If Mobile looks a little cleaner, thank Mike Wilber
Mobile's Mike Wilber is staying active in retirement. Along with playing pickleball, he sticks to a regular litter pickup schedule in Midtown and Spring Hill. (Michelle Matthews/This is Alabama)
“I’m going picking, dear,” Mike Wilber tells his wife, Renee, as he leaves their home in midtown Mobile.
“Picking” is what he calls the hobby he acquired at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. He walks up and down the roadways, using a bright yellow grabber to pick up all kinds of trash. His trained eye can spot a clear plastic wrapper here, a decomposing Styrofoam plate there, among the leaves, puddles, weeds and overgrown grass.
Retired CPA Mike Wilber’s daily cleanup rounds have been good for him as well as his community. (Michelle Matthews/This is Alabama)
Wilber, a CPA who retired two-and-a-half years ago to his native Mobile, says his hobby is well suited to his personality because, for one thing, he likes for things to be orderly. For another, he can do the job alone – perfect for a “friendly introvert,” as he calls himself. He likes to listen to podcasts as he walks. “I’m thoroughly entertained,” he says.
By 7 a.m. on a recent, cloudless Mobile morning, Wilber was headed west on Old Shell Road in midtown Mobile. As he crossed Florida Street, a woman rolled her window down. “Thank you!” she said, but he didn’t hear her. When he was a baby, he suffered a profound hearing loss.
“I’ve got good powers of concentration, and I’m very efficient, but I miss things,” he says. He makes up for it by wearing a high-tech hearing aid and reading lips.
Wilber converted a former beach cart – the kind with the big back wheels that can easily roll through sand – into a rolling trash can that he pulls behind him as he goes. He’s filled it with an empty black trash bag clipped onto the sides of the cart. In a zippered compartment, he stores several water bottles.
Tall and thin with a shock of white hair, Wilber wears one of his “pickleball outfits” — a moisture-wicking T-shirt tucked into his shorts and compression socks that come to just below his knees. The socks are “kind of a signature look for me,” he says with a grin.
After being derailed from his other hobby, pickleball, when the venues shut down because of COVID-19, he started “picking” by default. “When COVID hit, I didn’t want to hang around the house all day,” he says. He would take walks and pick up as much trash as he could by hand. Soon, he knew he needed a way to collect more, and he thought of the folding beach cart in the attic.
It’s hard to believe the energetic 60-something was ever sedentary, but he insists he was. “I think my wife was convinced I’d be a couch potato, but it turns out it’s the opposite.”
In his first year of retirement, Wilber lost 40 pounds by hitting the elliptical and rowing machines at the gym, then gradually lost another 15. “I have great energy,” he says. “I weigh less than I did when we got married”— 46 years ago. He and Renee have three daughters and 11 grandchildren.
For months, he picked up trash seven days a week. At one point, he did a “hard clean” of the I-65 Service Road between Old Shell Road and Dauphin Street, filling nine bags on one side and 12 on the other. His “territory” includes his own environment, which he considers to be the areas he drives in most frequently – comprising many miles along some of Mobile’s main thoroughfares and some side streets in Midtown and Spring Hill.
Now that pickleball has started back up, he’s playing at least four mornings per week, but he intends to keep up his second hobby in the afternoons. On this particular August morning, he makes a rare find: a $10 bill in a vacant lot. Occasionally he finds cash and reinvests it into his effort by buying garbage bags, but it’s more common for him to find garden tools left behind by lawn crews, he says.
It’s been about a month since he walked this route on Old Shell Road, and he’s impressed by the relatively small amount of trash he collects this morning. By the time he gets back to his starting point two hours later, he has filled one large bag. “I could do this all day long,” he says. “It beats sitting on the couch.”
He hopes that the sight of him hard at work, sweating in the Mobile heat, will inspire others to think before they litter. “In my mind, maybe this is some example-setting,” he says, then he waxes philosophical. “Who’s to say it’s not a part of why I’m here?”
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This story originally appeared on AL.com.
