“We pick up cans and plastic things, tennis balls and cups, plastic bags and beer cans,” says six-year-old Andrew LeCompte, known to his family and neighbors as the “garbage warrior” of the Alton Baker Park Canoe Canal. “I usually pick up cans and floating trash. Daddy gets the sinking trash. Sometimes he jumps in the water.” In the spring of 2019, Andrew and his parents Michael and Heather LeCompte sold their old home, built in 1965 for Clarence and Marche Chase, owners of the Chase Gardens greenhouse complex, but more recently engulfed by new development, and moved to a nearby house on the bank of the canal across from the park. “I call it a water-house because it’s blue like water,” says Andrew, who helped his dad build the boat they use to cruise the canal almost every evening year-round. “We used our stimulus check to buy pontoons from a guy in Vancouver,” dad Michael explains, “and put a deck on it made from a plywood partition wall in the old house. We went out and saw trash in the water.” They quickly learned that their oar wasn’t useful for picking things up, so they bought a four-foot-long grabber tool. “We found vitamin water bottles, fishing bobbers and bike locks,” Andrew enumerates, and Michael adds, “A whole car seat, blankets and clothing. Lane Apex garbage pickup has been very good; they pick up extra bags if our bin is overfull.” Andrew’s passion for cleaning also extends to the family house. “I help Mommy clean the house,” he notes, “and I water all the plants.” His more esoteric interests include buses and trains; he has ridden every bus route in the Lane Transit District, and he can see trains half a mile away from his backyard. He knows every bus and train engine by its number. Andrew LeCompte will enter school this fall at Ridgeline Montessori, a public charter school.

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