The Dump

This morning was my first trip to the Athens/Hocking Reclamation Center.

On Saturday afternoon, Ben helped a friend of ours who lives way out in the sticks pull scrap metal and tires out of the muck in his yard. I wasn't there, but I hear it was quite an ordeal. Ben put our truck in 4 wheel drive and tried to get out of the yard, but ended up burying the suspension up to the axles and sliding sideways so that our truck was resting against our friend's house. By the time our friend's sister hauled our truck out of the mud with her gargantuan diesel one million horse power truck, the dump was closed. When I saw that the load was not very large, my first thought was, "Oh, we should just throw that into the woods behind out house," but the eco-friendly part of me overpowered the trashy part and I didn't suggest it out loud.

So I drove our truck full of half a tractor tire, the back half of a TV, a spare tire, long strips of jagged, rusty metal, shards of glass, and a tattered seat from a small car to the dump this morning. Jenny came along, as I am currently her ride to work and class. I confessed my blue collar desire to start a dump of my own in our woods. She laughed.

Let me say, I grew up next to a junk yard. As in, I could see the junk yard from my bedroom window. My dad is a mechanic and we took regular trips there together in our galoshes, work pants, and flannel shirts. I am perfectly at home in a smoky trailer that serves as an office. I used all my junk yard skills this morning.

The dump was like the worst parts of the junk yard times 1000. Even with a small load, they have you drive straight back about a mile, right up to the edge of the pit that used to be a hill. There were two enormous bulldozers pushing piles of garbage into the pit, and one normal sized bulldozer trying hard to keep the 5 t0 10 inches of mud from becoming the kind of disaster that swallows men whole. I couldn't believe the size of the pit. It looked like someone had ripped a hole out of a huge hill, and was slowly but surely filling it in. Amazing. When I pulled up, the only instruction I got was from the man in the closest giant bulldozer. From my truck, I gestured to ask if I was in his way, but he just pointed at a small pile of trash (maybe 10 by 10 by 30 foot), as in, drop your crap here.

So I backed up to it and heaved my garbage onto the pile. Jenny was full of horror at wonder at the whole mess. I felt at home. I'm not sure what the dump is reclaiming. I know eventually, my garbage will be covered in a few dozen feet of soil, and grass will be planted on it. Eventually, people will forget it was a dump, and they will build houses and plant trees there. Garbage is different when you think of it terms of what you want your grandkids to build their house on, or what you want the hills on the countryside to be made of.