Twenty-Five Tons of Trash

My first effort to organize my own labor at the work site.

If hate, despair, and anger could be measured in terms of deliberate trash on a piece of land, there was no doubt: The last renters at the four-acre parcel on the ridge had been raging.

With the collapsing mobile home torn to pieces by Dale C’s deft excavations, his trucking team returned over and over, to load up and haul the trash to a landfill. It included the filth that filled the sad unit and that I’d bagged in order to sort it: soiled clothing, shredded school papers, personal hygiene items (used, gross), and syringes that proclaimed serious drug abuse.

I felt guilty and sad about sending so much waste to the landfill. At least I knew, from the pro testing, that it didn’t contain dangerous items like asbestos. But so much plastic, as well as the rotten contents of refrigerators abandoned years earlier, shattered kitchen appliances, ripped bedding … I couldn’t help seeing it as a small, contained battle zone of poverty and blame and worse.

When Dale C phoned me with the total invoice for his work, I learned the “mess” had added up to twenty-five tons. I’m still trying to put that into perspective.

But I didn’t have time to dwell on it just then. Before I could live and work at this site, so close to my Old House but so different, I needed some essentials: shelter, water, electricity, a septic system, and an Internet…