and then I pick that up, and then there's something further back," she said. "I've gone about 30 feet from the road to pick up things."

She's also found a few cats that had been killed on the road. She's taken them home and buried them.

"I just can't leave them," she said. "They need a proper burial."

Through these walks, she had met Bill Havyan, a Goodyear retiree. Havyan now mows Goodyear's property alongside the road.

"She's an angel," Havyan said. "She's really made it clean and nice looking, and that's the way we like to see it."

Havyan, who also picks up trash as he mows, picks up the small grocery bags that Vincent leaves at designated sites. He takes them and puts them in the Goodyear Dumpster, which is behind locked gates. Until their friendship started -- both waving hello at first -- Vincent either took the trash home or if she saw someone outside the blimp base, she called out to the employee, asking him/her to throw it in the Dumpster. The larger items she left alongside the road. She then would go home and get her truck. She disposes all of the items where they need to go.

Even clothing.

"I once found this sweatshirt that was frozen," she said of one of her winter walks. "I took it home, thawed it out and then washed it. It went to Goodwill."