Garbage Hymns

Randy Ludacer, Singing about Packaging on Fresh Kills

Randy Ludacer is a package designer. He is responsible for the public face of such essential items as lemon-scented insoles, table cloths and pillow covers, furry rocker chairs and retro stools, composters, video game controllers, bath salts for jet lag relief, and Bling-it-on peel-and-stick crystals, best described as spangles for underage females. Also Randy is a singer-songwriter. Naturally, some of his songs are also about packaging, including “The Prettiest Package,” “Expiration Date,” “Pop Top Ring,” “Can Of Worms” and the immortal “This Landfill Is Your Landfill.”

Last Saturday, Randy performed his packaging songs to a select audience on top of the 150 million tons of trash contained in the Fresh Kills landfill, which is, naturally, the very best place to do so. Unfortunately, procedures kept the fans down to a modest number. The audience had to be bused in, in accordance with San protocol—after we signed release forms holding the Department of Sanitation harmless for whatever horrors might befall us during or in the wake of the concert. There were. like, 20 seats on the bus.

But there we were, in the great outdoors, with a view of the Arthur Kill and the ruins of New Jersey to the west, the Manhattan skyline to the north, and a wildlife refuge to the east. Randy sang and accompanied himself on his Tropicana box guitar, keeping an admirable balance on the garbage tightrope. It’s not easy being serious about garbage without getting heavy-handed.

Us, the Audience (and a Methane Well in the Background)

The wind was brisk and rustled steadily in the late-season grass. The baby in the audience complained now and again. We clapped very nicely after every song, while the garbage kept very quiet underfoot.

Meanwhile, as Randy pointed out in one of his songs,  “Through the layers of the landfill, through/the garbage and the rubble, every tire slowly/rises to the surface like a bubble. This landfill/is our landfill. It was made for you and me.”

Just in case you want to know more about Fresh Kills? Try love letters and cabbage leaves About the old dump and the new park forming? More interested in the cheap thrills of Fresh Kills? Then you’ll want to take a look at landscape inspirations.

the piles behind me

I’ve got myself into a dilemma much like Tristram Shandy’s, whose life went by much faster than he was able to record it. Only my problem is that every time I get myself up to look for my ancient garbage, I create more of it in additional places. All of which will require more research, more getting myself up to look, more creating of garbage in hitherto unsuspected places, more research, more getting up, etc., etc. Infinite regress has already reared its monstrous head even though to date I have gone to look only for the largest quantities of my own historical trash. If I tried to locate the trash I’ve left all over the world while traveling, I would be dead before I properly documented my first 10 years.

Barneveld Landfill

My current sojourn in the Netherlands is associated with a heap of trash that,  as of this writing, has no known destination. All I know is where it does not go—the dump operated by the enterprise that collects the garbage at my temporary address. I’m not sure the locals agree about many things, but they do agree that the country is too small to fill it up with rubbish.

I had expected to be able to participate in food and green waste composting, but no such luck. I live in a place with a special dispensation and a solid refusal to deal with separate collections. All the trash I currently create, including those perfectly innocent scraps and peels, is going into purgatory somewhere unidentified, to burn for my sins.

I don’t even want to begin to think about what might happen to discards produced when I visit my folks.

Dumping Garbage Prohibited - Gevudo, Dordrecht

On the other hand, the considerable quantity of tissues I unwillingly used up in consequence of a cold while traveling to Heerjansdam to look for my childhood trash (see Buitenland’s Garbage, Zwijndrecht, Preserve, Times Two, Transmigration of Matter, and Pretty Picture) does have a known destination: the Dordrecht incinerator, where the visitor is summarily forbidden to dump his “dirt,” the standard term for garbage in local parlance.  The country’s only hospital waste incinerator is located here as well.

Next to the incinerator is a working landfill, where I presume the fly ash goes. It rises like Table Mountain above the surrounding flat lands, ominous and foreboding.

A little further east, there is bound to be more garbage because I found a ski slope, a cycle track, and a golf course—sure signs of waste underfoot. The ski slope is in disrepair, as Dutch people have generally evinced a preference for the Alps over tricked-out, spiffed-up garbage dumps. The ski lift is nothing but a downed clothesline in the grass, and the squares of corrugated plastic snow are sliding off the hillside as if to make up for the lack of human visitors.

In back of the golf course is a huge park, only half tended and almost completely deserted, of breath-taking beauty. Half wetland, half terra firma, hushed in the near fog, slowly awakening from long winter sleep. Despite the immediate proximity of ovens, upland waste, electricity pylons, and railway bridge, the area seems entirely removed from time except the cycles of the seasons.  This is hands down the prettiest garbage dump I have ever visited. I don’t recommend it as a tourist attraction only because too many visitors would spoil the prospect.

Merwelanden, northern end of the Biesbosch

Yet again further east lies a gigantic garbage dike, following the banks of the river Beneden Merwede for what I guess is a length of approximately 2 kilometers. It runs right into the upper end of one of the national parks, the Biesbosch. Also gorgeous. Also completely unreal.

Preserve, Times Two

April 6, 2009, De Bovenmolen, Kijfhoek, the Netherlands

Garbage under the Grass at the Bovenmolen

When I was a kid, there was a house in the copse of poplars to the right. The people who lived there, a family of vegetable growers, were so withdrawn from the usual affairs of the village that a weird aura hung over the farm. Kids made up stories to explain their otherworldliness. They hid a raving madman in the attic or something like that.

It might not have been quite so extreme, but for sure this family was unusual. On a tour of the village dumpsites, the former alderman of public works told me that he visited these people in the early 1960s with an offer to connect them to water, sewer, and electric services for a reduced price. They declined. They collected rain water, threw their own waste on the dung heap, and lit their house with oil lamps. That was good enough for them. They did without electrical appliances, power tools, radio. Perhaps they used coal for heating and cooking or perhaps—to free themselves from the prying eyes of the coal delivery man—they occasionally chopped down a tree to feed a potbellied stove. Such simplicity may be fine for a monk, but for a tomato grower it is definitely unexpected.

When the people still lived there, simplicity and all, a little bridge spanned the river Devel where there is now an unbroken collar of reeds. And this side of the reeds, under the spring green grass, was another local garbage dump site, active from 1965 or so. The lion’s share of the village garbage went to Zwijndrecht and later to an incinerator in Rotterdam, but anything that was not picked up in regular rounds (because it didn’t fit in the garbage can, for instance) was dumped here.

The dump is a little higher than the surrounding land. A metal plate in the grass gives access, according to my alderman, to sampling equipment in the ground that makes it possible to monitor the latter-day activities of my leftovers. But this dump  is not on any of the registers of monitored sites that I can find. Neither the national nor the provincial authorities have the Bovenmolen on any of their lists.

Despite the fact that it has been enriched with garbage, the area is being returned to Mother Nature, more or less. The house has been removed. You can’t cross the river to get into that copse unless you have a boat. If you look in the right direction, you don’t see the high-speed rail line which starts its descent into the underworld here to cross under the river Oude Maas nearby. The preserve is being reforested, after having been bare of trees except for windbreaks around farms for 600 or 700 years. It’s a modest effort and apparently progress has been halted, for now, by action groups who don’t agree with protocols.

On the whole, however, the entire scene speaks to a very different spirit from the way of things some 40 or 50 years ago. I’m almost inclined to grow cautiously optimistic.

making a stand, calling a halt

Play a little movie for your mind’s eye: A retreating glacier gradually uncovers a long low valley. Pooling meltwater makes a chain of mirrors for the sky. Slowly the waters rise and a continuous lake forms, dammed up behind the former glacier’s terminal moraine. Eventually, the water breaches the moraine and leaves behind a green world of low-lying meadows dotted with stands of larch and spruce. Humans thread their way through the landscape occasionally, on foot or by canoe, hunting or fishing, building small settlements and giving them up again as their needs and local environmental conditions change.

wetlands in winter

The climate warms; the waters rise again. Gradually, salt marsh begins to form at the edges of the meadows as the sea pushes up into the valley, creating an estuary. Cedars move in where the stands of older trees give up their hold. Eventually a vast system of tidal wetlands forms, fed by two separate rivers. Then things stabilize. The seasons come and go for a few thousand years, but each day dawns on a landscape that remains essentially the same, wild and peaceful, quiet though crowded with a rich array of plant and animal species. Reeds rustle in the wind. A bird calls. A rabbit screams as it is carried off by a raptor. The water gurgles in and out of creeks on the tides. Every spring and fall, the squawking, honking, and screeching of migrating birds adds depth to the silence and the wind resonates with the whooshing of a million wings.

European farmers arrive, with their cattle and their agricultural traditions, which tell them that salvation lies in improving the landscape.  They do their best, but for the most part their efforts are modest, the forces of nature too vast, and their tools too simple to permit extensive change. Imagine primitive farm houses, inhabited by ragged families clinging to survival by their fingernails. The cows roam on higher ground in summer. Their owners mow the salt grass meadows for winter feed. Scraggly fences go up here and there, writing the notion of ownership across the valley slopes. A few ditches are dug, painstakingly, in an effort to drain the soggy low-lying meadows. Somehow, they must be made to support more cows, more people, more dreams of wealth and power.

The native hunters and fishermen are pushed back, and hostilities ensue. Dikes are thrown up, but time and weather bring them down again. One farm might fail. Another. A dike might breach, a ditch silt up. A whole family might die of fever. It hardly matters, because others take their place.

Bit by bit, the newcomers begin to sculpt the mud. Land is bought in large swathes. Roads appear. Straggling communities of farms become villages, then burgeon into towns. Brick kilns, tanneries, copper mines, and lumber mills show up in between the meadows. More roads are built. Those made from cedar planks swallow up the last of the valley’s trees.

Large-scale reclamations are attempted, to wring more profit out of the land. It begins to look more and more like something we are familiar with. Ferries and railroads help bring produce and manufactured goods from the hinterland to the coastal cities. Eventually all the upland areas are taken in hand, increasing the pressure to reclaim the marshes. The whole endeavor survives only by growth, like a malignant tumor. The towns grow together, making a single continuous urban wasteland, cross-hatched with roads and bridges, turnpikes, railroads. More and more, the valley is a place to get through, rather than a place to be in.

garbage mountain

Ports grow larger. The machinery becomes more powerful, and the people more organized. Farms are pushed out by industries. Sounds of engines drown out the sounds of life. The last meadows are done over into suburbs. An airport is built. And all the remaining lowlands are filled up with garbage. Eventually, 51 separate and unregulated garbage dumps sprout in an area no larger than 32 square miles.

As time goes on, it must become increasingly apparent that what was begun as an experiment in improving the landscape is ending up an industrial desert, a slough of suburban despair. The Hackensack Meadowlands are now nothing but a misnomer, a historical name by which to measure the cost of improvement. To wring more profit from this poor place in an orderly manner, the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission is created in 1969. Its task is to help speed the development process for the last remaining virgin land and to regulate garbage disposal, which, it can no longer be ignored, is not just unsightly but outright poisonous.

Then, finally, the movie takes a slightly different turn. Just in time too, I have to say, because the plot is awfully depressing, and besides it seems I’ve seen this movie many times before. Do we have to watch it again?

Hold on. Not long after its inception, the development commission decides that a far better mission would be conservation. Indeed. It throws itself up as the protector of the few unspoilt stretches of wetland, it attempts to restore the natural marshes at the foot of the garbage mountains, it opens an educational park and research facility on the waterfront, as a memorial to the decision never again to allow uncontrolled dumping.

There’s no turning back the clock, of course, no digging up of garbage, no pulling out of roads to make room for the natural salt grass, no removal of housing or factories,  even when they appear to be falling down of their own accord. Upon first arrival, the impression is still overwhelmingly of utter degradation. Finding the park is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Nevertheless, there’s ample reason to be grateful for the tag end of history, because it gives us at least a choice of morals. It’s undoubtedly possible to see the story as yet another illustration of the rapacious predatious nature of humanity or any subgroup thereof (see, for example, my own meadow lands). We’d have reason on our side to figure it’s too little too late. But we might also think about the meadowlands as evidence of our extreme adaptability and resilience. Time to get serious.

Rolling Hills

Byxbee Park, on the bay shore in Palo Alto, is both perfectly obvious and perfectly bizarre. Obvious, because it’s in the middle of the Baylands and offers spectacular views of the bay in all directions. Perfectly bizarre, because it is full of machinery and mysterious artifacts that have an allure similar to Stonehenge. Clearly these things were built by humans, and at some effort, but to what earthly purpose?

Pole Field at Byxbee Park, Palo Alto

The artifacts include a carefully planted forest of wooden poles, as well as a piece of equipment that looks like a cross between a rugby goal and wind chimes. K-rail is laid out in chevrons on one hillside. In a dip on the other side, stands a chugging, churning device that looks to have sagged out of plumb a generation ago. A trail of shimmery heat waves comes out the top.

Most startlingly, the place breathes, though not always in the same rhythm. A few years ago, you had to listen carefully for the long-drawn-out, despondent sigh it cast upon the air every two minutes or so. When I visited more recently, the park breathed almost in synch with myself, a little stertorously perhaps, as if suffering from some minor pulmonary obstruction.

There’s a simple explanation for the mystery: Byxbee Park is repurposed landfill, a small section of the Palo Alto city dump that was decommissioned some time in the 1980s. Its artificial hills are studded with pipes and pumps for the capture of leachate and methane. The leachate goes to the purification plant down the road, while the methane is burned off by a flare, that rusty device described above. Construction rubble peeks out of the grassy knolls behind the “habitat reconstruction” signs. The pole forest is in fact “land art,” and so are the K-rail and the rugby chimes.

If you don’t already know, then it’s not so easy to find out what Byxbee Park is. A plaque near the entrance to the park says: “The design of Byxbee Park is the result of a collaboration between the City of Palo Alto, landscape architects Hargreaves Associates, and artists Michael Oppenheimer and Peter Richards. The project was funded in part by the City of Palo Alto refuse collection fees and the Public Art Commission’s Art in Public Places program.” A map identifies the installations by name but declines all effort at explanation. And not a word about garbage apart from those collection fees.

Byxbee’s tight-lipped stance, the likely legacy of the 20th-century’s long romance with “sanitation,” is perhaps understandable. Sanitation was about garbage removal as a public health measure, about whisking garbage away from the curb and making it disappear, as quickly and efficiently as possible. It was about burying garbage where nobody had to worry about it except the sanitation department. It was about creating a world where you could pretend that garbage didn’t really amount to any of your business. That time has passed.

Wind Wave installation

The sanitation romance is fading and reality asserts itself. What may once have counted as innocence now only looks like wanton blindness. Most of us are uncomfortably aware of the fact that natural resources are finite and landfill space harder and harder to come by. Sanitary engineering has given way to environmental engineering, and ordinary people are handling (and worrying about) their trash, at least a little. When we drag our garbage cans to the curb and the lid won’t quite go down, we probably don’t feel too good about it.

All the same, it’s still awkward to talk about garbage publicly. The instinct still is to pull away from the subject as if it were sex and we Victorians. Garbage isn’t quite taboo, but it isn’t approved cocktail party conversation either—or something easily owned up to in park signage. It’s not just Byxbee Park where the “habitat restoration” signs don’t specify what type of habitat it is exactly that’s being restored. Bayfront Park, in Menlo Park, doesn’t have a single sign telling you it’s the old town dump. The Sunnyvale dump has signs all over it that say “Sensitive Wildlife Area.” Indeed.

Garbage dumps are just more comfortable telling you how to comport yourself than pointing out what it is you’ve already accomplished.

But perhaps it’s time to learn to think about garbage and to discuss it, not just in the “trashies” subculture but in polite society—if only because we actually feel a little guilty about the amounts of trash we get rid of every week. Or perhaps because we suspect that, whatever happens to it precisely, it’s not a pretty story. Perhaps because looking at our garbage makes it possible to decide whether we want to continue to make more fake hills and fill up more canyons with dangerous stuff that needs to be tended and monitored for decades or longer. If we dig our garbage back up out of the twilit reaches of a guilty conscience, then perhaps the signage at our landfills can be a little more straightforward too?

Totting up donations on the Palo Alto dump

At Byxbee right now, the best hint of what’s underfoot is the active fill next door. Its mounds rise at a startling rate, even though only a portion of Palo Alto’s garbage ends up here now. Every time I visit Byxbee, the new dump is a little more present. One day, a new hill rises in the back. Another time, fill activity is going on in front, where there used to be a miscellany of trucks, rubble, equipment, and temporary storage. A third time, a little setup of pumps and other machinery has been moved out of the hollow in which it sat, and the hollow itself is now a big hill. It’s all carefully shaped to a grading plan that is meant to make the garbage look like the Coyote Hills across the bay–a natural feature of the environment.

With only a few years of space left in it, the active dump is expected to reach capacity in 2010, and the entire area will become parkland. As garbage hills go, Byxbee won’t be very large. Nevertheless, if it’s your garbage in there, how is it not special?

Even when you know what it is made of, Byxbee is quite lovely. Or maybe it is actually more lovely. In summer, when the grass is a bright strawberry blond and the sky intensely blue, the garbage is more a distant memory than a looming presence. Christmastime is different. The park has a leaden quality, even on the brighter days. The dull green of the grass and the relatively low light lend the hills an ominous air far more suggestive of the putrid mess underfoot.

In winter, the geese come through on their way south. Large groups, sometimes hundreds of them, camp out for a day or so to rest. The younger members of the flock occupy their time with incessant honking, squawking, and squabbling to rearrange the social order, while the more sedate and peaceable members of the congregation contentedly snack on the new grass.

The pelicans like to doze near Adobe Creek, neatly folded into small, blazing white packages from which occasionally a gawky long neck and beak protrudes. They could be a demonstration of the amazing ingenuity of a high-tech camping gadget. An occasional loner on the wing, flying low over the water, demonstrates the size and power of the animal when fully folded out.

At sunrise the wading birds and other water fowl are out at first light, always already there by the time I arrive. Most of the smaller ones I don’t recognize, although I am familiar with the names: terns, grebes, willets, western sandpipers, curlews, greater and lesser yellowlegs. They roll on the tongue like burbling water, out of time and history, comforting like the birds themselves.

They offer us a little hope: no matter how artificial the environment, no matter how degraded, life goes on. For now at least.

On Fire

In late July, a huge compost pile caught fire at the Palo Alto dump. Gigantic billows of smoke drifted off to the neighboring communities, creating considerable alarm among the residents, most of whom (understandably) don’t like to be intimate with landfill and its various effluents. Fire engines and helicopters were dispatched to extinguish the smoldering ruin, after which a crew sifted through the entire pile in search of hot spots.

Compost Pile in 2006

Barbara Cimino, a spokeswoman for the fire department, sought to calm the fears of residents in the path of the smoke, explaining it was all very harmless and quickly brought under control. The Huffington post fueled the flames by adding “toxic” to its headline, although that’s unlikely, considering it was the compost pile that was laid waste, so to speak. It won’t have been more unhealthy than smoke is, generally, I should think and to be avoided, but “toxic smoke” suggests something else to me.

Cimino noted that the fire department was investigating whether a truck had brought in combustible material. That’s what caught my ear, as definitely newspeak. Compost is by definition combustible. Moreover, the process of biodegradation generates heat and smoldering fires in landfills are common, as they used to be in haystacks, where moist hay can spur biodegradation and result in spontaneous combustion). Compost can’t be any different. So however it happened, in all likelihood, it was just in the nature of things.

A couple of years ago, I got a tour of the Palo Alto landfill from the manager, who showed me the active face, the recycling operations on top of the fill, the vast closed area which holds nothing but pipes and grass on top of the fill, and the area converted to park. He drove me around and explained what was what and how things worked, grudgingly at first and much more enthusiastically when he discovered I was nothing but ears.

He’d worked at the landfill since the early 1980s and told me stories about people stealthily trying to dump motor oil when the workers weren’t looking. About a lady bringing huge loads of new cabbage patch dolls just before Christmas, which the workers rescued and gave to a not-for-profit. About another lady dragging a worker under her car as he was helping her get unstuck from a muddy spot. About yachtsmen abandoning their craft as the marina silted up. leaving the landfill crew to deal with the remains.

Sunrise over the Palo Alto Dump

And he explained that the landfill was smoldering under the surface pretty much all the time. Usually, the workers coould tell where the hot spots were when their PVC methane collection pipes melted. There wasn’t much they could do about it except lay more pipe for methane collection.

He told me he didn’t know what he would do when the landfill closed, not too far in the future now. He didn’t have much education, being an outdoors kind of guy, but operating the heavy machinery on the landfill all those years had caused a lot of damage to his body. It left him quite a few years away from retirement but not very many options.

It was an education, as I gradually realized that landfill workers get squeezed between government organizations that demand less trash, residents who want to dump whatever they want to get rid off, regardless of regulations, and the trash itself, which is wayward, nasty, and toxic.

Many people like the park that has been created out of the part of the landfill that was closed years ago, but the landfill manager, my tourguide, would just as soon hang himself as walk around there. “It’s filthy,” he said. “and there are nasty creatures all over it–black widows, rats, and all sorts of other vermin.” We’ll have to give it to him. he knew what he was talking about.

Love Letters and Cabbage Leaves

Fresh Kills landfill was used in 2001 as the site where debris from the World Trade Center was separated into evidence on the one hand and waste on the other. Some victims, not having been recovered from the debris among the evidence, must have ended up in the waste. That is to say, their ashes now rest somewhere high on the gigantic piles of trash built by New York City out of all the waste it didn’t need for parks, parkways, and real estate improvement of a private sort. Until 2001, people in the know used to say you could see the World Trade Center from the unnatural mountains of Fresh Kills.

Now Fresh Kills is in the process of being redeveloped into a recreational area, and the planners envision a monument to the fallen of September 11 at the highest point.

A view of the Arthur Kill

I feel for everyone who has to let go of the people they love under circumstances such as these, their remains sifting right through the fingers of the investigators and drifting away, indistinguishable from the other ashes coming out of the conflagration. Nevetheless, I was relieved to read that a judge decided against the families suing to have Fresh Kills reopened for another effort to remove any human remains from the waste.

Fresh Kills is maybe a weird but not the worst place to end up. The mounds offer magnificent views, abundant wildlife, and endless peace and quiet. Below a report from a visit I made in 2005.

————————

November 5 and December 31, 2005

Fresh Kills is peaceful and deserted. Grass and weeds have sprung up on the garbage mounds, while a few scraggly trees are struggling in the wetter hollows and around the monitoring stations. The hillsides bristle with equipment—vents and pumps, drains and wells poke up out of the slopes everywhere. There’s a smattering of birds—a heron, an egret, an osprey. Fluids seep out of the sides of East Mound, making filmy puddles in suspicious colors on the road below. Here and there, a whiff of methane underscores the point. The largest and most famous garbage dump in the United States is officially in hiatus. Fill activity has stopped, the World Trade Center debris has long been processed, and the dump lies quiet. If you don’t look too closely, you might think it is a nature park.

Fresh Kills tour

I’m on the bus with perhaps 30 other visitors, taking a tour of the future. The New York City planners for the borough of Staten Island who have organized the tour are so full of hope, it’s infectious. They look out of the windows of the bus and see a pastoral idyll, a green haven in an urban jungle, an island oasis in the midst of a desert of urban sprawl. One of them proudly notes that this is the most engineered landfill in the world.

Through their eyes, how beautiful it is, how promising. They point out that 55% of Fresh Kills was never used for dumping to begin with. The water in Main and Richmond Creeks is as clean as the water in the Hudson River. (Whether that’s good or bad news I don’t know, but apparently it could be worse. The Arthur Kill, a major shipping lane that separates Fresh Kills from New Jersey, is reportedly more polluted.) And the views! On a clear day, you can see Manhattan from the garbage pinnacles, which form the highest point on Staten Island.

In its various planning documents, the City of New York relies on a profusion of images of what the dump will look like in the future—icons of wholesomeness and gleaming grass, nature groomed into polite submission and peopled with model citizens (not a single one of whom is fat). They are meant to prove its point that Fresh Kills is not a badge of shame, not a showcase of environmental insult and collective wastefulness, but rather a great natural resource that argues the versatility and tenacity of nature.

It came as a shock to me to realize, a few years ago, how hospitable and appealing a garbage dump is to a broad range of species. The raw garbage, of course, is an irresistible food source to birds. Besides the wheeling, screaming flocks of inevitable gulls, I have seen a heron virtually under the treads of a dozer while a pheasant went about its tranquil business less than 100 feet away. Virtually ineradicable, weeds colonize the mounds at the speed of the wind, and trees follow suit shortly after. The hares and rabbits, squirrels and other vegetarians move in probably only months after the weeds arrive. It’s hardly surprising that one of the visitors on our tour discovers deer droppings on South Mound.

Fresh Kills forest

This swift recuperation notwithstanding, for me it is a little more difficult to ignore what’s underfoot: a seething leachate stew bubbling up new chemical compounds, made up of manual typewriters, half-eaten hot dogs, cabbage leaves, love letters, safety pins, office chairs, paint thinner, tampons, lawn mowers, cigarette butts and yoghurt cups. All sorts of things once loved and then discarded. Barbie dolls and baseball gloves. Things no one ever cared for overmuch that were pitched in a trash can without a thought. Candy wrappers, potato peels, and nail clippings. It’s not so much that it’s wrong to ignore the garbage, it’s just a lot more interesting to think about. Hospital waste. Communion dresses and baptismal gowns. Dead rabbits. Incinerator ash.

The CLUI people describe Fresh Kills as “an undulating, dripping, vented bio-reactor of artificial organic decay, covered by a thin lid of soil.” Which is not to say it doesn’t have a great future as a recreational park.

Fresh Kills served New York City for a little over 50 years, from 1948 to 2001. The garbage, originally meant just to fill up the tidal marsh to pave the way for residential development, reaches some 20 to 40 feet down into the water without benefit of a liner. While the city planners paint a rosy picture of its environmental impact, the authors of Rubbish claim that the dump “pours a million gallons of leachate into New York Harbor every day.” Indeed, of all garbage dumps investigated by the University of Arizona Garbage Project, Fresh Kills was the only one that offered up evidence of advanced biodegradation, presumably because the tides continually wash the garbage, stimulating bacterial action—which in turn creates leachate. And the leachate flows into open water on the outgoing tides.

View of New Jersey

At its peak, the dump received 29,000 tons of garbage daily, which amounts to about 10 million tons a year. The barges arrived from the five boroughs around the clock. Just imagine the scene at dead of night in the middle of a winter storm: barges looming up out of the inky blackness, wind howling, cranes straining to transfer fresh garbage out of floodlit holds and into waiting trucks, which would disappear into the blackness themselves, only their headlights showing their progress up the face of the garbage mountains.

The four giant mounds are named for the compass points. North and South Mounds are the oldest and the smallest, at 250 and 345 acres respectively. At its highest point, North Mound is 146 feet above sea level. East Mound and West Mound, both larger and higher, are more recent and still in the process of being capped. West Mound, the tallest of the piles, will rise about 225 feet from the plain and spreads out over 500 acres. A September 11 memorial is planned for West Mound, to commemorate not only the tragedy but the fact that Fresh Kills was temporarily reopened after the attack to process debris and sort through the evidence. Some or all of the ash is buried there, making West Mound the final resting place for some of the victims.

In a photo I took from the summit of South Mound, I see some little ant-like scribbles on top of West Mound and realize with a shock that it must be the earth-moving equipment being used to place the cap. They are like a ruler in a picture of an archaeological find. If the dozers are so tiny that I never even noticed them with the naked eye, then the garbage mountain is 10 times bigger than I already thought it was. In fact, Fresh Kills takes up just about as much space as the lower third of Manhattan.

At the foot of North Mound

No matter what its spic-and-span future, Fresh Kills will always be a garbage dump. There are plenty of recreational parks in the U.S.—some of them quite large—where a despoiled nature is squeezed and groomed for the maximum convenience of an alienated people. But very few will have the same potential as Fresh Kills to invite us to reflect on who we are.

Rock on Garbage

Bayfront Park, at Marsh Road in Menlo Park, is a high and unusually shaped set of hills, overgrown clay mounds that look like they have been moulded by the dirt roads laid out in graceful curves from the narrow entrance to the highest promontory overlooking San Francisco Bay. There is no overt sign that gives the game away, but the shape is unmistakable to the practiced eye: this is primitive garbage dump morphology, predating the wisdom of modern sanitary engineering. Only landfill has this much machinery. Only landfill sticks this far out into the bay.

Closed some time in the 1980s, the mounds reach up to 200 vertical feet of garbage at the highest elevations, much of it in a liquid state because the dump is improperly sealed. Leachate runoff into the bay must be frightful.

The park is overgrown with grass and weeds, a few stunted palms, modest groves of fir and live oak, and strewn with boulders that seems strangely out of place. A helpful leaflet explains the mystery: the boulders are not really boulders but stone poetry, American Indian pictographs that aren’t American Indian, just as the park isn’t really a park. One of my professors in grad school liked to say that language is nothing but “a lie superimposed upon an error,” and it seems the stone poetry in Bayfront Park offers a perfect illustration.

Undoubtedly, the effort is well meant, even if it has the ring of refrigerator poetry, constrained by the availability of a limited vocabulary:

Evening pool

weather clear with stars

I walk with the wind behind me

inspired, with a glad heart

Come,

discover many animals,

grass, sun, canyons, and earth.

No hunger, war, no fear,

making peace and strong brothers.

The bit about canyons is an overstatement, by the way, but there is a decommissioned sewage treatment plant and a methane recovery facility way in the back, surrounded by some jewel-toned ponds of sludge, each set in a bezel of brightly glinting scum.

For all the degradation, Bayfront Park is a lovely place, especially at sunrise. Even at the softest footfall, the jackrabbits run for cover, legs too long and ears too tall. Shorebirds shriek into the softly-breathing stillness. The salt ponds gleam an improbable white, making a canvas for the runnels and phantom creeks drawing abstract figures through the crystal fields. If you’re lucky, day breaks with a radiance multiplied by the waters of the bay, a reminder and a promise

Weber’s Pit

As best I can understand, some of my garbage slumbers here in Weber’s Pit–somewhere underfoot or in the aspiring ski-slope atop the cumbrous piles. Until the late 1970s, this was just farmland. Then, the construction company Weber dug out sand as the foundation for the motorway Utrecht-’s Hertogenbosch, creating a huge pit. Now of course the pit is nowhere to be seen. A part of it was filled up with garbage that eventually rose a respectable distance into the air while another part filled up with water, as tends to happen with pits in the Netherlands.

From on top of the bump, I bet I could get a pretty good view of Utrecht, but not today. It’s indecently cold and wet and blustery. Even the measly trees look sorry they ended up in this mess.