Angel of the Highway : Volunteer Cleans Roadside Between Fillmore and Piru

The blue Adopt-A-Highway signs that have sprung up along California roads in the past three years usually feature the names of civic organizations or businesses, except for the occasional celebrity, such as Bette Midler.

But the two blue signs that mark off a lonely, three-mile stretch of California 126 in Piru list only the simple, intriguing name of “Lilith.”

Although her one-word name is reminiscent of stars such as Cher, Sting and Madonna, Lilith, a 48-year-old sales administrator for a Newbury Park computer modem manufacturer, is not a celebrity.

And she volunteered on her own to keep the road clean, without the backing of a business or nonprofit group.

“I didn’t have any other crazy friends,” she said.

Just to make it clear that she is a person and not an oddly named business or group, Lilith asked Caltrans to include the phrase “Ventura resident” on the sign.

She was motivated to join the cleanup effort, she said, by an aversion to litter that she inherited from her mother.

“She never let us litter,” Lilith said of her mother. “There was always a hand, a pocket” offered by her mother for stowing trash until a garbage can was found. “We never dropped anything.”

Her first choice had been to adopt a stretch of highway closer to her Ventura home, but most of those roads had already been claimed by the time she signed up for the program a few months ago.

So Lilith chose the road in Piru because of its connections to her family.

One hundred years ago, Lilith’s great-great-grandmother, Sophia Willard Padelford, left her husband in Nevada and came to California with her two sons to homestead in Piru.

None of Padelford’s descendants live in the Piru area now. Lilith grew up in Culver City and moved to Ventura two years ago after living for many years in San Francisco.

Lilith’s given name was Carol Mayfield. She discovered the name “Lilith” in a novel and adopted it as a nickname before taking it as her legal name in 1978. The name has no special or hidden meaning for her, she said.

“It was just pretty,” she said.

And she dropped her last name simply because the name Lilith “didn’t go with any other name. It was too strong, too independent.”

Lilith also demonstrates her commitment to independence in her work along the highway.

Seventy-two cleanup permits have been issued in Ventura County since Caltrans began its statewide Adopt-A-Highway program in 1989. But only 10 of these permits have gone to individuals.

Statewide, 3,211 cleanup permits have been issued, Caltrans officials said. Most participants do the work themselves, but some hire Caltrans-approved contractors to pick up the litter.

Lilith goes to her stretch of highway about once each month, spending four to five hours at a time scavenging the roadside for cigarette butts, globs of used motor oil stuck on leaves and grass, and other debris.

She dresses for the job, wearing heavy gloves and an orange, Caltrans-issued vest over a Western-style shirt and blue jeans.

Lilith is barely 5 feet, 3 inches tall, with fair skin and short, sandy hair. But she takes pride in her strength.

“I like physical labor,” she said. “It keeps me from getting soft.”

However, she acknowledged that the bright orange trash bags get heavy when they’re full.

Once, she found an inflatable, life-size plastic shark along the roadside which she used as a sled for hauling her trash.

One of her other unusual finds was a dead coyote.

She left that one alone, deciding not even to call the animal regulation department about the carcass.

“I figured nature would take care of it,” she said.

Lilith said she doesn’t expect any special recognition for her cleanup efforts, although she enjoys it when people occasionally honk and wave in appreciation as she is working.

But she hopes she can leave her own legacy in the area where her ancestors settled.

Her theory, she said, is that people are less likely to throw trash in an area that’s kept clean.