LOUIS KRAUSS/Eugene Register-Guard
FLORENCE — Take a drive from on Highway 126 east out of Florence and you’ll see something strange — trash bags tied to the metal reflector posts, hundreds of them, spray-painted with distressed, cartoony faces.
Some of the faces look anguished, others enraged and some of the bags are just emblazoned with the word “care.”
On most afternoons, drivers have a chance to see the man responsible for this unique display of trash collection — Raymond Block, who is attempting to clean every bit of both sides of the 54-mile stretch of highway between Florence and Eugene.
“I feel very driven to get people to realize how bad this is and that the people who are supposed to be doing the job are not,” said Block, who wears a yellow rainproof suit and is armed with a trash picker and a roll of empty bags. “It’s so my son doesn’t have to fight this battle, and so animals don’t pay the price for our ignorance.”
He wears a sign on his back, which displays the name of his group and his mission “Leaven No Trace,” and informs drivers it’s a “donation-driven cleanup campaign.”
The 41-year-old Florence man made it his full-time job seven years ago to clean up the local environment and Oregon’s highways. He calls the displays a “walk for awareness,” and said his first was traversing the entire Oregon coast on Highway 101 in 2017. His official last name is Furr, but he goes by the name Block.
He embarked on his latest “Leaven No Trace” journey in February. It is Block’s third large-scale highway cleanup, and he estimated he’s completed at least 3,000 smaller cleanup efforts around Oregon.
Block posts regular updates online at Facebook and has a database of unofficial dump sites he’s cleaned over time on his website.
Highway 126 is a stretch he cleaned before in 2020, so he knows what to expect.
“That last time took me 50 days, so after a year and a half I decided that it needed to be cleaned again,” he said last month when a reporter caught up to him while cleaning the highway.
Block’s hope is that the massive cleanup effort inspires others to take part in cleaning the sides of highways. By painting emoji-style faces on the bags, he said it helps him connect with drivers by expressing the sadness and anger he feels about seeing trash-covered sides of the roads.
“I knew that I needed to touch people emotionally,” he said. “Emojis were hot a few years ago, and it just turned into this amazing, beautiful message for people to care. It either touches people and fills them with joy, or makes them angry and they don’t know what to do with it.”
Block typically goes 10 days straight picking up trash before taking a break, starting on one side of the highway in the morning and tackling the other side in the afternoon. His mother and girlfriend follow Block on his travels, assist with the group and give handouts from two buses covered with the “Leaven No Trace” logo.
The name for his group came because he grew up adhering to the concept of “leave no trace,” and picked the word “leaven” because its second definition is to transform or modify something for the better. He noted he’s supported by donations and the disability funding he and his mother receive.
So far he’s filled up around 750 bags on this effort. Some of the more obscure items discovered include bags of meth, animal eyeballs attached to an empty shot bottle and sex toys.
Through his cleanups, Block said there’s an astonishing amount of hidden trash, such as car parts that have been mowed over and buried under the dirt by highway crews.
“There were certain sections where I would find the same kind of (bottles of) alcohol, but you could tell it was different ages of the same product,” he said.
But some troubles in Florence
While Block’s trash cleanups often draw honks of support from drivers, some local governments have viewed the piles of bags left in town as a nuisance.
Before he moved to Florence, Block was charged three times in Coos County with multiple counts of offensive littering and disorderly conduct for his trash pickups in 2016 and 2019. Of the seven charges, three had a not guilty verdict, three were dismissed and he was found guilty of one count of disorderly conduct. As part of the one-year probation sentence, Block was ordered to not collect any garbage on public or private lands without written permission from the landowner.
In 2021 the city of Florence cited Block with 18 crimes in municipal court, including seven counts of offensive littering, five counts of third-degree criminal mischief, five counts of disorderly conduct and one count of contempt of the court.
Assistant City Manager Megan Messmer and Florence Police Commander John Pitcher declined to further discuss the municipal charges and officials’ interactions with him because of pending court hearings. However, criminal complaints show police were citing Block for the trash bag displays in town.
The citations came after Block began a ramped-up effort last year to clean trash from abandoned homeless camp within the city limits, Block said. He alleges city officials ignored him and initially didn’t want to work together on his project, leading him to try to get their attention.
“What I did is I decided to shame the city of Florence because they kept ignoring me, they wouldn’t talk to me, or collaborate and try to solve the problem,” he said. “So I got their attention.”
Block began going to “immense” measures with the cleanups, filling 30 to 40 bags from each empty camp and putting them on the sides of Highway 101 in Florence. The seven offensive littering complaints say Block knowingly discarded garbage, and those for criminal mischief say he caused “substantial inconvenience” by tying bags to light posts. The complaints for second-degree disorderly conduct in September allege Block intended to inconvenience the public by obstructing pedestrians’ public way with his bags.
He noted he’s concerned that the city would ticket him for doing what he sees as a public service and awareness campaign.
After he began the Florence displays, Block said city staff were concerned animals would get into trash bags left on the sides of the road. They tried to work with Block by offering to provide a dumpster behind Goodwill to put the bags in as part of the city’s adopt-a-street program. Block did not agree, taking issue with the city not letting him display the emoji-face bags along the road where drivers would see them. It was suggested he instead hold up a sign on the side of the road to inform drivers of how many bags he picked up, Block said.
“They wanted me doing the work behind Goodwill where people couldn’t see it, and they didn’t want to see it,” Block said.
Block’s next municipal court appearance is a status hearing Aug. 9, before the trial, which set for Aug. 23.
“With the cases being active in the circuit and municipal courts, we don’t want it to be a detriment to him or to us by speaking about this in the media when it’s in the system,” Pitcher said.
Aside from litter pickup, Block has taken more extreme steps to clean up trash, such as last fall when he installed several homemade trash filters on storm drain pipes in Florence. One filter placed on a culvert got clogged, backed up with 24 inches of water, and threatened to damage the road and topple trees due to erosion, Pitcher said in an Oct. 7 news release.
Block was told beforehand by Public Works Director Mike Miller that he would need to go through the city’s permit process and get engineering considerations addressed before installing the filters, but “that direction was ignored,” according to the police statement.
“I went ahead with it because it was the first rain of the season and all the drains looked like ash trays and trash cans,” Block said, noting he caught 50 pounds of trash in the first night with the filters.
Pitcher added in the release that the flooding and soil erosion posed a risk to people living in houses downhill from the culvert. Another filter, applied to a Siuslaw River Bridge storm drain discharge pipe, created a hazard because Block removed large rocks that had been in place to protect the river bottom from erosion, Pitcher said in the release.
Because there was a storm at the time, the filter created a trench in the river, which could have caused the bridge supports to fail, Pitcher said. Block was arrested Oct. 6 and charged with two counts of felony-level criminal mischief in Lane County Circuit Court.
Compromise with ODOT
Although Block’s trash pickup displays have been contentious in Florence, his relationship with the Oregon Department of Transportation has improved over time. Unlike some previous cleanup projects, Block signed a liability waiver, and ODOT spokeswoman Angela Beers Seydel said he is now working with the department.
“He’s working with us much more closely than he did in the past, and that’s great,” Beers Seydel said. “That’s how relationships get built. He can get a better understanding of what we need to do, and we’re working with him to fulfill what he’s trying to do. It’s all a benefit to the people of Oregon and the people who use Highway 126.”
Block’s efforts are essentially a large-scale version of the state’s Adopt-A-Highway program, in which people can volunteer to pick up litter on smaller sections of the highway. Beers Seydel noted Block’s method of leaving bags on the side of the road for pickup is standard for the program. ODOT workers typically pick up the bags Block leaves every three to five days.
“We appreciate the fact he’s so committed to this,” she said.
While Block has an intense drive desire to pick up highway trash, he hopes to eventually reach a time where it will be unnecessary.
“Really I do not like picking up trash; I loathe it, and look forward to the day I’m not needed.”