Act 2, Scene 32: “The Long, Brown Slide”

In SB, you haul your own garbage. Mostly, anyway. You can pay $25 a month to have a private garbage company – Tidy Town - come around and empty your garbage bin once a week. And that’s what TRL and S elected to do. They were not going to drive to the town dump every week with a trunk full of rotting garbage. It just did not seem like a good use of time.

But they did pay their $25 to the town to use the town dump to dump everything that Tidy Town would not haul away. Which includes leaves, grass clippings, boxes, bottles, anything recyclable, in fact. And anything else that a household would need to get rid of. Old lights the electrician has pulled down from the ceiling. Lumber falling off the back porch. Oddly shaped pieces of metal found in the basement. The evil hose that leaked everywhere.

TRL had started raking the seven tons of leaves that had blanketed his yard, suffocating the green grass and, according to his friend G who has been a homeowner for years and years, would render the lawn a mud bowl if not soon removed. So TRL started raking. And raking. And raking.

He made a small dent in the front yard and had 14 bags of leaves to prove it. And now he needed to get rid of these leaves. In the back, as he had done at his house growing up, was not an option for there was no forest in the back of TRL and S’s house. Just the neighbor’s backyard. And TRL felt sure the neighbor would notice.

So he stuffs the bags into the back of the Volvo and aims for the dump, a vast wasteland of waste. This was an industrial dump – trucks from all over the region hauled garbage of every make and model here – but SB had a little section for itself. It was on a slight hill, with a great view of the undulating mounds of land fill, the huge metal crushing machines, the scary corrugated metal warehouses where refuse went in one form and came out in a totally new form. There were things here that could hurt a man.

The SB elevated section also afforded a perfect olfactory platform to sample the day’s offerings. Animal, vegetable and mineral all vied for rotting attention. It also offered an anthropological look into the lives of the inhabitants. Old mattresses, lawnmowers, chairs and sofas sat around. As did an abundance of discarded plastic childrens’ toys. And tons of magazines and newspapers. TVs, fans, air conditioners. Tennis rackets and enough beer bottles for a good spring break weekend. This was a town living high on the hog.

The day was cold, below freezing for the first time this year, and TRL brings the car next to a giant mountain of leaves. He plucks the bags from the car, rips them open and adds his small contribution of dried tree cover to the mound. On his way to put the plastic bags in their own receptacle, TRL begins to slide. A long, long slide on something frozen and brown. He waves his arms and weaves, but manages to stay upright. Which is a good thing because he sees the brown was leaking liquefied garbage which had made its way from the bottom of a rancid-smelling dumpster to where TRL now stood. It was tundra garbage, barren and frozen. And TRL had almost gone over head first and licked it like a popsicle no company would ever market. In the city you don’t have to go to dumps. Every 10 years there is a garbage strike and the dumps come to you. Out here in SB, every other week was an occasion to make the journey to the land of refuse.