In Alaska when I worked for Princess Cruises, one benefit to employees was we got to register at the hotel tour desk, and possibly tag along on land excursions and tours with resort guests on our days off, if there was space available due to unsold seats. Many times I went on free whale watching day-cruises, helicopter galcier tours, rail rides on the Princess cars of the Alaska Railiroad, etc in this manner.
Well, me being fairly chatty and quite open and approachable- I often found myself playing tour guide, sharing tid-bits of info and my experiences to questioning tourists... and there was always a slight amount of embarrassment as we meandered through some of the world's most pristine scenery just to happen onto some privately-owned land that might look like a total junk-yard! (It's common in outlying areas to see exactly as Cathy describes, yards full of piles of crap... rusted-out boats, cars, trucks, barrels of this 'n that, mountains of sh#t under plastic blue tarps, etc. You get the idea!)
Always some red-lipped, blue-haired, high-heel-wearin' well-to-do socialite from New Jersey or Charleston or Santa Barbara would ask me why on earth these n'er-do-well savages would want to pollute the scenery in such poor taste like that?
I usually just explained that A.) in remote locales outside of cities and towns there might not be any formal garbage or re-cycling pick-up methods, so getting rid of stuff wasn't as easy as one might think in such areas... and B.) when one has a cabin on a wooded lot in a valley surrounded by mountain ranges, national forests, ice fields, rolling rapids and blue-ice glaciers... it's easy to consider your tiny yard just your "storage shed", and the outlying countryside your actual "back-yard". And if one was to ask the home-owner, he would consider that he had the most flawless, lovely back-yard in all the world.
Sometimes this explanation (ie; "excuse") worked to satisfy the blue-hairs and sometimes not. But I can assure of one thing... at some point during that glacier tour or nature hike it was gonna be up to ME to bend my happy-azz over and pick-up the empty one liter Aquafina bottle Mrs. Blue-Hair forgot and left behind on a boulder... or pluck the plastic price-tags removed from the 9 sweatshirts for her grandchildren and the plastic gift-shop bag they came in that she tossed into a stand of purple lupine trailside... I guess "litter" is all in the eye of the beholder!
