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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
For more than ten years now, I've been tangled up with the problem of plastic bags stuck in trees. If I've learned anything from the experience, it's "Be careful what you notice." I was living in Brooklyn; I noticed the many plastic bags flapping by their handles from the high branches of trees, cheerful and confident and out of reach. Noticing led to pondering, pondering led to an invention: the bag snagger, a prong-and-hook device that, when attached to a long pole, removes bags and other debris from trees with satisfying efficiency. My friend Tim McClelland made the first working model in his jewelry studio on Broome Street, downtown. Possessing the tool, we of course had to use it; we immediately set off on a sort of harvest festival of bag snagging.
Tim's older brother, Bill, came, too. With snagger and poles (interlocking ones, of aluminum, at first) stowed in Bill's Taurus, we snagged in every New York borough, sometimes going out twice a week. We found bags everywhere, by the thousand; the ultrafine traffic soot that collects on them covered our hands like graphite. Then our ambition led us further, on bag-snagging jaunts to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. From someone at a party I heard that trees along the Mississippi River were full of debris after the big floods of 1993, so one August we drove to the river and did a lot of snagging on both the Illinois and the Missouri sides. An environmental group invited us to come to Los Angeles and help with a cleanup along the Los Angeles River, so Bill and I flew out and snagged bags and debris from the prickly desert flora there. For a long while, bag snagging became our main outdoor recreation, completely obliterating the occasional mornings we'd formerly given to golf.
Bill and Tim and I are all transplanted Midwesterners. They grew up in Michigan, I in Ohio. Bill went to my high school in Ohio. We used to do some wild things. Get Tim to tell you about the time at his parents' house outside Rochester, Michigan, on New Year's Eve when he and I decided it would be a great idea to shoot a flashlight out of a tree from a moving toboggan. We tied the flashlight to a branch above a toboggan run on their property, and we were sitting on the toboggan, Tim in front, me in back, me with a loaded shotgun, both of us scooching with our heels to get the toboggan started, when Bill and his (now) wife, Jean, intervened.
Or another time, this one in my loft in lower Manhattan: Tim and I were sitting around drinking Jack Daniel's and beer, and we took my twenty-gauge shotgun down and started fooling with it. Tim asked if I had any ammo for it, and I said I did, and I went and got it. He asked how you loaded it, and I chambered a shell. It happened that my girlfriend (now wife) had moved out a few weeks earlier. Not long before she left, she had persuaded me, at the cost of much labor and hauling by ropes up the elevator shaft, to add a heavy oak bookshelf to our few loft furnishings. I had never figured out where to put the bookshelf, and it still stood in the middle of the floor at one end of the loft, about forty feet from where Tim and I were sitting. The bookshelf had a back of particle board. Hefting the gun, I looked at the shelf for a while, and listened to determine if my neighbors upstairs and down were home; the floor and ceiling in that loft were thin enough so that I could usually...
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