Beer Cans in Nature

     Last week, I went hiking with my friends. It was an easy trail, just walking along a path which led to a waterfall. I brought my camera to practice my photography. And, while looking for things to take pictures of, I was struck by the amount of beer cans littered among the nature. I had set out to take pictures of things that were more commonly associated with hiking: flowers, trees, rivers, but the beer cans were such a prominent piece of my experience I couldn't leave them out. They had become part of the nature, and I decided to photograph that.

     I wondered why there were so many. Do people regularly drive out to parks to drink beer? There wasn't any other kind of cans or bottles; no coke, liquor, or La Croix. Maybe it's just the beer drinkers that are the least responsible, or care the least about littering. 

    Maybe underage kids got their hands on a six pack and came here to have an adventure without being caught. The park closes at dark, but security is not something anyone has to worry about. 

     Some of the cans still had liquid in them. I imagined kids hearing a noise and dropping everything they had to get away. But the cans were never in groups. It was always just one or two lying on the ground. 

    Some had made their way into the ground, moving in with the mulch and dirt, fusing into a singular organism. But the bright colors of the cans and lids would never let that fully happen. 

    Some were crushed beside the river, reduced to less than it'd started as, but still keeping up it's place in this environment.

    See that one? That small blue thing far in the distance. At this point in our hike my friends and I were sitting atop some rocks by a waterfall, resting and observing. A group of kids, probably a couple years older than us, sat across the water, laughing and talking. Maybe if it'd been a few hours later they would've brought some beer, and they would be the culprit for all the beer cans. 

    Inside a fallen tree with a hollowed out trunk, at the very end, a small bit of light was allowed in, and illuminated something at the bottom: a beer can.