I was a dump virgin. We had enough shit in the backs of our trucks to fill a space cruiser, but weren’t sure what we were going to do with it all. A line from Alice’s Restaurant wandered through my stupid head and I considered looking for a likely pile of garbage to join with ours, but in the end we continued on, my son and I, to the Tucson landfill.
I have to admit, it was a bargain, like some weird anti-buffet: all you can dump for $10.
We drove onto the scale. The crusty fellow in the booth gave us the once over, trying to decide, I’m sure, if we were dump-worthy folk, and not some left-wing-tree-hugging-government-inspectors. I gave him twenty-bucks and, after another quick review, he gave me “the guy nod” and passed me a receipt via a three-foot long mechanical claw (don’t ask), whereupon Jake and I drove into the 1st Circle of Hell.
Up the hill and to the left was a pickup truck convention, which was mostly attended by cheerful people with poor dental coverage and wearing lots of plaid. I guessed we were in the right place to dump our garbage. As we backed into the spot and unveiled our payload, a nice Mexican boy ran up and took my son’s bike from the top of the heap. A stuttering woman sporting a Greenpeace button on her lapel and a Confederate Flag bandanaon her head approached and asked if she could have our pa…pa…pa…pots. The guy next to us was busy emptying plastic drums of what looked like radioactive waste, and three trucks down a guy and his wife were anxiously rolling human-shaped bundles down the hill. Ah, humanity.
Aside from the incredible reek of the place, we did have fun chucking all our crap into the void, flinging hunks of doghouse, broken furniture, and a forest’s worth of cardboard before the hungry blades of the bulldozers.
As for the picture above, no Google plagiarism going on here; I took it. Welcome to Arizona, my friend. Looks like this fellow should have spent less on his truck and more on his trailer. But who am I to say?
Anyway, I can’t wait to go back.