Out of the shower, and still don’t feel clean. I blow my nose and the tissue is still marked with black flecks, decay I inhaled while at the dump. I dislike Oregon City in general, but the dump in particular is symbolic of everything I hate.
I began today helping out with some remodelling at my mother’s house, the house I grew up in. She, my mother, has big plans on how to remodel the house, how to turn it into a property she can sell to finance buying a better house, somewhere else, to retire to with her boyfriend.
I think the house should be burnt to the ground.
Not just because I have few good memories associated with the house, but also because the place is in such bad shape that it is devaluing the property it is on. She’d get more money selling the lot if the house wasn’t there.
But she still has big plans of getting it cleaned up, of turning it into the house she hoped it would be back when she was married to my father, and he was doing the remodeling (which explains a lot of why it is in such bad shape as it is). The work my father did was impressively bad: for example, there are metal plug boxes dangling from the ceiling in parts of the basement, with current running through the box waiting to zap you when you reach up to brush it aside, the roof being low enough and the basement narrow enough that there is no good way to avoid it.
The plan for the day was to load the back of her pickup truck with debris from the house: plastic sacks full of old rotten insulation, wooden paneling stripped off of the walls, sliding doors that are broken, and other stray bits of wood and sheet rock found around the basement.
The work was tiring, especially on a day as hot as this, in a house with such poor insulation and no air-conditioning. It was dusty, dirty, and full of cobwebs.
But still far cleaner than the dump will be.
The dump is a strange place to visit. When we first arrive we pull into the HazMat line as we had batteries and old lightbulbs to get rid of. The HazMat debris station looks like an oversized car park covered with fans. Coming up I thought they were for AC, the day being so hot out, but actually it functions as a giant fume hood to vent away all the toxic fumes of materials dropped off. The workers are all in dressed in white bunny suits, making the entire scene feel vaguely surreal as the wave the truck forward and peak beneath the tarp in back. All of our materials are in a cardboard box behind the seat, which we hand over out the window, and they hand over a clipboard to sign off on, and five dollars change hands.
The main part of the dump is just around the corner and up the road, starting with a weigh station to determine how much the truck weighs on the way in. The rates (seen through the link up above) are based heavily upon whether the load is covered or not, and when we reach the window we are asked what our load consists of: Trash, Wood, Mixed Debris? Our mixed load puts us in at the most expensive rate, we are given a colored board to put on our dash so the workers can see what we have and direct us to where we need to head.
Bay 2 is our destination today, a warehouse-like building with a lane of traffic heading in and out. We are waved in, directed to the far end of the building, past several other people who are busy unloading their vehicles, park, and get out of the truck.
The air is thick enough to be physically felt.
There is a scent that, in my experience, is unique to the dump. A scent of rot, decay, and humanity. Not the fecal scent of an outhouse (though occasionally there is that hint, when people dump bags full of diapers or pet litter), but the scent of a house that was once occupied but has gone to rot. Not the musty smell of dry decay, or the scent of mold and wet rot, but something that seems to have hints of both.
The floor is never dry. It is nearly 80 degrees out, and yet the ground is wet in here. Concrete covered with the effluvia of all the debris that has rotted here while waiting to be sorted and disposed of elsewhere. Flecks of rotten cloth, old cardboard, wood splinters, all mixed into the thin layer of wet mud across the floor. The scent is permeated into this layer across the floor, it clings to your shoes even after you leave, carrying the smell into your car.
Behind the truck is the unsorted debris pile that we are throwing our trash upon, across the wall in front of the truck though are the sorted piles. A wood pile that is largely furniture today, a stack taller than the truck of old TVs, a couple piles of appliances that run from being older than I am to looking brand-new, and a pile of glass windows.
The debris piles make this a uniquely First World building. Across so much of the world the trash I see (a truck further down the line throws out a clothes dresser, the drawers fall open as it lands atop the pile and I can see it is full of clothes) would be treasure. But here, in the US, we throw out all these things without a backwards glance and then I watch trucks leave the dump and drive across the street to the Home Depot to buy new doors and windows and furniture to replace (consume) what had just been disposed of.
You can’t help but breathe the rot in, it’s in the air and fills this space. Physical and social. I don’t know how the people who work there, who breathe it day in and day out without masks on, survive it.
The path leaving the dump is just a re-tracing of steps, one lane over. Out the door adjacent to where we came in, back around the corner, through the weigh station, billed twenty-eight dollars (sixteen dollar minimum, twelve dollars for the .14 of a ton we dropped off), and back onto I-205 towards home.
I start coughing as we pull away, needing to hack up the bits clinging to the inside of my throat. I make it home before needing to spit to clear my mouth, mucus filled with black flecks hitting the concrete strips alongside the driveway. I need a shower.