Where they found themselves - traipsing around the woods in boots and mud-splattered sweatshirts, pulling plastic bags and old tires out of a chilly creek - was not what they expected.

"You know, we eat at Outback and Bertucci's all the time and we didn't know this was down here," said Danny Campbell. "This is just terrible."

The Campbells were among a few dozen volunteers picking up trash and debris in Church Creek between the parking lot at Home Depot and Route 2 in Parole. It was part of Project Clean Stream, an annual event coordinated to have hundreds of volunteers at different sites throughout the Chesapeake Bay cleaning up streams in the watershed. It is organized by the Alliance of the Chesapeake Bay and partner organizations.

Much of the trash behind the Outback Steakhouse, Bertucci's Italian Restaurant and Home Depot was little stuff. Mixed in with the leaves were items like old food wrappers, cigarette butts and loads of plastic shopping bags weighed down in the muck of the stream or shredded and wrapped around fallen trees.

Most of this kind of litter gets down there when winds and heavy rains carry it from the parking lots and roads down into Church Creek, which eventually feeds into the South River, said Jennifer Carr, a site organizer.

"Forty to 50 percent of the area here around Church Creek is impervious. When you look around and see all the pavement around in this parking lot, it has an impact," she said.

But then, there was the big stuff.

They found a recliner, then an ottoman. There was a TV set, a vacuum cleaner, old tires and a shopping cart. Someone pulled a full-sized hanging light fixture and another picked up an entire kitchen sink. A couple of trash cans, which looked like they'd been filled before being rolled down the side of a small ravine, were near the creek.

Placing an old car battery on two-by-fours resembling a gurney, a few volunteers carefully climbed up the hill trying not to spill acid. "I'm sure the wind just blew this down here," one of them wryly remarked.

Down the road off of General's Highway, volunteers filled at least two 40-foot trash containers with discarded tires, said Bob Whitcomb, president of the Severn River Association and organizer for the cleanup site on Clements Creek. The creek feeds into the Severn River.

The Parole area near the shopping centers is one of the notoriously bad spots for "midnight dumping," said Diana Muller, the South Riverkeeper. Muller said she's tried chasing folks away and calling the police when she sees them dumping trash, but every year they find more.

"It's disgusting, totally disgusting," Muller said, surveying the creek. "People are apathetic."

People should care about the banks of these creeks if they care about healthy crabs and oysters downstream, said Lori Orme of Mayo as she climbed uphill picking up trash. She and her husband are second-generation watermen and she's seen the impact of pollution from trash and runoff from roads and yards.

"I've seen South River go downhill fast," Orme said.

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