by Pa Rock
Ruminator
(Note: I keep a running list of things that might make for decent blog postings. Last week I put "Noel City Dump" on the list, though now I have no idea why. I'm old and I tend to forget, so that's why I write things down.)
Back in the day when the price of gasoline was less than twenty-five cents a gallon, cigarettes were a quarter a pack and you could buy them from machines, and decent people like Ike and Mamie still lived in the White House, most people in small and rural communities either burned their trash in rusty barrels in the backyard, or they hauled it to the local dump where, for a fee, they added it to a growing pile that was already there. Some cities owned and maintained their own dumps, and others, like the town where I grew up, had dumps which were privately owned.
It was a time when there were no environmental laws.
The city dump for Noel, Missouri, "The Christmas City of the Ozarks," my hometown where I spent my misspent youth, was located two miles out of town in an idyllic setting of pine covered hills. There was a large graded area where vehicles pulled off of the main road and then backed up to one of multiple sloping hillsides and threw or pushed the trash from their vehicles. The trash cascaded downward and settled in among other people's trash. The dump was especially convenient if a person needed to get rid of something big, like a couch, mattress, or a major appliance.
The family who owned the dump would occasionally bring in a bulldozer to push dirt on top of the trash or just to clear it from the parking area and push the trash further down the hillsides - and they would sometimes burn accumulated trash which gave the area a more-or-less permanent, pungent odor, one that I can still smell to this day
The dump was a great place for ten-year-olds to visit and explore, and I would often find some treasure to take home that was just as exciting as getting a new toy from the Ben Franklin five-an-dime store. In addition to human scavengers, the Noel City Dump also drew an abundance of wildlife that searched the hillside for edible scraps, and people with unwanted litters of kittens and puppies would do the "humane" thing and drop them at the dump where they might survive off of garbage until someone showed some mercy and took them home.
When I was twelve or thirteen, a mama black bear and two cubs showed up at the dump and hung around for a couple of weeks. Bears were uncommon in southwest Missouri, and those quickly became a tourist attraction. In the evenings people would go out to the dump and sit in their lawn chairs hoping for a sighting of the visitors. I was in a Boy Scout troop at the time, and our scoutmaster took us there just before dusk one evening to see the bears as they came to feed, but we showed up on an evening when the bears didn't.
Going to the dump was a regular and, I'm sure, under-appreciated chore for my parents, but for me it was always an adventure. I'm so glad that I grew up before computers and "screens" took the outdoor fun out of childhood.
(And yes, there are still community dumps today, but they are just not the same. The city of West Plains, Missouri, where I now live, has a dump (next to a cemetery) which is contained in a large, empty warehouse (the dump, not the cemetery). People bringing in trash report to an office next door to the warehouse, pay a fee based on amount and type of trash, and then back up to the door and toss it in onto the concrete floor. Then it is trucked to Springfield and dumped into a landfill. Where's the fun in that?)
(I pay a private company to pick up my household trash every Monday at 7:00 o'damned-clock in the morning. They also truck it to the landfill near Springfield.)
1 comment:
I remember those days but out on the farm, we had a ditch. We would burn whatever trash would burn and eventually when the burn barrel filled, we would haul it out to our very own ditch. When I was old enough to drive, we bought two old cars. We cannibalized one for parts. That one ended up in the ditch. The ditch was a good place to hunt rabbits. Fortunately, we couldn't see the ditch from the house.
I moved and that community had a dump that was way down a dirt road. Just haul it down there and dump it. It was a great place to plink tin cans with a .22.
Fast forward. You can still find old dumps out in the woods, that are defunct. Just last week I drove past a parcel of land that may someday be developed but it will be an awkward bit of construction. There at the little road or should I say drive was an old couch and some other detritus. I have no use for people who do that.
Somewhere between the old days and the current days, I was a park ranger. I pulled into a parking lot at a trail head and the trash cans were overflowing, there were a couple of plastic trash bags next to the barrel, and trash was scattered all around. I had to clean up the trash left first by some trashy person and later by the raccoons. I found a few letters or whatever with a name and an address. I went to the house and met the man whose name was on multiple pieces of paper at the parking lot. He explained that he had missed the trash pickup and took his trash to our trash can. When he ran out of room, he just put the trash bags next to the barrel. He was remorseful and he apologized to me. While I accepted his policy personally, I felt that the National Park Service was more interested in teaching him a lesson. I sat right there at his kitchen table and wrote him a ticket. I suspect he never missed trash pickup again.
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