Adaptive Curmudgeon

The citizens you meet at dumps are the cream of the crop! Want to know why America rocks? Go to a dump!

It was a flurry of activity. A couple dozen vehicles (which is a crowd in these parts) were speeding from pile to pile. Nearly every vehicle was a truck and most (mine included) were towing trailers. Rusty Toyotas and gleaming diesel monsters were equally represented. Everyone operated their vehicle with the subtle confidence of people who know what they’re doing.

Real Americans have equipment and they know how to use it.

There were no roads between piles; just informal narrow rutted dirt trails. Luckily every truck was expertly piloted; zipping efficiently and quickly from pile to pile. A Wal-mart parking lot reminds me of chimps at a zoo but here, in the natural habitat of men and trucks, machinery was flitting around like bees in a hive.

Cooperation reigned.  When vehicles met on narrow paths an instant and silent negotiation ensued. Everyone worked together to slip past each other. I saw three trucks zooming down a narrow dead end path while two trucks (both with trailers) approached in the opposite direction.  On a city street one or more would be piloted by a fool and it would slow everyone’s progress. There were no jackass antics here. Drivers immediately adapted. All five jockeyed into place; one paused, two continued, one backed up, and one eased off the path. With flawless precision and timing everyone took their turn filtering though the bottleneck. Elapsed time? Forty seconds tops. Total and instant cooperation among strangers! I’ve seen people screw up merging grocery carts. A dump brings out the best in men.

Yes, I said men. Every truck had from one to three men; occasionally you’d see a boy happily riding shotgun. Probably 50 people at a a time were hard at work with people entering and leaving in quick intervals. I saw only one woman; she was unloading a truck like everyone else. Good for her! In local lingo the men would admiringly say “she’s a keeper!” A woman can do anything a man can do but apparently men take out the garbage. I don’t know why.

Everyone was smiling. Did I mention that? Amid piles of junk everyone was as happy as a lark.

People who work have pride. Pride feels good.

Getting something done, even the mundane, is progress. Progress feels good.

People who are sullen and useless don’t go to the dump. Good thing too; we don’t need their drama. We’ve got work to do.

I lined up my trailer. It was a tight fit between two trucks. Three guys were hard at work emptying them. They saw me and nodded. Two shifted to the back and one jumped in the truck bed. My runway was clear. I engaged 4×4 and backed just right; easing up a steep muddy slope and swerving around nasty ruts. Whew! Backing with skill is imperative in the high society of a dump!

Before I’d opened my door, one of the adjacent trucks roared off and another was lining up to replace it. While I was heaving old siding on the pile I noticed a guy (who, like me, was there solo) that was struggling with some big sheets of plywood. I grabbed the other ends and helped. He thanked me and zoomed off.  The next person backed in just inches past my truck mirror. I wasn’t worried. If he couldn’t drive he wouldn’t be here. Three guys jumped out and started flinging old shingles while telling jokes.

I was unloading as fast as I could. Construction debris is heavy! I was about two thirds done. I’d just finished wrestling with an old plank and reached for the next item.  Half of the remaining load was gone. Huh? I looked up and two fellows were reaching in and chucking stuff fast and furious. “Gee thanks!” I stammered to one. “No sweat”, he said, “no use sitting on my ass waiting for you.” I glanced up and saw his truck lined up for my spot. Both doors were open. With their help the trailer was unloaded in 45 seconds. I thanked both fellows, dropped the truck in gear, and motored out. They waved and seconds later were occupying the spot I’d vacated.

Cooperation and independence. Chaos that generates order. Stunning efficiency.

I got in and out and moved a half ton of debris in 15 minutes. About the same speed as everyone else. When a group of people has no losers, industriousness takes hold.

It was heartening. Like everyone, I get concerned about our nation. We bear a lot of fat useless turds getting elected by other fat useless turds. The losers of society make things hard for the rest of us. Fortunately that’s not the whole picture. There is still a backbone of hard working, cooperative, industrious citizens. Folks who are equipped and willing to get things done. Folks who will help you unload your trailer because it’s a nice thing to do and because they want to get your ass out of the way. There are places where everyone has a goal and makes it happen. Places where nobody is bitching and everyone is happy because the people who bitch aren’t fouling the air. Go to a dump. You’ll find hope and optimism there. Americans who take out the trash continue to hold it together.

My “dump”, like all government services, is managed specifically to be a pain in the ass. The dump is locked when it’s closed (because people will steal the garbage?). It’s open on a schedule that only a committee could devise. As far as I can tell it’s open from 2:35 pm to 4:27 pm on Thursdays and from dawn until the coffee runs out on alternate prime numbered Saturdays during the summer season which runs from the spring equinox through the opening day of deer season. Following the third moon after the neap tides it will revert to winter hours which have not yet been determined but which will be posted 30 days in advance on the bulletin board behind the coffee pot at the sheriff’s office. The dump is never open on Sunday because God said so. I can’t wait until these loons run medicine!

Being the kind of citizen that government hates, a person who has a job, it’s hard to get there when its open. I set my alarm to wake early (not too early!) Saturday morning. I move at glacial speed on Saturday mornings. Sometimes I miss my chance. I’m ok with that. I’m a land owning redneck homesteader and I’ve got room to store stuff. Also Saturday morning coffee is “me time”.

I haul everything with my open topped trailer. I rarely tie the load down. I prefer to stack debris based on aerodynamics and density. It’s a game. Planning the highway speed air flows of rotten plywood flung upon light plastic bags full of “ugh” is an art and a science. There are rules to this game: Density is king (heavy stuff stays put). Anything smaller than a quarter is fair game for “aerial distribution”. Anything that leaks out is recycled as an asphalt treatment. If something whips out and lands on the roadside you lose and have to go back and pick it up. Bonus round: if it smells exceptionally bad you should take it through the nearest McDonalds drive through!

The dump, like anything run by the government, requires regrettable personal interaction with regrettable persons. The local dump has one employee. I don’t know his name. I call him “Ralph” because Ralph is a friendly name and I’m trying to curb my natural impulse to call everyone “Asshole”. I’m sure he’s a nice guy at home but at work he’s moodier than a bi-polar grizzly. Now that I think about it…he smells like a grizzly too. On a good day he’ll smile and chat and I’ll think “that Ralph fellow is such a gentleman”. On a bad day I’ll wind up thinking “he’s an asshole and I’d pay good money to have him kidnapped and shipped to Bolivia in a cargo container filled with cobras and used car salesmen.”

On my most recent “dump run” I knew it was not a good day for Ralph. He sighed like my arrival was the saddest personal tragedy he’d experienced since his childhood dog died on Christmas morning. I could see the body language at 60 paces. He should get an Oscar for that kind of overacting. He waddled over to my truck while glaring at me like I was something he scraped off his shoe. He had a battered clipboard and carried it like a Samurai Sword.

He examined my trailer as if my garbage wasn’t up to his high standards. It wasn’t. No garbage is ever suitable for the suffering and overworked Ralph. No matter what I’m carrying he always complains that I’ve mixed different kinds of materials. He does this to everyone. The only people that would fill an entire load with just one kind of material are commercial haulers with dump trucks or exceptionally large farm families with thirty seven children generating used diapers by the ton.

As always I had to listen through an annoying lecture about sorting each waste component into each location in the dump. (Hint to Ralph: I can figure out where my wood waste goes using deductive reasoning and the presence of a sixty foot pile that’s composed entirely of wood.) Luckily, I always get through the gate in a few seconds. No matter how hard Ralph tries he’ll never be anything but a genius and a hero compared to the TSA.

Once you’re through the gate you’re done with government interaction. Everything looks brighter from this point on!

When I was a kid I thought the dump was the coolest place on earth. I was right.

A “dump” is the glorious place where you dispose of both boring household garbage and cool stuff like broken lamps and trashed lawnmowers. You can learn a lot at a dump. Dumps are the non-metaphoric end of the line for the material possessions that make us better than cavemen. They’re also the end game of Wal-Mart consumerism which probably makes us worse.

Dumps are a window on local government because they’re run by an alphabet soup of local or regional entities. They’ll inexplicably try to obscure the purpose of a dump; calling it something euphemistic like “solid waste facility”. This is an affront to humanity and reason why bureaucrats are thought of as snobbish yahoos. It is a dump and all right thinking humans know that’s the proper word.

Urban and rural citizens have different relationships to the dump. The urban language is awash in smoke and mirrors vocabulary: City dwellers use (“are desperately dependent upon”) contractors (“monopolistic garbage disposal conglomerates”) to haul their solid waste (“crap”) to the solid waste facility (“dump”). They pay (“get screwed”) a lot (“hard”) for this voluntary (“mandatory”) service. Rural folk avoid euphemisms; we put crap in trucks and drive it to the dump. We can’t totally avoid the spin; we pay nothing (“get taxed”) for this “free” service (“not free”) and participate voluntarily (“voluntary in the sense that you can choose to not pay property taxes and wind up homeless”).

Hauling your own garbage is good for you. The antiseptic relationship suburbanites have with garbage hides realities. A sweaty redneck hefting a broken dishwasher onto a pile of discarded appliances understands the environment and recycling in ways that his urban brethren don’t. He’s less likely to get all atwitter about a recyclable grocery bag because he’s seen things.