Trash worried no one. In the summer of 1942 seven regiments powered through the North Country woods. Equipment broke. The regiments chewed through axles, rollers and tracks. One cat broke down, then another, parts from one fixed the other and the cannibalized tractor sat at the side of the road. A truck sunk in the mud, sunk really deep, would take too long to dig out?
Leave it where it stands; keep going.
Truck drivers and cat skinners scavenged parts from abandoned vehicles, carried them as spares–tires, axles, tracks, anything useable. A driver who left even a useable truck unattended might well return to find a stripped hulk–trash.
The United States and its Army at war didn’t do environmental impact statements, didn’t have an EPA to deal with (or an OSHA, for that matter). The Corps didn’t concern itself much with cleanup. By spring and early summer, all along the road, every steep hill or canyon featured trash–a debris scatter at its bottom. Broken down and wrecked trucks lay everywhere—over banks, in ditches.
Ten-ton wreckers couldn’t keep up with demand for their services and the motor pools didn’t waste time on junk. Scattered, along with the wrecks, lumber; cement; and, especially, empty fuel barrels gave the road one of its best nicknames. It became the “Oil Can Highway”. One soldier told Cyril Griffith, a PRA trucker, as they careened down a steep hill, “Don’t worry boss, Uncle Sam has lots more trucks.”
Adding to the mess, every bivouac included a latrine. Hastily covered over when the bivouac moved. They tended to stay covered. But every bivouac also included a garbage dump. Soldiers on kitchen police (KP) buried it, of course. But bears immediately dug it back up. They could paw through four feet of dirt, topped with rocks.