Ever try and get a two-year-old to pick up trash? This was our goal this past weekend on a glorious, clear Saturday, the morning of the two-decades old International Coastal Cleanup. Once a year, volunteers from all over the country gather on beaches, baysides, and riverbanks to clean 'em up. The sponsor of the effort, the Ocean Conservancy, says that to date six million volunteers from around the world have taken over 100 million pounds of trash out of American waters. That sounded a little far-fetched until my little family of four, two toddlers included, spent a morning on the Potomac River.

We live a few blocks from the storied river. To many, the Potomac, the water that frames the nation's capital, is a witness and carrier of history. But it's also the lifeblood of the towns like mine that  it has carved out on its shores. The river is a community builder; along the Mount Vernon trail that runs for miles along the Potomac in Virginia, we meet more neighbors during the week than we would if we went door-to-door. Letting the kids run alongside the river where they can see ducks, osprey, kayakers, and sailboats stimulates fertile minds. To me, a walk or run along the river trail is serenity at the end of a hectic day.

We want to see the river sparkling clean. We also feel a tad guilty for not performing any kind of community service for the past two years as the kids dominated nearly every waking moment. So we strapped the kids into the stroller and walked over to Daingerfield Island, home of boat docks, soccer fields, and a great view of planes taking off at Reagan National Airport. The National Park Service ranger handed us three large trash bags, three sets of gloves, a long-handled "gripper" for snatching pieces of trash out of reach, and directed us to a portion of the trail where he'd seen "tons of garbage." I still was suspicious.

But in a little over an hour, my hubby and I were overwhelmed with plastic cola bottles, rusted tin cans, countless itty-bitty pieces of styrofoam, tennis balls, water bottles, crates, and one size 13 Air Jordan shoe, lightly worn.  In about a 30-yard stretch—one we had trekked countless times—we had our bags filled to the brim, too heavy to transport back to the ranger while managing a baby in the stroller and a two-year-old who kept screaming TRASH! and running in its direction.

We discovered this river garbage can easily conceal itself in vegetation and in the mud of the banks. It can also hide in plain sight if those who put it there just don't care. Simply put, this trash—or marine debris, if you want to be proper—kills. It destroys not only fish, other marine life and seabirds, but also their homes.

Thoughtlessly discarded on land or from boats in coastal communities, trash finds its way to the water—and bigger bodies of water, in our case, the Chesapeake and eventually the Atlantic—and voila! A garbage dump at sea. Much of this trash has real "staying power," as the Ocean Conservancy calls it in their findings from a marine monitoring program, and resists decomposing. Fish mistake trash for food. Discarded fishing lines or nets entrap sea life, amputating fins or strangling them. Many marine ecosystems don't fare well with rubber tires, paint cans, and disinfectants planted on the seabeds. It doesn't take a genius to understand that a rusted can of DW-40 shouldn't be dinner niblets for a stripped bass.
 
My toddler, Luke, spent the first hour mastering the gripper, his little chubby fingers manipulating the squeeze-handle so the tongs would grip the object of his focus. All told, he "gripped" two plastic bottles and successfully managed to place them INSIDE the bag.  The next day when we returned to the trail for a family run (a jog, really). When we approached our cleanup area, Luke's eye widened as he exclaimed, "Pick up trash!"

That's right, buddy. Good advice.