I finally moved from the campground where I’ve been acting as camp host to my very-own-for-the-summer campground.

I’d been told to leave my supplies and tools at the temporary campground, so I arrived at my campground with no broom and no shovel and no garbage bags. I couldn’t sweep the restrooms, and I couldn’t clean the fire rings. I needed to work at least a couple more hours, so I set out to pick up micro trash.

I spent over an hour and a half removing bits of trash from the ground. The campground only has ten campsites, so I wasn’t dealing with a very big area. The trash seemed older here: the metal bottle caps were rusty and the plastic ones were squished into the dirt. This year is the first time this campground has had a host, so I guess no one’s picked up micro trash in a long time. Maybe it’s never been done.

After I combed the campground for stray paper, plastic, metal, and glass, I walked the half-mile dirt road that leads from the campground to the highway. I walked with my plastic grocery store bag and picked up trash all the way to the highway and all the way back. The road was cleaner than the campground. I found an empty Corona bottle, a few bottle caps, a bag that once held candy, and some tiny bits of this and that.

The grossest thing I found all day? A condom.

At the back edge of site 4, where the campsite has almost turned into the forest, I found an unwrapped, unrolled condom on the ground. I’m going to assume it had been used. I grabbed a good size piece of loose plastic out of my makeshift trash bag and touched the condom with the plastic and not my fingers.

Let me say, I applaud the use of condoms. I advocate for the use of condoms. I’m glad someone was wise enough and mature enough to use that condom. But for goodness sake, once that condom did its job, why was it not put into a trashcan?

To be fair, the condom looked as if it had been lying on the ground for quiet a while, and the campground only officially opened a few days ago. Maybe there are no trashcans in the campground in the off season. But if ever there were something packed in that needed to be packed out, it was this condom.

This is just the sort of thing which will eventually give Woodsy Owl a heart attack.

Give a hoot! Don’t throw your used condom on the ground, ya idiot!