Cosmo's Parkway

Northern Views, by Jodi Snyder

I got a call from a friend in Willow last week. After we spoke about other things, she mentioned that while traveling north on the Parks Highway near Kashwitna Lake, she spotted a newly erected sign along that stretch of road.

"I think it said Kosmos Kramer Parkway," she said, and then she asked, "Doesn't naming a parkway require a proclamation?" I think she was joking, but I wasn't sure. Then she said "We were going to ask you to do an investigative report about it," and I knew she was joking then. But with her nudge of interest, I figured other people may be curious about the new sign, too.

The sign is a standard "Adopt-a-Highway" sign, with its bright blue background and official state seal. "Kosmos Kramer Parkway," it reads, quite authoritatively.

I explained to her what I know about the sign -- that it acknowledges the clean-up efforts of Kashwitna Lake residents Cammie Walker and Jim Alford and their friends, who do a bang-up job gathering up the truckloads -- literally -- of garbage along both sides of their adopted two-mile stretch of the Parks Highway.

Walker and Alford are the kind of people we really appreciate in this small community. They've got a lovely home on the far side of Kashwitna Lake, accessible by boat in the summer and by driving across the lake in winter. They are a hard-working, fun-loving couple. Walker commutes to a job in Anchorage several days a week and works from home the rest of the time. They lead a very busy life, but still find time to clean up their adopted highway each spring.

I e-mailed Walker and asked her about the sign. This is her reply:

"Kosmos Kramer Parkway, which by the way, is spelled wrong -- it should be Cosmo, my mistake -- is from a Seinfeld episode where Kramer adopts a highway and along with picking up the trash, decides to improve it by repainting the lines and adding another lane. Only instead of improving the rush-hour traffic," wrote Walker, "he causes a major gridlock. I promised the fellows over at Willow DOT we wouldn't be making any lane improvements. Besides, they know where we live."

This is Walker's third year picking up along the highway. "I'd give you more quote material, but this is a family newspaper," she wrote. "Usually by the end of the clean-up, I am thoroughly disgusted with the littering portion of the human race, and ready to make a citizen's arrest on the next person I see throwing a cigarette butt out the window."

Some years it has taken Walker three weekends to pick up the four miles of roadway, but this year she said she had a lot of help, particularly on Mother's Day.

"I think my family and our friend, Ed Berger, felt sorry for me," she wrote. Walker said they managed to get it all picked up in one weekend -- some 70 to 80 bags of garbage.

The same weekend Walker was making trips to the dump with her giant loads of trash, my son and I walked our one-mile stretch of road. We stopped at the neighbors and got a kitchen-sized garbage bag, then proceeded to fill it up with empty beer cans and bottles, cigarette wrappers and other unrecognizable objects we found on the side of our little road. By the time we reached the mailboxes out at the Parks Highway, the bag was completely full, and I was feeling pretty smug about my good deed.

The next day, as I drove down to Willow, I saw Walker, her truck full of trash, working alongside the highway. Then I realized that my one bag of garbage was not such a big deal after all. But while we can't all be as dedicated as Walker is to keeping the trash under control, if everyone could pick up a little bag-full, imagine the improvement.

Next Saturday, June 5, is Cleanup Day in Willow. Let's all learn from community members like Walker, and do our part to pick up the mess. Find out what you can do to help clean up your town. And when you travel north along the "Kosmos Kramer Parkway," please don't litter. Walker and Alford are planning their wedding on the lake this summer, and they won't have a lot of extra time to pick up trash.

Jodi Snyder makes her home in Willow and covers the norther region of the Mat-Su Borough for the Frontiersman newspaper.