It’s a remarkable thing, going to the dump. Something about it gets the juices flowing. It may be the heavy equipment roaming around. It may be the camaraderie you feel with the workers and other patrons. It might just be the beautiful organization of the place: glass here, trash there, old paint there, used oil over here.
My latest story tells of some of my experiences there including jumping into a huge dumpster to retrieve something and being unable to get out. Wearing a bag over my head when I forgot a covid mask and a fantastic idea of date night at the dump. Plus the exacting strategy you must employ getting ready to go to the landfill. This may seem like a story of fiction. It is not. All this happened just as I have written. Enjoy!
The other day, it was snowing, and since there wasn’t much work that could be done around the farm, it was a good day to load up our trash and recyclables in the old pickup and head to the dump. Going to the dump, or sanitary landfill as it’s now called, is not a dreaded chore. I actually love it! I think most men from my baby boomer generation enjoy a manly trip to the dump. My bonus is a farmer’s market on the way home that sells freshly baked pies. Go to the dump. Come home with a pie! It just doesn’t get much better than that!
You probably don’t know this, but there’s a whole strategy for systematically loading a truck heading for the dump. If you were an accountant, you would refer to this as the LIFO approach to inventory management: Last In, First Out. It’s imperative you know the layout of your local dump and its various sectors to make the unloading process as efficient as possible. So, with the vision of a map of the sectors in my head, I packed up my rusted-out old farm truck, “Pooter,” and headed out.
Whenever Pooter and I go to the dump, we look like the Clampetts moving to Beverly Hills. Pooter, filled to the gills with trash, looks a little rough. He’s pretty rusted out and has a giant indentation on one side where a parking garage pillar attacked him once, and then there are a couple of holes in the floorboard that afford me the lovely view of the road rushing by below my feet. There’s always a concern about whether I’ll return home alive.
Even though I love going, the trip begins with me already under duress. Will the truck make it? Will some piece of garbage fly off Pooter and hit someone behind me? Will the truck floor break through and cause me to drive Fred Flintstone style? The tension that accompanies me on this trip has only begun.
My heart begins to race a bit as I pull into the dump. What if the dump police don’t accept what I have in my truck? What if I get into the grounds and Pooter breaks down? What if I run over a nail or piece of glass and get a flat tire? Yes, there is a lot to worry about.
The people who work there, I call them the dump police, are very serious about their jobs, and they don’t want you to screw up the place they work so hard to keep in tip-top shape.
The first building you come to is where you pay for the privilege of discarding your crap in someone else’s backyard. Not many questions are asked of you here. Maybe an occasional “What do you have today?” A simple “household trash and recycles” reply will usually get you safely through this first checkpoint. The next checkpoint is way more serious and can make or break you. As you slowly pull up to the small guard shack that houses one dump Gestapo member, your pulse quickens even more for fear of the ultimate rejection of your trash or any part thereof. They approach your vehicle, scrutinizing everything suspiciously. As they distract you with friendly small talk, they eyeball your load. They inquire as to what’s in the truck. This is thee crucial point of your visit. Now, you have to make an important decision: to be honest or play dumb if you happen to be toting a questionable landfill item.
Once, I had an old mannequin, don’t ask, and had no idea what it was made of or where it should go. I tried to hide it at the bottom of my load. My cargo must have shifted and settled during the trip, and by the time I pulled into checkpoint 2, an arm had worked its way out to the top of the pile, as if to give a little salute to Checkpoint Charlie. The police told me I would have to dismember it. The head, arms, and legs could be broken off and thrown in the trash. The body was plastic and could be recycled. It was a bit morbid, but I said ok. You can imagine the looks I got from other dump customers during that surgical procedure.
After the interrogation, you’re asked if you know where everything goes. If you’re a seasoned dump visitor like me, you respond, “Yes.” Then the sheriff says, “You can put your trash in number three. “Which means, “Whew! I made it through to the next round!!
And off you go to dumpster number three in the long line of giant trash bins.
Household trash is always the first stop. After that, on this particular day, I drove across the landfill campus to another giant dumpster to toss in my paper and glass. Our recyclables are in garbage cans.
I decided not to use the portable metal stairs that the county provides; they looked slippery. The county offers the stairs so you can lug your trash cans or boxes with recyclables up to the top of the dumpster and have an easy shot at throwing the stuff in. The stairs are similar to the ones you’ve seen in Lowe’s or Home Depot. You know, the stairs on wheels that some guy rolls into place, then closes the only aisle you need to use so he can get a fancy toilet seat off the top shelf.
With the stairs appearing a bit risky, I opted for another strategy. I took the top off my first container and lifted it above my head to empty its contents over the side of the immense, eight-foot-high dumpster. I’m 6’3″, and an eight-foot reach is possible, but that’s my absolute limit. I lifted the first can to the top edge and turned it over. I heard all the bottles, cans, and unpaid bills crash down onto the floor of the nearly empty, massive dumpster, but so did my trash can as I lost my grip on the slippery handle. I was somewhat startled at first. I had never thrown in my trash can along with the trash before. I climbed the metal stairs, which weren’t that slippery, after all, to look down into the cavernous waste pit. There was my ten-dollar, practically new trash can. It was a goner. What was I to do? There was no way to reach the thing. I thought, “You know, maybe the darn thing cost twenty bucks.” I looked around.
The dump was very quiet that snowy day. Then, the Mission Impossible theme began playing in my head. I put one leg over the side. I looked around again. I put the other leg over and sat teetering on the top edge. “Should I be doing this?” “I don’t know.” “This seems a little nuts.” “Oh, screw it!” I heaved myself into the dumpster. I immediately sensed I was dropping much further than I thought I would. I stuck the landing with great aplomb. However, my moment of triumph was short-lived as I quickly realized I had landed a lot deeper down than I initially anticipated.
I made my way over to my thirty-dollar trash can, grabbed it, and launched it over the wall and out of the steel tomb to safety. Now, I had to figure out how to get myself out of this house-sized trash receptacle. I trudged back to where I thought the stairs were. I reached as high as I could, grabbed the top of the wall with my fingertips, and attempted to pull myself up. The top of the wall was 6 to 8 inches wide. I could not reach across the width of the wet steel since I only had the tips of my fingers available to pull up my 200 pounds. I struggled. I couldn’t get out. I looked around, thinking there might be an interior steel ladder built specifically for idiots like me. No such luck. I think it was at this point that I realized that I had thrown out the one thing I could have turned upside down and stood on to make an easy exit. Wow, this just keeps getting better. I tried to get leverage with my feet against the wet steel wall. With my old rubber farm shoes that, of course, had no tread left, I hung there spinning out like a dragster. The bottoms of my feet actually felt hot from the friction they created. I tried barefoot. That hurt. I filed that under last resort. “Maybe if I got a running start.” That didn’t work either, but I did think I might need to go into concussion protocol if I ever got out when I hit the unforgiving wall. Should I yell for help? Should I call Vicky and ask her to come and save me? I can hear the conversation now. “You’re WHERE!!” Plus, I may be buried alive in beer cans, wine bottles, and old magazines by the time she arrived.
I felt a bit defeated. Standing with my back against the cold steel wall, I slowly slid down to the bottom and sat a spell to figure this thing out before I suffered a mental breakdown! I looked around at the inside of the massive steel structure. God, what was I thinking jumping in here?
This situation reminded me of the time I visited a cabin with a real estate agent. The keys he brought to open the place didn’t work. I really, really wanted to see this cabin. I reviewed the situation and presented my plan to the agent. I would climb the maple tree next to the cabin, jump to the roof, and go down the chimney to get inside. When I said it out loud, it sounded like a ridiculous plan, but the even more absurd thing was that after my presentation, he said, “Ok!” I did it, but it got a little hairy at the bottom when my body wouldn’t bend the way it needed to in order to slide out of the chimney and into the room. It still gives me that scary feeling in my stomach when I think I could still be there.
Meanwhile, sitting in this steel mausoleum, I drifted back in time to my many experiences at the dump. I started thinking about how much I loved the dump and how today’s well-organized and clean landfill compared to the town dump I knew as a kid. That dump was a smoldering mountain of trash where just one giant inhale could send you to the cancer ward.
Squatting there, I recalled a visit during COVID when I admit my creativity was tested to the max. Like everyone else at the time, I always had a bandana or mask with me everywhere I went, always. When I pulled into the landfill, I was told a mask had to be worn at all times, which surprised me a little, given that everything was outside. It surprised me a lot when I realized I didn’t have my regular bandana around my neck, at the ready to pull up. And I didn’t have a standard mask in my seldom-used truck either. There was a significant load of trash in Pooter, and the thought of being kicked out for not having a mask and having to drive all the way back to the farm or a drugstore was not appealing. There must be something I could fashion into a temporary mask. I opened the glove compartment and found a mouse nest made of seat material. There was no potential mask there. I looked at the bags of recycles next to me in the cab of the truck and started rummaging through the paper. How could I make a mask out of paper and tie it behind my head? That wasn’t going to work. Then it hit me. There were plenty of brown paper grocery bags piled right next to me! The image of a guy who performed with a bag over his head, known as the “Unknown Comic,” flashed in my brain. I pictured the lean years when Orioles fans were scattered around the nearly empty Camden Yards, many wearing grocery bags over their heads with holes cut out for their eyes and mouths to spare them the embarrassment of being seen there. Obviously, I wouldn’t cut out the mouth, but it didn’t take long to dump out the paper recycles in one of the grocery bags, cut out a couple of eye holes with my pocket knife, and slip the bag over my head. I emerged from the truck as “The Unknown Dumper”! I thought, “Is this genius or what?” The landfill traffic director caught a glimpse of me with the bag over my head and began walking towards me. I expected a laugh, an elbow-high five, or at least acknowledgment for being a sanitary landfill savant. None of these were forthcoming. As he approached me, he turned his back on the other dump patrons and covertly handed me a new face mask, muttering the words I heard so often in my youth, “Don’t pull this shit again.”
Then there were those couple of months in 22 when I began to feel a sense of change in the air at the dump. A new day may have been dawning. An infiltration was happening—something we and the world had never seen before. I noticed more and more women visiting the dump. Now we all know that women can’t leave men’s stuff alone, especially if we seem to be enjoying ourselves. So I got to thinking that maybe they’re checking it out for themselves to see what it’s all about. OR… would they be single ladies visiting the dump to find love? On more than one occasion, a woman with a load of trash was seemingly struggling with the unloading process, and I felt, as a gentleman, I should ask if she needed assistance. Some have rejected the offer, but some have accepted the help with a smile.
After returning home, I burst through the door and exclaimed to Vicky, “I have a great idea! Date night at the dump!” Of course, she looked at me like I had taken in some sort of toxic fume while I was there. But think about it. Men are drawn to ladies’ nights at the local bars to meet women. I believe women would be drawn to the dump to meet men! I think it may already be happening on a small scale! Can you picture it? Searchlights in the sky like a Hollywood opening, bars set up at the “battery and latex paint recycling” kiosks, darts and corn hole by the “glass, cardboard, and mixed recyclables.” Enjoy drinks a little closer to the stars on top of the mountain of buried trash the landfill has become. And, who knows what might happen at the “used cushion and mattress department after the D.J. spins a Barry White classic? Just watching the heavy equipment at the compost and mulch area alone is enough to send a couple to the “used oil” wedding chapel! I couldn’t wait to share my idea with the county executive.
Suddenly, a large crash, I believe, coming from the nearby metal salvage area brought me back to my current situation. I looked up at my prison walls. I still wasn’t sure I could get out of this giant steel coffin. I stood up to survey the situation again. I truly felt trapped. Fear turned into panic. Panic turned into terror. Terror miraculously turned into strength, and somehow, I pulled myself up and over the side to freedom. When my feet hit the ground, I quickly picked up my fifty-dollar trash can, threw it in Pooter, who was still idling, jumped in, and put the pedal to the metal. Thankfully, my foot didn’t go through the rusted-out floorboard when I sped off. Ten minutes later, I pulled into the world of pies. Maybe it was my imagination, but as I exited Pooter, I was sure I heard distant sirens. I dashed into the market. Standing there trying to recover from the harrowing experience I had just gone through, I vowed then and there to always keep a firm grip on my trash cans and, more importantly, never to pull this shit again.
