Dressed in a full-body wetsuit, neon green board shorts and flip-flops, zoology freshman Ryan O'Hagan heaved out the first of 28 bikes salvaged from the Red Cedar River during the fall river cleanup event hosted by the Fisheries & Wildlife Club on Sunday.
The bike O'Hagan found was falling apart, its wheels had no spokes and it was covered in mud.
Other items found in the river include thong underwear, three tables, a Target shopping cart, a bike rack with two bikes attached, a fire extinguisher, three purses, two vacuums and two wallets.
One of the purses was still intact with everything in it, so someone called the owner and she came to pick it up, said fisheries and wildlife junior Chris Homeister.
"You never know what you're going to find," said Homeister, also a member of the Fisheries & Wildlife Club and an event coordinator.
Students started arriving at around 9:30 a.m. to pull canoes out to the dock and get ready for the river cleanup, which lasted from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Homeister and fisheries and wildlife senior Kile Kucher, also president of the Fisheries & Wildlife Club, organized the 50 volunteers into groups that covered four sections of the Red Cedar River, spanning from the bridge behind the Kellogg Center to the one near Hagadorn Road.
Some people floated the river in canoes, some wore waders to collect trash near the shore and others walked along the banks to pick up loose litter. Everyone was provided with blue rubber gloves, black garbage bags and smaller green bags with handles.
"I'm doing it with some of my frat (Alpha Phi Omega) members," professional writing sophomore Ben Rubinstein said. "It's a good thing to do that needs to be done."
The cleanup started as a class called "The Red Cedar, a Meandering Laboratory" in the fall of 2000, but class members formed a club to make sure it happened every year.
Now the river cleanup is held twice each year, including once in the fall and once in the spring.
Several volunteers are members of the Fisheries & Wildlife Club or RISE, the Residential Initiative on the Study of the Environment, but students and East Lansing residents are also encouraged to help clean the river.
At the end of the cleanup, a total of 39 trash bags were collected.
"We're trying to change people's attitudes so they don't throw things in," Kucher said. "(We hope) people will realize it's a good river. People don't realize it's a clean river."
