When Jeff Hvid moved from Connecticut to Burlingame with his family at age 11, he was immediately fascinated with Half Moon Bay. What didn’t fascinate him were the bottles and cans he’d find on the beach. “My mom says I’d pick them up to throw them away,” he says. “I’ve always been picking up small-scale stuff,” he continues. “It comes naturally.”Now 62 and living in San Anselmo (where he and his wife moved to 35 years ago), the habit has taken this former professional mushroom forager to a completely different level. “About 15 years ago, I was at the watershed near Fairfax,” he says. “I’m a bird watcher, and I’d stopped at a pullout, looked over the edge and saw a TV, bottles and cans. I decided to pick them up. But the deeper in I got, the more stuff I found. I got mad. I spent two or three hours and made a pile in the pullout that I could clear away more easily. It became what I did on Saturdays.”
Hvid, who’s now a carpenter at True North Construction in San Anselmo, has since removed tens of thousands of pounds of trash, much of it single-handedly. He’s also been co-captain of California Coastal Cleanup Day, which takes place annually in late September.
“He’s one of a kind, I can honestly say that,” says his friend of 10 years, Joe Brubaker, an artist who uses found materials in his work. “He began by hauling the stuff up from the creeks and shorelines and piling it along the road, where he’d pick it up and haul it to the dump. Since some people find a pile of junk by the side of the road a reason to add their own used mattresses, sofas and such, Jeff began making his piles into ‘art,’ thinking people might be inhibited from adding to the pile."
Brubaker and Hvid are involved in a collaborative art group (Joe Brubaker and the Exquisite Gardeners), which recently displayed their work at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design. Hvid estimates he keeps about 1 percent of his findings for the group’s artwork.
He gets permission from the state park rangers, watershed managers and others, as necessary, for his cleanups. They then help with the junk removal.
“I’ve done hundreds of cleanups,” he continues. “I did two series of them when my oldest son, Harper, was in the Sea Disk Program at Sir Francis Drake High School. We did 13 cleanups over four months—and pulled out 14,000 pounds of stuff.” The following year, Bobby Blaine, a senior who saw the good that had been done wanted to continue it, so Hvid led the program to collect 12,000 pounds.
“The environment, that’s my gig,” he says. “Doing the cleanups makes me feel good. I’m always encouraging people to get involved. It’s so simple. You don’t have to do what I do, just open your eyes to what we have and care about preserving it. Don’t leave trash. Pick up something someone else left behind. Just be aware!”
