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10/21/2015 09:30 AMIf you’ve traveled in the vicinity of Route 146 on your way into town, you’ve probably spotted Ruth Brooks picking up roadside trash—she’s been at it for nearly 17 years.
Thanks to a nomination from past Person of the Week Tracy Tomaselli, the Courier recently caught up with Ruth to honor her as Person of the Week and to share a bit about this inspirational lady.
A Guilford resident since 1998, Ruth first took on trash after noticing it while walking her dog; when living in Madison for nearly 20 years. Ruth points to comments made to the U.S. Congress in the 19th century by Chief Seattle, the ancestral leader of the Suquamish Tribe, in which he said all things are bound together by a common thread: What you do to nature, you do to yourself.
“What he said is so profound. To me, we’re but a thread in it. Whatever we do to it, we do to ourselves. Knowing that, I just couldn’t tolerate the trash,” says Ruth. “This is life. You can’t trash it; it’s sacred.”
Shortly after moving to Guilford, the mindful exercise began to grow into something even more spiritual and meaningful for Ruth.
“Two months after I moved here, my 18 year-old son died. I would go out and continue my walking and my crying, and nature just spoke to me at a level that it had never before. This was healing. It took years, and I was even more upset that nature was being trashed,” says Ruth, who kept cleaning up what she found.
At the time, Ruth was serving as psychiatric chaplain for Yale-New Haven Hospital, a post she held for 25 years before retiring in 2013. Upon retiring, Ruth expanded to what’s now five different two-mile walking routes. Sadly, also about two years ago, Ruth’s daughter passed away.
“My daughter died about a month after I retired,” says Ruth, who’s thankful she has one more child—a son—and grandchildren to share her life with.
She says she was also grateful to have learned the healing power of her walks in nature, which helped her to cope with her daughter’s death.
“At least I knew the power of it’s the healing, so I was able to chaplain myself, so to speak, in that way,” says Ruth.
Ruth walks nearly every day of the year. Unfortunately, the trash isn’t diminishing.
“The routes that I take are a mile from the water everywhere, which is such a blessing for me, but every day, literally about 355 days a year, whether I’ve been there the day before or two days before,” Ruth says, adding that she does take a few days off every year due to the weather or sometimes because she is not feeling well. “I never ever do not have full bag or two, or sometimes even three. This is not acceptable to me.”
While Ruth has never tried to start a movement, she’s delighted that many people seem to understand just why she’s out there.
“One person left a note and money in my mailbox and I was so surprised, because this person understood what I was doing! They called it my ministry...I couldn’t even write them a note and thank them, but I kept that note because it meant so much to me, because someone got it.”
People have stopped Ruth to tell her they appreciate what she does—some even have given gifts. There’s the man who called her “Gandhi” and gave her a mug with Gandhi’s “be the change you want to see in the world” saying on it. Another man, after watching her for 16 years, stopped his car and said, “You are such a steward of the earth.” A neighbor recently said, “You’re better than Johnny Appleseed!” The comment delights Ruth.
“That’s the image I’m trying to spread: Love of the earth, love of nature, love animals, love of the environment...That’s what I’m doing,” says Ruth, adding, “Two days later, a man stopped me and said, ‘My wife and I love what you do,’ and I said, ‘I love what I do, too!’ He said, ‘You give us such joy,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a spiritual thing, too—joy.’ So there are people who get it—but again, I don’t do it to impress anyone.”
That’s not to say there aren’t a few pet peeves Ruth has also collected over the years, from a loathing for Styrofoam peanuts and broken bottles (which can injure animals) and some simple questions, like why are people more concerned with a clean car than a clean environment and “why do we complain about a health crisis in this country when people can’t walk two feet to a garbage pail?” she asks.
Ruth also feels that officials need to better enforce roadside litter fines, some which scale up to $1,000.
“It seems no one [in government] will acknowledge there are fines for littering. None of us would have to pay taxes if you charged for every piece of litter discarded in this town,” she says. “If we have a way of fining people, we should. There is an ordinance.”
Ruth is certain a $1,000 fine would have been easy to impose on one violation that took her about three weeks to clean up, after a passing truck scattered bits and pieces of foam material along a stretch of Route 146.
“I cleaned it up on my own; I picked up every piece I could find. I went down into the marshes because I refused to leave it for the animals and fish,” says Ruth.
She has ideas for keeping roadways clean, such as having a local entity print up car trash bags to distribute through Town Hall, offering businesses awards for keeping grounds garbage-free, and, of course, enforcing fines.
“I think on that scale, but that’s not my forte,” she says. “This is what I do, be the change. I’m Johnny Appleseed—I’m not trying to sell apples, just trying to plant seeds. I tried to carry a dust pan and brush, it was too much to carry...The town gave me sticks to pick up trash, and the state did same thing. Everybody wants to give me stuff to pick trash up with, but the point is, don’t throw it out there in the first place!”
Ruth recently was honored by Guilford Rotary with a Paul Harris Fellowship Medal, Rotary’s highest award. It was the first acknowledgment of its kind she’s received. “One of the Rotary members stopped me and told me he was going to put me in for the award, because he saw me doing this all these years,” says Ruth, smiling. “A lot of people have said, ‘You should be Person of the Week,’ too.”
In September, Tomaselli went a bit further with that suggestion and secured contact information and an okay from Ruth for a Person of the Week nomination.
“She stopped her car and yelled out to me! I was pretty far away, and here was this lady...She was really chasing me,” says Ruth, laughing. The thanks are wonderful, but the real reward is the ability to continue to get out into nature and enjoy the place she loves to call home. “I feel about it like it my child, because I realized during the past year this is my baby, and I care for it in that way,” says Ruth. “I can tell you where every weed and every twig and every poison ivy plant is. I have that kind of intimacy with it now, because I care for it. I am so grateful to be so connected to this.”