Vashon’s ‘litter old ladies’ clean up island roads
Published 1:30 am Tuesday, July 7, 2026
What do you call two retired women who spent their careers collecting taxes and now spend retirement collecting trash?
A couple of “litter old ladies.”
At least that’s the punchline Deborah Diamond and Elizabeth Boutin have created for themselves since moving to Vashon from Seattle 11 years ago.
Nearly every day, Diamond and Boutin, both 76, pull on bright yellow safety vests, grab litter pickers and a fistful of old Bartell Drugs bags, and head for the shoulder of a Vashon road.
Diamond works one side, while Boutin takes the other, each scanning the ground for something that doesn’t belong.
“We’re both very orderly people,” said Diamond. “We just can’t stand to walk by trash.”
That instinct goes back decades. During their 30-year careers with the Internal Revenue Service, the pair turned their daily walk from their Queen Anne neighborhood home to the Federal Building into an informal cleanup route, dropping whatever they found into the nearest garbage can without much thought. When they moved to Vashon, there were no cans, so they started carrying their own bags.
“It’s kind of a dopamine rush,” said Diamond. “You see something that’s not supposed to be there, you grab it with your picker, put it in a bag, and then it’s gone.”
Slowly, the two shifted from being tax collectors to trash collectors. Today, they officially maintain a two-mile stretch of West Side Highway between 220th Street and the Vashon Recycling and Transfer Station, but they don’t limit themselves to boundaries.
“If there’s litter, we’ll find it,” said Boutin. “We just can’t help ourselves.”
Over time, they’ve developed their own language for roadside debris. There’s the “blowout” — plastic sheeting, ice bags, anything that catches wind from the back of a pickup truck. The “slide-off” — coffee mugs and forgotten paperwork left on top of a car. Then there’s the “throwout,” which is what it sounds like: beer cans, vape cartridges and food wrappers tossed from a window. There’s also the absurd, like a frozen 15-pound turkey and always just one work glove. “Never two,” according to Boutin.
They once hauled 60 gallons of dumped paint from the woods piece by piece before calling King County to take it away. Another time, they found 103 wine bottles clustered in one spot.
“Those kids must’ve graduated,” Diamond joked. “We don’t find those in groups like that anymore.”
Fireball bottles, though, never seem to disappear. After finding so many, the pair finally went out and bought a bottle just to see what the fuss with cinnamon whisky was all about. The same with Torpedo beer and Evan Williams.
“Sometimes that’s how we form our shopping list,” Diamond said, laughing. “By what we find.”
Not everything they find goes in the trash.
Clothing gets washed and donated to Granny’s Attic Thrift Shop, along with toys, electronics, sports equipment and anything else that still has some life in it. Their old investigative skills come in handy when they find wallets — Diamond now works as an independent workplace investigator — and they’ve tracked down owners from driver’s licenses and credit cards. Boutin said one woman cried when they returned her ID, hours before a flight she wouldn’t have been able to board without it.
Back at their Burton Hills home, an antique type case hangs on the wall. Its tiny compartments hold little toys, old emblems and odd trinkets rescued from the roadside over the years. Most people wouldn’t think twice about them, but for Boutin and Diamond it’s a small memory of where they were and what they found together.
The two don’t have any plans to slow down in retirement. Every Thursday they volunteer through AARP Tax-Aide at Vashon Lutheran Church, helping prepare nearly 150 tax returns for free each year for island residents.
“We like projects,” Diamond said. “We like being busy and we like contributing.”
After all these years, picking up litter has become second nature. So much so that Diamond sometimes has to save Boutin from herself. If they’re driving somewhere and pass trash along the road, Diamond has learned to offer the same advice: “Don’t look,” she tells Boutin. “Don’t look.” Otherwise, she knows they’ll end up turning around.
Maybe the move from tax collector to trash collector wasn’t much of a career change after all. For more than four decades, Diamond and Boutin have done the same kind of work: finding things that don’t belong and putting them where they do. Only the messes changed.
Eddie Macsalka is a contributing reporter for The Beachcomber.
