“It’s meditative”: Elsa Tranter and the Zen of Picking Up Trash
Elsa Tranter uses customized bags to pick up trash every week. (Photos by Janet Byron.)
Berkeley grandmother still going strong after 2nd year of weekly beach cleanups
By Janet Byron
Flattened red plastic cup. Liter bottle half-filled with dirt. Broken glass shards. Candy wrapper.
I’ve joined Elsa Tranter for her 101st beach cleanup at the Berkeley Marina, on January 23, 2021. Two weeks later, she will complete her second full year of weekly shoreline cleanups.
“Yr 2 wk 52 beach clean-up,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “Berkeley bay at very low tide. Lucky seven dice; muddy boots and 4 bags of debris. And toward the end Colleen [Neff] showed up to document the dumping of the last bags into the garbage bins. An exhilarating and productive day.”
Inspired by the humorist David Sedaris’s storied daily quest to pick up litter in the South Downs of England and by an English grandmother who cleaned 52 beaches in 2018, Tranter embarked on her Great Bay Area Beach Cleanup in early 2019.
An East Coast native, Tranter moved to Berkeley with her husband Revan in 1973. They raised two children, and she worked in the Cal sociology department for 30 years. In retirement, she volunteered and served on the board of Berkeley Path Wanderers Association.
Sometimes Tranter brings along a path-wandering friend or two; sometimes her grandson Ellison joins; other times she goes solo. Today, I’m her lucky companion. Tranter prefers not to share her age, but I’m more than two decades younger and she’s got at least double my energy.
“It was going to be a year, and then the year was up. I thought, Why not keep doing it? It’s the most satisfying thing,” she tells me.
We start walking east on the wide path between the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel and the I-80 service road, with the San Francisco Bay on our left and the Berkeley Meadow on our right.
Trash in one bag, recycling in another
Blue plastic tie thingie. Vintage (2002) Coke bottle, “Hecho en Mexico.” Takeout container lid. Big black trash bag.
“Be careful! Don’t hurt yourself!” Tranter warns as I scramble among the huge chunks of concrete riprap — decades-old debris from when the Marina was Berkeley’s garbage dump — that make up the exposed part of the shoreline here.
Elsa Tranter (right) and her lucky companion, Janet Byron.
Tranter brings her one-of-a-kind “Elsa’s Trash Bag” bags, a gift from a friend; one is used for trash, the other for recycling. I decide to redeploy my found trash bag for recyclables.
“This is a real find,” she tells me, holding up a big chunk of Styrofoam. “It would break up into 10,000 pieces in the water.” She points out a dead gull; we leave it to return to nature.
It’s low tide, which Tranter reminds me is the best time for trash picking. A bright red Coke can eludes both of us; it’s just a few feet too far out into the quicksand-like muck. A bit farther on, she spots a large dead rodent, hairless and too long gone to determine exactly what kind. Yuck.
It’s also a great time for incidental birdwatching. As we perch on concrete to rest and eat our apples, a pair of (extremely cute) bufflehead ducks dives offshore among the rafts of scaup and widgeon; shorebirds peep along the water’s edge while long-legged avocets and a snowy egret scavenge in between. Above us, a white-shouldered kite hovers over the meadow in search of mice or voles.
We dump our full trash bags in the can next to the entrance to the Berkeley Meadow, consolidate our recycling into the big, black bag to pick up later, and then turn the corner to head north past a large outflow pipe — or is it the end of Strawberry Creek?
Leave the glass, ceramics, and dog poop
Bottom half of takeout container. Multi-colored little plastic thingies. More glass shards. Lots of ceramic pieces.
“There’s so much beach glass here!” Tranter says. “It’s really remarkable.”
Now she tells me that she doesn’t bother picking up the glass shards; they’ll turn into beach glass, which another stratum of shoreline combers enjoy collecting. Tranter also doesn’t pick up broken pieces of pottery, which most likely got here from an old ceramics factory near the El Cerrito Costco that dumped its broken and rejected plates on the shoreline for decades (see TEPCO Beach). Also:
“I don’t pick up dog poop in bags and wish people wouldn’t leave it lying around,” Tranter adds.
Red Solo cup. Shredded plastic bag. Soda-can pull tab.
Tranter spots a pair of black oystercatchers down the beach, cartoonish with their chunky bodies and long, bright-red, rounded bills.
A youngish man, in a green T-shirt and tall waders, with a big backpack and long camera, is talking on the phone and peaking under rocks. What is he looking for? We strike up a conversation with an older man in a yellow T-shirt and a Drew University cap, who tells us he’s an artist searching for “treasures” to incorporate into his work.
“That’s my happy place”
Plastic. Plastic. Plastic.
It’s a nice and breezy afternoon for flying kites in Cesar Chavez Park. Across the water is the shadowy outline of Mount Tam and farther down the incongruous outline of the Chevron refinery.
On the way back to the car we deposit another two full bags of trash and consolidate our recyclables for proper disposal. After a pit stop at the DoubleTree restroom, we stop by the Sea Breeze Market for a treat: fried clams, crab cakes and French fries; and we talk about the Zen of Picking Up Trash.
“It’s meditative. It’s like being in your own world,” Tranter explains. “I love being down here by the water. That’s my happy place.”
Click here to read about Elsa's start on this journey back in 2019.