Maysville, N.C. ? Since his retirement three years ago, Elmer Eddy hasn’t just relaxed and taken it easy in his home beside the broad and beautiful White Oak River.

He paddles the river to pick up trash — other people’s trash.

Eddy, 84, is a former insurance company executive who left Raleigh when he retired. He moved to Swansboro, between Camp Lejeune and the Croatan National Forest on North Carolina’s southern shoreline.

Shortly afterward, Eddy read a news story about individual responsibility for keeping the environment clean.

Eddy, an enthusiastic canoeist, was inspired. He was sick of seeing other people’s trash as he paddled the river, which starts in the state-owned Hofmann Forest and flows through the Croatan on its way to the sea.

“I want to see a beautiful wilderness,” he said. “It’s a short river. It doesn’t start in the mountains. It doesn’t get Raleigh trash. It’s ours, so we ought to be able to keep it clean.”

Litter-fighting trip

On a recent summer day, he was behind the wheel of his battered, red 1979 Ford pickup leading a band of eight litter-fighting disciples to a five-hour paddling trip along the 48-mile-long river’s upper reaches near Maysville. Their goal was to paddle the river and collect trash from a campground to a series of nine small lakes formed when old quarry pits along the river filled with water.

Eddy donned a straw hat and paddled his one-man canoe with deft flicks of his double paddle, never seeming as tired as his younger companions.

By the end of the day, they had filled about a dozen bright orange trash bags with bottles, cans, juice boxes, paper and pieces of cloth. They snared a tire, two basketballs, a miniature soccer ball and a flattened metal bucket.

Larry Wayne drove from his home in Cary, outside Raleigh. He said he became a disciple of Eddy’s cleanups when he got an e-mail about “a guy who wanted to clean up the White Oak River. I had to come help.”

Fellow paddler and retired postal worker Ken Court, of Jacksonville, said he liked working with Eddy, but got frustrated with litter.

“We’ve only got one environment,” he said.

Enlisting helpers

Eddy said he would paddle the river alone to pick up trash if no one wanted to come along — and he has, occasionally. But it’s hard to resist the urging of the grinning, gentle Eddy, who uses e-mail to round up friends and a Web page to spread his gospel.

Dale Weston, a military retiree who lives in nearby Jacksonville and was a member of the New River Foundation, said he got interested when he received an e-mail that had bounced through river and paddling groups about Eddy.

“I knew he must be old, but I had no idea how old,” Weston said. “The day he was 84, he was out paddling.”

Eddy says he has been canoeing all his life, though snow skiing is his favorite hobby. But picking up trash is his passion, so much so that he has earned the title The White Oak River Trashman.

Eddy has gotten his 14-year-old grandson, Jack, interested in trash pickup. Jack paddled a small red kayak on the trip down the White Oak and snagged trash, but had to be called off when he came to a bank loaded with trash and old refrigerators.

“That’s a real dump,” Eddy said. “We’ll have to leave it.”

Branching out

As he collects trash, Eddy leaves behind litter bags with fishing concessionaires and puts up signs that say the area has been cleaned up by the Izaak Walton League; he belongs to the local chapter of the national conservation organization that was founded in 1922.

When Eddy feels his river is clean enough for the time being, he branches out to the other waterways that lace the area, again using e-mail to enlist other paddlers to join him. Just a week after the White Oak trip, he was paddling the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway near Swansboro.

He works with local governments to arrange for trash to be picked up once it’s bagged.

Once, he and a couple of followers were cleaning up under the bridge over Bogue Sound and collected so much in orange bags that they couldn’t haul it out in canoes.

The problem with litter is twofold, Eddy said. Fishermen throw trash into the river and some residents use the water as a trash can instead of paying local dump fees.

Eddy’s persistence has won him acclaim in the Izaak Walton League magazine and an award from Keep Onslow Beautiful, a local anti-litter organization.

He also founded the Stewards of the White Oak River Basin, a coalition that organizes cleanups and lobbies local governments to help with litter.

“While the rest of us environmentalists worry about such weighty topics as global climate change, stormwater or overdevelopment, Elmer concerns himself with more earthy problems — the trash that litters our roadsides and streambanks,” said Frank Tursi, the coastkeeper for the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

“He’s passionate about it and dedicated to getting rid of it. Elmer won’t rest until the last paper cup, beer can or errant crab pot is removed from the White Oak River.”