Trash Pickers (no offense JP) are a funny lot and under the right conditions we can all play. I think most of us have seen the occasional guitar neck sticking out and stopped to investigate....with the usual results.

So I never find any of the garbage can guitars. Someone always has a story about trash treasures and I'm always on the outside looking in. Don't get me wrong, I have sifted a fair amount of trash and stopped by several piles on the street, but every time I have spied one of those necks, its been attached (or not) to some piece of incredible crap that should have been trashed straight from the factory. So just take your stories and bugger off!

About 20 years back I saw how effective trash pickers can be from an ecology standpoint. There was a covered bridge a few miles out of town and people had taken to throwing garbage off to the side at one end of the bridge. The "Columbus Dispatch" ran a feature on what a mess and what a shame this was on the front page...with a photo. The picture showed a mountain of trash, but prominently displayed at the top was what looked to be a perfectly good chainsaw. A friend sees this and picks me up and we head out to the trash heap somehow oblivious to the fact that half a million other people saw the same article! I mean it was on the FRONT PAGE!!! We arrive to find cars parked in all directions for at least a half mile around the bridge and a throng of pickers sorting through the pile. People are carrying all kinds of stuff back to their cars! It was unbelievable. If the chainsaw was more that a prop for the photo, it was obviously long gone of course, but some were finding their own treasures in this mouldering mountain. A few days later, the county sent a crew with ONE dumptruck and cleaned up what little was left.

Spaw