By Gabriel Cohen
Captain Ahab hurled his harpoon at the Great White Whale. Don Quixote tilted at windmills with his lance. Taylor Mali, a poet in Brooklyn, has become known for wielding a long and pointy weapon at city treetops.
His quest began two years ago, after his wife, Rachel, looked upon the Bradford pear tree out the window of their Carroll Gardens apartment. She found her view marred by a plastic deli bag caught in its bare branches. Dutifully, Mr. Mali went to the Home Depot and bought a yellow metal painter’s pole that could extend to 21 feet. Within minutes of his return, he had managed to tug down the trash and earn some husbandly karma.
In possession of a $50 pole and with no ceilings to paint, he began yanking down other derelict plastic bags stuck in trees around the neighborhood. “I had made my wife happy, so my day was made,” he recalled. “I decided to see if I could make someone else’s, too.”
So began the legend of the Plastic Bagman and the Snatchelator.
Mr. Mali modified his equipment, adding some L-brackets for more snagging capacity, which turned it into “something like a spear with an awkward sprangle of metal pieces at the end” — this is the Snatchelator. He also gave himself an alter ego: the Plastic Bagman.
website, his
Instagram account and through some magnetic business cards that he sticks up on lampposts and hands out to neighbors.
For no charge (though donations for new equipment are welcome), he will travel across his own neighborhood, plus Cobble Hill, Red Hook, Gowanus and Boerum Hill. He will sometimes venture beyond this zone, as when he grabbed a bag for a desperate would-be client in Dumbo who offered to make a $200 donation to the charity of his choice (Planned Parenthood).
his own crusade, but Mr. Mali says he started bag-grabbing before he found out about the article. He averages about five or six appointments a month, with a higher rate in winter, since bare branches impale more bags.
He estimates that he has “a 99 percent success rate, as long as they’re within reach.” When asked if he keeps them as trophies, he laughed. “I wear them on my belt to scare away other bags,” he said. He has also pulled down sneakers, an errant garden umbrella and a number of Mylar balloons.
Heather Mitchell, a TV writer and producer who lives on Hoyt Street, contacted Mr. Mali after being annoyed for more than a year by a black garbage bag trapped in a Callery pear tree in front of her townhouse. “It was hideous,” she said. “We watched it shred and waste away until it was a ghost of itself.” She heard about Mr. Mali from
Pardon Me for Asking, a local blog. She made an appointment and was amazed at how quickly he came and pulled it down.
On the way to such an engagement, Mr. Mali will often stop to take down other random bags. Sometimes he works with the help of two small assistants, his 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter. He enjoys the attention he gets from spectators, as when he recently received an unexpected ovation from a crowd in Carroll Park, but most of the time he does his work unheralded, alone.
What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World.”
In his spare time, he continues his mission: ridding urban trees of garbage. Though New York City has outlawed some plastic shopping bags, he still has plenty of work to do; he noted that some types are still exempt, and “there’s no ban on Mylar balloons.”
On a recent Sunday afternoon, as he prepared to do combat with a foe fluttering high in a London plane tree on Hicks Street, he offered a quote from the philosopher Edmund Burke: “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.”
