For 10 years, anglers on and afficionados of the Delaware River have taken a day to wield crowbars and shovels, rather than bait and tackle, in service of keeping the river clean. 

Get Trashed in the Catskills, an annual cleanup along the Delaware River, celebrates its 10th anniversary this August. Friends and founders Chris Calabrese and Dan Santoro started it after getting inspired by a group called Pig Farm Ink, which holds cleanup events out west. 

For the first few years, the group organized the clean-up in line with the Pig Farm Ink model, organizing participants into teams and assigning points to collected bags of trash, says Dan. That changed as the years went on. “We kind of realized that we needed to evolve the program more for our needs and our friendgroup, which was more fun.”

The group still awards prizes, but it’s a subjective thing, now: awards go to the collector of the most interesting piece of trash, or someone who put in an MVP performance, or a kid or a newcomer who’ll really appreciate it. “It’s more nurturing the scene than it is about actually winning anything,” says Dan. 

The group’s methods, too, have changed over the years. Initially, the cleanup crew didn’t bring specialty tools, with people using their hands to dig trash out of the riverbanks. However, Dan says, after the 20th time having to leave a tire behind because the group didn’t have the proper tools to extract it, the group adapted, bringing crowbars and shovels. 

“We’re almost professionalizing trash pick-up, to a point,” says Dan. 

A clean community

Get Trashed attracts a regular crew of contributors. Last year, over 80 people turned out for the cleanup. People make an event out of it, coming back year after year from as far as New York City. 

Part of that comes down to the ways the event builds a sense of community. The group hosts participants for a night of camping and revelry the day before the event; after the cleanup, there’s a party with food, drinks and live music. 

“People who have never been to it may just think, ‘Well, I’m going to go up there on a hot-ass August day or June day or whatever, and I’m going to do manual labor for free,’” Dan says. “Once they actually come and see how we 

operate, and see that there’s a lot of camaraderie and there’s a lot of fanfare for getting that big tire or getting some big piece of trash, and then you go back to the club[house] or you go back to the brewery around here, wherever that afterparty is, and you kind of realize there’s a lot more to it, and then it gets addictive, and we’ve had people come 10 years in a row.”

Many of the people who participate come out of the area’s fishing scene. Chris and Dan both work at Housefly Fishing, a full-service fly fishing shop in Hawley, PA. 

“It’s a great way for people that fish solo or are new flyfishermen that don’t really have any friends that fish to meet people that are likeminded,” says Chris. “That’s a huge part of it too. People that have been coming for years, now they’re fly-fishing buddies or friends.”

However, the cleanup isn’t just for people who fish. It’s for anyone with a stake in the river—or anyone who doesn’t yet know they have a stake in the river but wants to learn. 

“You have to love something to protect it,” Dan says. “You’re not going to just wake up one day and be like, ‘My mission is to clean the Delaware.’ You have to immerse yourself in the thing to realize it needs help. Whether it be eagle watching, canoe, kayaking, fishing, whatever that recreational thing is (ours just happens to be fly fishing), that’s the immersive experience [which] is like this kind of pathological thing that ends up with you organizing river clean-ups.”

There are people who might not care about the environment they live in or fully appreciate the wealth of the natural resources in the area, Dan says. Those people, too, are crucial to the clean-up’s efforts. 

“If only a handful of people after this 10 years has come to kind of appreciate their environment and get [themselves] outdoors—that, to me, is a big part of it,” he says.