WW and I drove to the Salol dump the other day. He is in the middle of a project to remove eighty years of farm trash from his property. The previous owners did not have trash pickup and like most of their neighbors threw everything they couldn't burn or feed to the hogs into a pile in the woods.
When he's in the mood, WW will throw a pile of this trash into the back of his truck along with some of his own stuff (he doesn't have trash pickup) and for just a few dollars he can leave his trash at the dump or the transfer station to use its gentrified name.
WW will usually let me know when he has a load and asks if I have anything for the dump. Teresa and I try to recycle everything we can. Edibles go to the compost bin, plastic and tin to the recycling bins in Roseau, and WW and I even make a monthly run to Thief River Falls because Roseau doesn't take glass or cardboard.
I usually have something to add to his pile and I often ride along just for an outing. As we drove along the back roads to the dump, I wondered how the people in the scattered homesteads filled their days. WW, being a man of the earth, imagined romantic interludes. Perhaps, but that wouldn't fill the whole day. In the old days people would have been milking the cows or getting equipment ready for spring planting. Or they would have been cutting down trees to refill the woodshed. But nowadays farms have gotten bigger and farmers have gotten fewer.
Many of the houses would be empty, their owners being at work and the kids in school. But what about retired people like us. They could be at the dump, some of them. They may be caring for their pets, walking the dog(s) or currying the horses or petting the cat. They may be doing something about supper or making a bench in the workshop or just watching a little TV. I know lots of people leave the TV on all day as a security blanket. As long as the TV is broadcasting, they know the major cities of the country have not been destroyed in a nuclear attack. Here in the boondocks, if they didn't have the TV on they wouldn't learn till next morning at the café that Wannaska was now the tenth largest city in Minnesota.
I wonder how many replicate my routine. Up early- request to the Almighty to protect my friends, family, everyone in fact. -A little stretching -a little quiet to settle my racing brain, to call it back from the furthest galaxy, back from the spinning atoms that make up the trillions of cell that make up each of us and tell them to settle down and stay on task, please.
There must be some people in those passing homesteads who are doing some of those things. I appreciate that everyone's different. I think of the Moslems. If they're lucky enough to be where it's nighttime, they're filling their bellies because they can't eat or drink anything in the daylight hours during this month of Ramadan.
Ennaways, we finally arrive at the dump. The dump makes no pretense of being pretty. But the place is well organized. You pay your $12 (extra for electronics) and back up to the open door of one of the truck transfer boxes sitting on the ground. All metal goes in a big pile which can be resold. Sitting in front of the metal pile is a toolbox like you'd see in a mechanic's shop. It had once cost a lot of money. The person who was getting rid of it had placed it out front of the pile in case someone could use. I checked the drawers; all but one slid smoothly. There was a 9 mm socket in one drawer which I put in my pocket. You never know.
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| Where your dumping fee goes |
Great piece! But do we ever really retire? Or do we just rehape our days by our needs? Jimboy
ReplyDeleteAgreed! A stellar piece amid an earthy story. One of these days, I may ask to be a quiet mouse on one of the bottle runs, although I doubt I will be granted permission, even should I bring treats. That's okay. I go places on the astral plains that C & WW would find fascinating - if only they had "a ticket to ride."
ReplyDeleteOn a ride with CJ, a trip to the dump is sublime!
ReplyDeleteThe trash I took to the dump that day was trash I created after beginning to paint my long-neglected house, and not the trash 'of eighty years.' It was empty paint cans, tarps, ribbons of masking tape; a few throw-away paint brushes, the like. Soon after I retired in 2017, I began to clean out an old stable I had built 30 years earlier in which I regretfully allowed junk to accumulate in. I remedied this by cleaning it all up and hauling it to the dump from 2018-2019, and not before, because I had an aversion to using the dump at all; it didn’t seem right to do that to the earth, but what was I to do?
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, neighbor helped me by hauling steel scrap and old farm equipment that was here, in the woods and such, to the salvage yard. Thanks, 'Uncle Wayne.'
My aunt & uncle who owned the farm before me, apparently, threw bottles and cans over the creek bank or in threw it pits in the woods as many farm families did —and still do. My aunt and uncle had rented their farmhouse out for a year or so in the sixties, so they may have had a hand into it as well. I cleaned the creek bank its whole length in the late eighties, with help, so a great deal of that trash is non-existent now. On a very recent walk, I made a note on my cellphone to flag the existence of old fencing that a prescribed burn I did, revealed through the ashes.
Jackie and I recycle everything we can as well. Whereas we don’t compost, we recycle household foodstuffs: i.e, coffee grounds are dumped on anthills and far away from our yard, we offer biodegradable meat bones, vegetable skins, spoiled fruit, etc to whatever eats it, and it disappears; plastic, aluminum/tin, newspapers, magazines we recycle. Glass and cardboard go to TRF.