Thursday May 28, 2020

HEAVE HO! OFF YOU GO!

“This is my last load,” I told the guy at the Roseau County Transfer Station.
“You’ve said that before,” he said smiling, inspecting all the junk in my truck.     
“Whattya got in here this time?”

It was my tenth load to the dump this month, so I really meant it. I had removed all the junk I had thrown around our place for the past 38 years. I had become ashamed of how I alone had affected the landscape so negatively, and so decided to just act, at long last, before the bugs came out and the heat set in.

The idea of taking things to the landfill had always bothered me. The fact that as a society we dumped our waste material on the land and then buried it, chewed away at my environmental perspective for decades, but not so much that I didn’t do the same thing at home, behind ‘the Shed From Hell’, ‘in the old Ford pickup and the Escort,’ ‘back in the woods,’ and ‘out by the old threshing machine,’ allowing I did, as so did my neighbors, albeit in different places. 

Every farm had its trash burning pile although burning trash was against the law. Many of my neighbors did it just as their families had done for years -- and I did too. Living in a rural area allows for certain transgressions, until you get caught or it catches up with you in the form of a trash fire gone wrong and you catch the woods and barn on fire. Marion?

Although it’s largely true, my excuses for not maintaining a clean farmstead included the fact, when I worked at jobs in town before retirement I often worked six to seven days a week during the busy growing season, or were otherwise kept busy in area factories. When I wasn’t working for others, I busied myself in other elements of just living and loving, and in between that spent the rest of my time writing eight -- often nine and ten days a week, and long into the night typing tons of stories for THE RAVEN and other local publications, or long letters and emails to family and friends. I was also consumed sleeping on occasion. Nonetheless, it was easier to just ignore the trash I had so carelessly distributed in some easily accessed spots until I finally matured to the point that I couldn’t anymore. 

I was also consumed sleeping on occasion

Several years ago, Joe and I visited the Knife River Indian Village near Stanton, Nort’ Dakota: https://www.nps.gov/knri/index.htm, where I walked the guide trail describing the layout of a village hundreds of years old; land, that before the National Park Service stepped in, was farmed over and laid to waste by ignorance and disrespect. Tourist season was over. The land was almost empty again of its other-world visitors like me, so I could imagine its ancestral spirits returning at dusk; their echoes heard along the river by those who listen, but what caught my eye was the evidence of the village’s unmarked trash piles, made largely of animal bones, that had emerged from the ground in various places, and brought to my mind all the rocks that mysteriously appear on the surface of a bare farm field when the frost goes out each spring.

Stepping off the footpath, I carefully wandered the midden and studied its perhaps gadzillion bone shards and fragments, with the realization that it represented human occupation as had other camp dumps had done throughout history, world-wide. “Hmmmm,” I thought. “This is quite the find. “

So to ease my mind, I accepted what I had been doing as a natural phenomenon; except most of our stuff wasn’t as biodegradable. The fact I hadn’t taken it to the dump before now was because I was ignorant of how to do it and allowed my fears their satisfaction factor; if I don’t do it, I won’t do it wrong. I had worried about the separation of recyclables, plus the fact that I was just moving my trash from my place to another place and resolving nothing in reality, except removing it from my line of sight to somewhere else.

It wasn’t that we didn’t recycle our stuff; we recycled all that we could especially in the later years; but I didn’t continue it with any conviction until I married my current wife, 'Jacqueline.' What we couldn’t recycle, we sometimes stuck in with Chairman Joe’s stuff to do it on a monthly basis through him (Hey, we asked him) that he had hauled to the dump by the garbage man, but that wasn’t fair because our material consumption has always been greater than his family (they’re a frugal sort).

I wasn’t into burning tires or old computer monitors, microwaves, or inkjet printers; I even had even a huge dot-matrix plotter printer I had brought home from the toy factory, which I’d never consider burning -- or burying, so rather than take them somewhere to get rid of them, these things just piled up here and there. 

Some things a person couldn’t immediately identify, at a glance, being naturally camouflaged and blended into the background like the three rusted 50-gallon burner barrels that had imploded side-by-side over the years. One had a nice cedar growing in it, the other two sported tall poplar saplings. In many other places, there were lots of crushed beer cans and rumpled tin cans; fists of plastic wrap and scrunches of used aluminum foil; metal odds and ends spanning many years of my marital history. It was a trip down memory lane and every piece jogged my memory. However I wasn’t so nostalgic to keep but a very few of them. The expression, “Hey, I might need this someday,” was exactly the reasoning I used when I decided to keep them in the first place and apparently I had been wrong.

Other junk locations included the bed and cab of my sky blue 1985 Ford F-150 pickup that I backed into its final resting place in about 2003 under its own power. Providing double-duty all that time since, it has faithfully served me as a tool and junk storage facility for seventeen years. I don’t doubt that with just a little effort including fresh gasoline and a good battery, the straight-six engine whose carburetor caught fire in Royalton, Minnesota, in 2002, would start up. But that’s not true of my red 1997 Ford Escort wagon and green 1989 Honda Accord, both grass-killing storage facilities, parked some distance apart. 

Other junk locations included the bed and cab of my sky blue 1985 Ford F-150 pickup 

 The Honda started two years ago, but the rear brake drums were frozen and couldn’t move, so it just sat and idled; we listened to the radio and marveled at the flip-up headlights, held in place with panduit straps, still worked. The Escort, last licensed in August of 2017, CD player works; but its engine is shot. Its seats and rear storage compartments hold an eighteen foot above-ground swimming pool, an archery target, and dozens of wood and plastic picture frames of various sizes -- that desperately need a home. (I haven’t got to them yet.)

The main focus of my clean up was the woodland area surrounding the rickety old stable I built over 30-years ago. After the horses departed, I had eventually filled that space with many ‘truck and house basement cleanings’ when I would dump the contents of my scourges there in garbage bags, cardboard boxes and plastic cut-out two-gallon oil jugs in addition to plastic five-gallon buckets full of rusted nails and bolts, old tools, ice scrapers, caulk tubes and guns; grease tubes, air fresheners, and magazines. Used oil too had become a problem.

 I used my lawn tractor to pull the trailer to my truck because the ground was too soft to drive on it with anything bigger

I wrenched from its hiding place along one wall, a wooden headboard scrawled with my daughter’s artwork on it; nearby were two hand scythes, a softball, a hardball, and a green tennis ball all in great condition; and several pair of old wood hames all wired together at one end. Chucked into the space between the roof and a wall was the broken plastic grill from my 1986 Toyota pickup. Below a shelf containing a brand-new, still-in-the-box Ford F150 water pump and radiator hose (never used), I dug out two sets of rusted tire chains.

Outside the shed, I miraculously discovered a ten-foot long 5/8-inch link log chain in the mud under my boot; that now hangs from a tree enjoying the sunshine since who knows when.

Using my reciprocating saw, I cut up a rotted wood picnic table that had sat beneath a gaping hole in the roof (that’s now been repaired) revealing a dozen various jugs and pieces of garden hoses, nozzles and connections. I wondered if it had been solely me that had amassed such a fortune in old garbage such as this. Could it be true?

“That magazine must be ancient, she’s so young there,” I said to my archeological-self, recognizing a current TV character as a much younger woman and me, in turn, a similar-aged much older man.
I sifted through the layers of my history in that dirt-floored dank old stable built of pallet wood scraps, cedar posts, and tamarack rafters, rolled sheathing, and corrugated steel roofing held down by old car tires and fallen tree limbs, held up in the center by a jack post and a home-made lamination of 2x4s and steel strapping.

I knew I still had to wrestle two rear tractor tires from behind the building, roll them away over rough ground, and get them into the truck, one atop the other. On its other side laid an assortment of partially empty two-gallon plastic oil jugs and waste oil. There was a rotted wooden dogsled with Hyfax plastic runners and machined hinge joints; its polypropylene harness lines still tied and bolted to its now frail frame aside a ten-speed bicycle whose tires and rusty chrome rims hadn’t seen air, nor its seat a butt, for twenty years.

I accepted my accumulations as common to human occupation if but for my own peace of mind. Although I was latent cleaning up my willful dumpage, I hadn’t done anything terribly new to the land than had its three other owner/ occupants since 1906: Engeborg Johnson, a widow, 1906-1911; John and Ostine Lohre 1911-1945 (although they never lived on the land); Martin and Irene (Palm) Davidson 1945-1971. [Martin had married the Lohre's daughter, Mable, in 1927, but she died in 1933 with cancer. Martin later married Irene Palm.]

I hoped that I hadn’t despoiled it any worse, recalling that in the late 1980s, wife No. 2 and I had cleaned the creek bank of glass jars and bottles, rusted cans and fence wire, and later-era plastic bottles, etc, that appeared to have been literally thrown out the door on the original house site. That creek bank is pretty clean now, although something small and shiny may glimmer there yet in the right light. I believe the Davidsons were the ones who left the steam threshing machine, a pull-type combine, and a vintage haystacker north of the building site, that I have chosen to leave as relics.

 I tried to go out every day and create a truckload of stuff to take to the dump; then go the next day, making the 53-mile round trip sometimes two times a week. My wife tried to dissuade me, saying I was working too long, too hard, too late. She would sometimes bring bottled water and a sandwich out to me, where I stood in the mud, motioning for me to come to her --because she wasn’t going to come to me. 

Oh yeah, didn’t I mention mud?

After all, it was spring; the snow had only melted from the northside of the woods a couple weeks earlier. I had removed deadfalls in the woods surrounding the stable and piled firewood-sized cobs off the trail, to dry for gathering later in the year. An old and damaged 16-foot Wenonah/Jensen canoe was exposed under the layers of humus; another project for a later day, if but yet another trip to the dump in my determination.

Water was pooled in front of the stable as a black muck until I spent a few hours channeling it northward through a large depression and a grown-over dead furrow that blocked its natural flow. I contemplated digging the trough another 70-feet to a natural field drain, but accepted it was too much work at that point. I decided I would improve on it with my tractor and plow after the ground dried up in the coming months, but for now I’d just do what was reasonable.

The water slowly drained away over the weeks to come. I kept digging the trough out as it filled in with sediment, and using long-handled pruners I cut finger-length tree roots out that were blocking the flowage; my leather steel-toed waterproof work boots a godsend those days, kept my feet dry, and protected my feet from unseen nails and wire hidden in the ground.

Losing my fear of getting stuck with my full-sized four-wheel drive pickup (and getting tired of using the wheelbarrow to haul stuff to the truck parked some distance away, one afternoon, after getting home from the dump, I backed in closer to the stable on higher ground. Then I loaded it good.
The next morning I came out and saw it had sunk about four-inches and so created a preparatory road of snowmobile track, car ramps, half sheets of plywood, and other stuff I hoped would support the wheels long enough for me to gain momentum and make it back to the yard, but I didn’t go four feet before the right rear wheel broke traction and the truck sank like a stone in slop. 

I had hoped to make it to the dump before the weekend-- because the Roseau dump isn’t open on Saturday, (unbelievably). So to make a 3.5 hour story short, I got out my Handyman jack and got enough stuff under all the tires ahead and behind, then using my tractor from some solid ground and a forty-foot tow strap, pulled it out of the hole to where I could finally drive the truck out and go to the dump. Never did that again. The wheelbarrow proved to be a necessity.

Four days later, I smiled as I walked under the canopy of green surrounding the old stable and the pickup. I did what I set out to do and I was happy with my work. The stable and pickup are functional as momentary storage places again; relatively water resistant and cleaner than they've been for a long time. I did a good job.