It was never on my bucket list, but now
I've visited a dump.
In this part of the world there's no
trash collection, but us residents pay some tax or other that gives
us access to the dump. The other day I received my “disposal use
permit,” a wallet-sized bright pink card, along with a sheet of
paper describing its use and restrictions.
Roughly, once a week I get to unload
500 pounds of trash at no charge, although to be precise, I get to do
that four times a month plus four additional visits. The card has the
each month of the year on it written four times, and each time I
visit the dump, it gets punched.
My card, now, has one punch.
Yesterday I lowered the top on the
Jeep, filled the back with some of the trash I'd accumulated since
moving here, and Minardi and I followed the signs to the dump. It's
only a few miles, a handful of kilometers, away, and we were there in
no time.
At the entrance there's a small
building with a woman inside, and every time I've visited it to ask
questions, there's been a different one. They've all been really
friendly and helpful, but this was the first time I actually waited
in line for the green light, drove up next to the building, and
waited on the scale.
It just took a minute and after some
talk about whether those of us who live here are Landerites (her
suggestion) or Landerians (mine), she told me to stop at the scale,
again, on the way down after unloading my trash, so the weight of my
empty Jeep could be entered into the system.
We made our way past the entrance
point, followed the road up the hill (or mountain. I've never been
sure about the difference), and once it was out of sight of the
entrance shack, became a dirt road.
Minardi, I like to think, enjoys riding
on dirt roads as much as I do. There's a lot of them out here, which
I use to justify the purchase of the Jeep.
There were some signs directing
traffic, separating commercial and septic dumpers from the rest of
us, and we kept going up and up the hill. It was a bright, clear day
and the view from the mountaintop was wonderful, and there was a sign
telling me to wait until directed to move.
There were a handful of trucks stopped
a little ahead of me and some guy in a bright, high visibility vest,
chatting with their owners. He eventually waved me ahead, pointed to
a spot where some trash was sitting, and then proceeded to ignore me.
I parked the Jeep, tossed the bags of
trash out of the back and onto the pile, and drove back down the
hill, back to the entrance shack. The trucks that were there when I
showed up were still there, the huge machines used to move the trash
around and crush it were still hanging around, waiting to move the
day's additions to the fields of compressed trash that waded around
the hilly peaks in the dump.
The place looked pretty much the way
I'd imagined, but I was surprised at the number of tires. There were
so many of them that they were using some to mark off roads, some to
hold signs in place, others piled in cairns of unknown purpose.
I'm in good enough shape that dumping
the trash myself wasn't an issue, but mentally noted that with no one
watching, I could have gotten rid of anything without drawing any
suspicion. I'm not sure I could get away with dumping a body, but
maybe …
When I got back to the shack, the woman
entered the Jeep's info (which must have included the weight of the
dog in the passenger seat) into her computer, wrote the license
number on my card, and handed it back.
Then, I was free to go. So, I did.
One thing I liked about the whole
process was waiting in line in my tiny Jeep between large pickups
filled to the brim, some with trailers holding even more trash, as
well as a couple of the huge, commercial trash trucks that show up
all over the world. I was dwarfed by them, and my little personal
load seemed almost laughable in comparison, but this will be how I
get rid of orange peels, used tissues, and coffee grounds for as long
as I live here.
And also, of course, those bodies...
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