If you like seeing trash-free streets around the community, then you just might want to thank Wilber Saunders.
The 78-year-old has been picking up garbage and recycling all over the Williams Lake area for over a decade.
Not originally from the lakecity, Saunders ended up here thanks to a road trip to British Columbia from his home province of Alberta.
He and his wife Thelma had met and married in the prairie province. Shortly after getting married, they returned to B.C. to visit her family, which was in Agassiz.
The young couple didn’t stop there though, and they saw Victoria, travelled through the Okanagan and then their road trip in his 1965 Chevrolet Bel Air brought them to Williams Lake, where he had an uncle.
His uncle worked at the Jacobson Brothers Mill.
“That was how it began,” he said.
Saunders said he had started the road trip with the idea he might like to try a different kind of work. Having left school before he finished his Grade 8, by the time he was married in 1972 at 27 years old, the long hours working labour jobs left him ready to try something else.
So Saunders got a job at the Jacobson Mill, which eventually became Tolko, and he ended up working there for 37 years, until it was closed at one point and he was offered a severance package.
“I always wanted to go back to farming,” he said, but instead, he stayed put. Though he didn’t go back to farming, he got to enjoy outdoor pursuits here in the Cariboo, a beautiful place to be, he said, where he enjoyed fishing and hunting for many years.
He has mostly given up both of those and now he said he “shoots animals with a camera.”
After having open heart surgery in 2008, things had shifted for Saunders.
“From then on, that was the best thing that ever happened in my life,” he said, crediting the life-saving surgery with allowing him to be around for his four children and two grandchildren.
Without the surgery, he said he would have been gone 10 years ago, and he is clearly grateful for this time.
Since then, he has walked nearly every day, up to 28 kilometres on some days. But walking got to be a little bit boring for him, and he had been noticing the trash when he walked, which bothered him.
“It’s all over, it’s everywhere,” he said.
So he started picking it up.
“I got into it,” he said of the new hobby.
Since then, he picks up garbage many days a week, and as we spoke over the holiday break, Saunders said he had been out three days over the holidays already. One year, he even went out on Christmas Day.
“I put the turkey in the oven and went down the road and picked trash,” he recalled.
Over the more than a dozen years of picking up trash, which started out with picking up cans and bottles, he has developed a tool box and a system.
From friends he has collected plastic feed bags, which are sturdy and he can reuse them over and over.
He has rubber gloves, high-visibility vests, plastic bags, and different grabbers. In his pocket he has a small plastic baggie for random items like batteries. He has a plastic bucket with a lid to hold the cigarette butts. He said he gets about a five-gallon bucket of butts every month. These are sent to Vernon where the toxic items can be recycled.
After collecting the garbage, he takes it home and sorts it, separating out what can be recycled and is clean enough to do so. He said as much as half of what he collects is recyclable. Saunders also likes gardening, writing poetry, and watching hockey, but he said he can’t just sit for too long.
“I’m not a house guy, I’m an outside guy.”
Saunders loves the outdoors and now he enjoys helping keep it clean, which he does all over the community, from the FreshCo parking lot to Dog Creek Road. But Scout Island is a spot you’ll see him the most often.
“This is my second home,” he said fondly.
“I do what I do and I’m so happy I don’t ask for anything,” he said. Look for Saunders’ posts of wildlife he spots while out and about on the Scout Island Nature Centre Facebook Page.
READ MORE: HOMETOWN: Retirement hasn’t slowed this 76-year-old Williams Lake man down
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