'This is the road I live on': Old Lyme man keeps neighborhood clean one bag at a time

Sep. 5—EDITOR'S NOTE — Ever wonder what's the story behind that person you see picking up roadside garbage in Old Lyme? Or what's the deal with that usher at the Garde Arts Center in New London who takes your tickets with a giant smile? The Day is launching a Get to Know Your Neighbors series, where for the next week you will learn about the people in your community who make a big difference but often go unnoticed

Old Lyme ― David Littlefield scoops roadside trash like others pick up after their dogs.

The "sterile technique" demonstrated by the self-described do-gooder goes like this: He places his hand inside a produce bag, uses the plastic like a glove to grab offending items, and then turns the bag inside out with the trash secured inside.

It's all part of the one-man neighborhood cleanup he's been carrying out for more than 40 years.

The Mile Creek Road resident walks a total of five or six miles per day, every day. His route includes both sides of the winding, tree-lined expanse marked by rivers and brooks meandering toward Long Island Sound.

He's collected the traditional triad of cigarette butts, beer cans and miniature liquor bottles, as well as more obscure refuse including a bag of dead fish and a one-time haul of $157 in paper bills.

"You really never know what you're going to see," he said.

On a recent Monday, a one-mile leg of his daily afternoon stroll took him from his house to the Union Chapel where it sits at the eastern intersection of Route 156 near the East Lyme border.

He once found foreign coins on the road, he said. The discovery led him to conjure a story in his mind of someone who robbed a house and threw out the coins because there was no use for them.

"I make up my own narrative," he said.

But at the blindest turns in the road, he keeps his mind totally clear.

"I usually don't say a word to myself," he said as he reached one such curve. "I just keep my eyes focused."

Littlefield could recount only a few times when he thought he might get hit by an oncoming vehicle. Slight and mild mannered, he said the most he'll do is shake his fist at speeders as they drive by. But he described the prevalence of inconsiderate drivers as "maddening."

He recalled one driver purposely swerving toward him on a Sunday morning with no other cars on the road as he picked up trash with his work gloves and plastic bags. Others throw litter in front of his house.

"There are people that resent what I do," he said. "I can feel it, I can see it."

Still, he said almost a half century of traversing the neighborhood has included its share of gratitude. Some people roll down their windows to thank him. He now counts as friends the strangers on Chestnut Hill Road to whom he returned the $157 he found alongside identifying contents of a wallet.

"This is the road I live on. If I don't do it, then no one else is going to. I'm not using that to pat myself on the back, but I'm just kind of driven to keep it clean," he said.

Littlefield moved to his current home with companion Elene in 1977. They started walking the next year, and it didn't take them long to figure out trash had been accumulating. Early cleanup efforts yielded items like scrap metal, old tires and large bags of junk that local officials agreed to pick up where he collected them.

Now, he described his efforts as everyday maintenance. On the afternoon walk, only a couple of cigarette butts and a can of White Claw Hard Seltzer went into his bags.

"Most of the time, I will recycle what's recyclable. Sometimes, if somebody has done something nasty to the bottle, like chewing tobacco or even worse than that, then I gingerly put it in my bag and throw it away," he said.

Generational ties

Littlefield moved to Old Lyme as a 10 year old in 1961 from a nearby homestead going back generations in East Lyme. That's where the forces of modernization swallowed up hundreds of acres, spitting them back out in the form of Interstate 95's Rocky Neck Connector and an industrial park.

He graduated from Lyme-Old Lyme High School in 1968. A self-described "unproductive citizen" during that tumultuous political era, he eventually went on to become a psychiatric aide and then a registered nurse at Norwich Hospital and Connecticut Valley Hospital. It was in the mid-1980s that he switched careers to become an interpreter and maritime music performer at Mystic Seaport. He retired in 2009 at 59.

He credited his generational ties and his good fortune for inspiring his need to keep the area clean.

"We own our home and our cars outright. I'm so lucky that I don't have to go to work every day. I better do something that reflects that gratitude," he said.

At the halfway point of the walk, he stopped at the Union Chapel built in 1900 at the corner of Mile Creek Road in the South Lyme area known for its working class mariner-farmers. It's been in continual service since then, according to Littlefield.

His research shows his great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Littlefield, served as founding superintendent of the chapel that her husband accrued 420 work hours to help build.

The great-grandson's attitude about the upkeep of the building reflects his feelings for the road it sits on.

"This place needs to look good," he said. "If this place were to look shabby, or if there were holes in the roof or the paint is peeling, it's going to be a different feeling. Right now, it's a gem."

He walked back against traffic with the scent of wild grapes coming from roadside vines. He pointed to the warm-weather reliability of ravens, crows and hawks as they circle the same spots every day.

He described the area as most beautiful in the winter when snow keeps traffic off the road.

The natural world is in a routine that only a small number of people slow down enough to observe, according to Littlefield.

"You cannot know a road, with all its creatures and plants and hidden treasures, by car or even by bicycle," he said. "You have to walk it in all seasons."

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