Snapshot: Keeping it clean: Doug Wilde -- One man's mission of roadside beautification Snapshot: Keeping it clean: Doug Wilde -- One man's mission of roadside beautification (July 14, 2004)

By David Boyce
Almanac Staff Writer

In the woods along the upper reaches of Highway 84 in Woodside, nature has a way of cleaning up after itself. Fallen leaves mold and disintegrate, animal carcasses succumb to scavengers, and life begins anew from what was before.

The same can't be said for the detritus that collects on the side of that road. Keeping the area clean -- and it is quite clean -- requires something more like a trash collector.

Enter Doug Wilde, bicyclist, actor and retired engineering professor at Stanford University. For the past 10 years, a couple of times each week, Mr. Wilde, 74, has cycled from the Stanford campus up Highway 84 to Skyline Boulevard, about a 10-mile trip. It's good exercise, he says.

For the past five years, he has added to his routine. When he finds litter along the way, he stops, gets off his bike, picks it up and stores it in one of two plastic bags looped around his handlebars: one for trash and the other for recyclables.

"I got sick of looking at the trash," he told the Almanac in a roadside interview at a wide spot on the road. "I found out that if I kept at it, it gets cleaned up."

He says he removes about a half-ton of recycled material annually. Once he found a garbage bag containing some 400 beer cans. He flattened them and carted them out over several trips.

"It's amazing what one guy can do. It's unbelievable in a way. I would have never thought that I could have kept this whole road clean," he says. "When it's cleaned up, it's really a beautiful road."

Mr. Wilde wears out a bike every three to four years, at which point his wife Jane buys him a new one, he says. He credits his physical agility not so much to the cycling as to getting off and on the bike frequently.

Rewards

On a day with lots to pick up, Mr. Wilde can be going uphill for three to four hours in a six-hour round trip. Aside from the intangible rewards that often accompany good deeds, there are other compensations.

He once found a $20 bill, followed shortly by a $5 bill. Other finds: a pair of sunglasses and a Yale sweatshirt with a stain on it.

There are unexpected compliments. A pickup-truck driver once said to him: "I don't like these bikes on the road, but you're OK."

He's had drivers, apparently in a spirit of generosity, throw empty cans out in front of him. "A lot of these guys think I do this for a living," he says.

When he finally reaches the top, he has lunch at the Skywood Trading Post, where the Palestinians who run the place watch Al Jazeerah -- the Arabic satellite broadcast station -- and translate it for him. "They're a cool bunch up there," he says.

Most satisfying is when a mother stops and points him out to her children. "See what the man's doing," he says the mother will say. "How would I ever experience that if I weren't doing this?"

Mr. Wilde is also an actor. One venue is Stanford Hospital, where he's memorized disease symptoms and acted them out for medical students unaware that he was faking it. He's portrayed heart attacks, emphysema, a thyroid condition, a stroke, and suicidal tendencies, he says.

"They make me cry when they (are diligent enough to) catch me," he says. "It's very touching."

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