THEY CLEAN UP NICELY

Erin Mason carries dozens of plastic straws, a felt-tip marker, a soda can and several empty chip bags. Nicholas Garcia carries a small piece of rotted pallet wood and a tangle of string. Clara Missman carries electrical wire, a glass bottle and fast-food wrappers. This gathering - a Keep Nature Wild (KNW) trash pickup event in east Mesa started midmorning, under a green tent set up in the back corner of a dirt parking lot. Cameron Jarman, one of the founders of KNW, delivered some simple instructions while standing in the bed of a truck: Pick up trash, but with a few caveats. Watch out for snakes. Beware of glass. Don't pick up needles. Drink plenty of water. Owned and managed by the Arizona State Land Department, this land is wide open, a natural desert area full of native plants. It's not a state park or a recreation area it's just land. On one side of the plot is a public park. On the other, several hundred yards away and separated by a fence, is the State Route 202 freeway. Forrest and Parker Leeper ages 6 and 4, respectively are out here with kid-size trash pickers and buckets they decorated with stickers and Sharpies. Kids are out here in strollers. Others are running circles around their parents. This is a multipurpose Saturday morning a teachable moment, and a chance to run off some energy. The parents don't seem fazed by the dangers they might find the snakes or glass or needles but they keep a close eye on their curious kids. These parents carry a responsibility to teach their kids the price of littering. You can tell a lot about people, and what they care about, based on what they carry.

What people carry varies by size and weight. The kids pounce on trash picking up labels and empty water bottles, and adding them to bags their parents are carrying.

The Leeper boys, together, carry a lizard. Kara, their mother, carries the weight of teaching her children to make environmentalism a habit.

Strong men and women carry truck tires and trailer parts and the remnants of an old, burned boat. Someone left an entire fridge out here. Participants carry these parts and the fridge contents back to the dumpster.

The things people carry are largely driven by someone else's convenience.

Among these things are rims, stripped car wheels and a shopping cart without any wheels. There is a slew of construction materials, piping and electrical wire from demo jobs - items simply easier to drive out to the middle of the desert and dump than to dispose of properly.

Other participants carry bags filled with plastic foam egg cartons and single-use plastic bags. There are rusty paint buckets, recyclable water bottles in every size, and shotgun shells. There is a banged-up car hood with chipped paint. Rachel McDermotte carries a pool noodle, a tape measure and the shards of a broken sink.

The things they carry are determined, to some extent, by experience and responsibility.

Daniel Richerson, a former police officer, carries the duty of monitoring and cleaning up. He's a natural resource manager for the Arizona State Land Department - and one of just two people in the state with that job. He and his counterpart are responsible for millions of acres of land the department owns.

"We wanted it to be the structure of a social event, not a church," Huntington says, although you find the same sense of community and the same reverence toward nature at these events as you do within sanctuary walls.

Cleanup efforts like this often are not possible because of a lack of resources and manpower, so when Richerson connected with KNW about this project, he was excited to have access to 100 eager volunteers for a few hours.

Missman, a natural resources and ecology student, carries the burden of wanting to keep trash out of the animal and plant habitat. "The problem is getting worse," she says. "I want to make a difference."

Sean Huntington, KNW's other founder, carries his camera, a frustration about the littered ground he stands on and the chagrin of a community he helped to create.

Jarman gets called away shortly after the trash pickup starts. Someone has come across a needle, and he must run interference. He picks up the syringe, with the protection of gloves and a plastic bag for proper disposal, and carries it to his car. This is a common, though easily mitigated, occurrence during these trash events.

Jarman and Huntington both have the always-disheveled look of outdoorsmen: a permanent state of hat hair, mountain-man scruff and never-spotless boots. They're joined by Jarman's wife, Casi, who's also Huntington's sister. You can tell she's most herself in jeans and a cotton T-shirt. The three form the perfect balance of personality you want along no matter the adventure: They're equal parts "roll with the punches" and energetic.

Keep Nature Wild grew about as organically as the nature it's protecting. The Jarmans, avid hikers, began keeping track of their treks in 2013. They documented them - with pictures and simple