One can't help but think that Jeanne Marie Laskas was influenced by Studs Terkel's "man on the street", working class interviews . Laskas certainly merits a comparison.
The idea for HIDDEN AMERICA came from an article Laskas wrote for GQ about coal miners, and she includes them in her investigation. She also interviews migrant workers, NFL cheerleaders, air traffic controllers, gun dealers, red angus ranchers, Alaskan oil rig workers, a female truck driver, and land fill workers.
Considering the constant danger, the coal miners were very funny. One of them wore size thirteen shoes; so his nickname became "Foot". They all had nicknames. It was also surprising how much money they made; they could earn up to $90,000 a year in a non-union mine. One of them was a college graduate who swore he'd never work in the mines, but the money was too good to pass up. Also, despite what the politicians say, coal is doing better than they ever have before, at least when Laskas wrote the book it was. For instance, 70% of China's factories draw their power from coal.
The Cincinnati Ben-Gal cheerleaders were also surprising. Their numbers are drawn from some unique sources. One was a scientist; another was a construction worker. When asked why she tried out, the scientist said, "Who wouldn't want to be a Ben-Gal?" The construction worker was chosen cheerleader of the week and got her picture and bio put up on the scoreboard. She got so excited she overslept for the game and was replaced, but the director gave her another chance. So then, the motivation seems to be similar with all the girls. They're not there to trap a man; players aren't allowed near the girls; they just want to be somebody, if only for a little while.
Perhaps the most charismatic character in the book was the female truck driver, nicknamed "Sputter." We're introduced to her as she's driving down the road trying to stay awake. Her solution is to go braless and to turn on the lights in the cab to show the other truckers.
The landfill workers weren't what you'd expect either, nor was the landfill itself. Puente Hills Landfill, just outside Los Angeles pipes the methane out of the landfill to a generator that provides power for a middle-sized city. You'd also never know the place was a landfill if you didn't know it was there. The engineers built a verge with trees and flowers on the boundary to hide its existence. Civil engineer Joe Haworth has been around the landfill since its inception. He was one of those who came up with the idea to use the methane as a power source. He sees the landfill as a life lesson. Nature teaches us that everything is recycled. He doesn't really believe in God, but nature seems to imply that when we die, it's not the end. We are such things as stars are made of. In 2013, Puente Hills will close and Los Angeles' garbage will be hauled by rail into the desert; this will be more expensive, but even more of the garbage will be recycled.
I guess what I learned from the book is that people tend to elevate their jobs. The migrant workers, for instance, wound up in Maine, raking blueberries. These are natural blueberries. The best. People from all over Maine used to help pick the berries when they were in season. They still hold Blueberry festivals, but, according to the migrant workers, most Americans are too lazy to pick them. They're missing out on something that would have connected them to their ancestors as well as other people of every stripe.
Laskas will also throw in the occasional factoid. Despite what politicians and TV journalists say, the number of illegals entering the country is down. It's getting too hard for the migrant workers, over half of whom are illegal, to get back into the country, so they stay. Some haven't been home for years. And American growers wouldn't be able to harvest their crops without them.
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An Oprah.com “Must-Read Book”
Award-winning journalist Jeanne Marie Laskas reveals “enlightening, entertaining, and often poignant”* profiles of America's working class—the forgotten men and women who make our country run.
Take the men of Hopedale Mining company in Cadiz, Ohio. Laskas spent several weeks with them, both below and above ground, and by the end, you will know not only about their work, but about Pap and his dying mom, Smitty and the mail-order bride who stood him up at the airport, and Scotty and his thwarted dreams of becoming a boxing champion.
That is only one hidden world. Others that she explores: an Alaskan oil rig, a migrant labor camp in Maine, the air traffic control center at LaGuardia Airport in New York, a beef ranch in Texas, a landfill in California, a long-haul trucker in Iowa, a gun shop in Arizona, and the Cincinnati Ben-Gals cheerleaders, mere footnotes in the moneymaking spectacle that is professional football.
“Jeanne Marie Laskas is a reporting and writing powerhouse. She doesn’t just interview the people who dig our coal and extract our oil, she goes deep into the mines and tundra with them. With beauty, wit, curiosity, and grace, she finds the hidden soul of America. Hidden America is essential reading.”—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Award-winning journalist Jeanne Marie Laskas reveals “enlightening, entertaining, and often poignant”* profiles of America's working class—the forgotten men and women who make our country run.
Take the men of Hopedale Mining company in Cadiz, Ohio. Laskas spent several weeks with them, both below and above ground, and by the end, you will know not only about their work, but about Pap and his dying mom, Smitty and the mail-order bride who stood him up at the airport, and Scotty and his thwarted dreams of becoming a boxing champion.
That is only one hidden world. Others that she explores: an Alaskan oil rig, a migrant labor camp in Maine, the air traffic control center at LaGuardia Airport in New York, a beef ranch in Texas, a landfill in California, a long-haul trucker in Iowa, a gun shop in Arizona, and the Cincinnati Ben-Gals cheerleaders, mere footnotes in the moneymaking spectacle that is professional football.
“Jeanne Marie Laskas is a reporting and writing powerhouse. She doesn’t just interview the people who dig our coal and extract our oil, she goes deep into the mines and tundra with them. With beauty, wit, curiosity, and grace, she finds the hidden soul of America. Hidden America is essential reading.”—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBerkley
- Publication dateSeptember 13, 2012
- File size1101 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A literary miracle. In effortlessly lucid prose, Laskas tells stories that spellbind precisely because they remind us of the center that quietly holds America together.”—Robert Draper, author of Do Not Ask What Good We Do
“In this thoroughly entertaining study of what some people do that other people would never do, journalist Laskas makes her subjects sing.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Each of these profiles rings true.”—*The Huffington Post
“At a time when American workers seem most prized for their ability to serve as campaign props, Hidden America comes as a breath of fresh air with no political slant, no hidden motive.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Hearing [these] voices, it’s impossible not to see the world a little differently.”—The Daily Beast, Hot Read
“It’s not a stretch to use the name Studs Terkel in the same sentence with the name Jeanne Marie Laskas. She’s one hell of a journalist, a world-class storyteller. This is not just a good read, it’s an important one.”—Linda Ellerbee
“At once heartwarming, funny, sad, ironic, and most of all, insightful.”—Bob Schieffer
“A finely crafted look behind the curtains of everyday life—think Dirty Jobs for the literate set.”—Mike Sager, author of The Someone You’re Not
“A wondrous book, fierce and intimate in its investigations...Like Studs Terkel if he wrote novels and Tom Wolfe if he wrote about working folk.”—Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies and The Signal
“In this thoroughly entertaining study of what some people do that other people would never do, journalist Laskas makes her subjects sing.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Each of these profiles rings true.”—*The Huffington Post
“At a time when American workers seem most prized for their ability to serve as campaign props, Hidden America comes as a breath of fresh air with no political slant, no hidden motive.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Hearing [these] voices, it’s impossible not to see the world a little differently.”—The Daily Beast, Hot Read
“It’s not a stretch to use the name Studs Terkel in the same sentence with the name Jeanne Marie Laskas. She’s one hell of a journalist, a world-class storyteller. This is not just a good read, it’s an important one.”—Linda Ellerbee
“At once heartwarming, funny, sad, ironic, and most of all, insightful.”—Bob Schieffer
“A finely crafted look behind the curtains of everyday life—think Dirty Jobs for the literate set.”—Mike Sager, author of The Someone You’re Not
“A wondrous book, fierce and intimate in its investigations...Like Studs Terkel if he wrote novels and Tom Wolfe if he wrote about working folk.”—Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies and The Signal
About the Author
Jeanne Marie Laskas is the New York Times bestselling author of six books including Hidden America and Concussion, which inspired the Golden Globe-nominated film. Formerly a contributing editor at Esquire, and a syndicated weekly columnist at The Washington Post Magazine, she has been writing for national magazines for 20 years, with work appearing in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Allure, Ladies Home Journal, and many others. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Best American Magazine Writing 2008 and Best American Sportswriting 2000, 2002, 2008, 2010 and 2012. She has won more than a dozen Gold Quill awards for Excellence in Journalism, and her piece about coal mining, “Underworld,” was a finalist in feature writing for the 2007 National Magazine Awards. Her earliest essays and features are compiled in The Balloon Lady and Other People I Know.
Laskas writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and GQ, where she is a correspondent. She is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is director of The Writing Program, and founding director of The Center for Creativity. She lives on a horse farm with her husband and two daughters.
Laskas writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and GQ, where she is a correspondent. She is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is director of The Writing Program, and founding director of The Center for Creativity. She lives on a horse farm with her husband and two daughters.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THIS IS PARADISE
Puente Hills Landfill
City of Industry, California
Herman asks me if I smell anything, and the way he says it I can’t tell if I’m supposed to lie. He says he loves being part of nature, enjoys watching the sunrise, and
then he says it again. “Do you smell anything?”
“Well, it is a landfill,” I say, finally. I’m trying to be polite. He is old, wiry, chewing a toothpick. He’s been at this for decades, always the first to arrive, pulling no. 72, the thirty-foot-long tractor-trailer full of trash assigned to him each day. Dumping is permitted to begin at 6:00 a.m., and he keeps his finger on a red button inside a panel on the truck and constantly checks his watch.
“Women smell things men can’t smell,” he says.
At this hour the landfill looks nothing like what most people picture when they imagine a landfill. Nothing messy, nothing gross, nothing slimy, no trash anywhere at all. It looks, perhaps disappointingly, like an enormous, lonesome construction site, a 1,365-acre expanse of light brown dirt hiding buried trash from yesterday and thousands of other yesterdays. The scale of the thing alone boggles the mind. To stop and ponder the fact that nearly fifty years of trash forms a foundation four hundred feet deep is simply to become fretful with some unnamed woe about America’s past and the planet’s future, and so I am trying not to do it. When fellow truckers arrive, pulling up next to Herman, the ground—so deep with trash—is so soft it bounces.
The Puente Hills Landfill, about sixteen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, was a series of canyons when people first started dumping here. Now it’s a mountain. In 1953 the film adaptation of H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel The War of the Worlds featured the Puente Hills as the landing site of the first spacecraft in the Martian invasion. Dumping started in 1965 in an area named the San Gabriel Valley Dump. In 1970 the dump was purchased by the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County, a partnership of twenty-four independent districts serving five million people in seventy-eight cities in Los Angeles County, and renamed the Puente Hills Landfill. Every day 13,200 new tons of trash are added. That’s enough trash to fill a one-acre hole twenty feet deep. The other way to look at it is a football stadium filled two stories high.
On November 1, 2013, the landfill will be out of room, and all that trash will have to go somewhere else.
At six o’clock, Herman pushes the button. The back end of the trailer rises and 79,650 pounds of debris comes thundering out, most of it wood and plaster and nails and shreds of wallpaper. Be- side him a truck is dumping decidedly more organic garbage, pun- gent indeed, and way down the row, off to the side, a guy is pouring a truck full of sludge, sterilized human waste, black as ink.
Herman gets a broom, sweeps his trailer clean. Unlike most of
the haulers who come here—the guys who drive for the conglomerates like Waste Management with their continuous fleet of shiny green packers—Herman works for the Sanitation Districts itself, moving trash from a central dumping station in the nearby town of Southgate. Thus, his priority status. He will make five trips in a day, stopping only once to eat Oodles of Noodles and cheese crackers and a cookie. On the ride home, he eats a green apple. “I’ve got my routine,” he says. “Every day I do it all exactly the same.” He talks to me about his philosophy of slowing down, not making mistakes, same way every day, the power of ritual. Peaceful. Using this method, he worked his way up from paper picker, day laborer, traffic director, water truck diver, on and on until he found his niche. There is honor, he says, in being first each day, all those other trucks parting at the gate so Herman can get through. He is careful to note that he is the only one of his entire eighth-grade graduating class of 1954 who has not yet retired. “Why would anyone retire from a place like this?” he asks. “Why would you?”
Having spent more than a week at the landfill, by now I am get- ting used to hearing workers here, from the highest to the lowest ranks, speak like this. Concerning the landfill, they are all pride and admiration and even thanks. It seemed, at first, like crazy talk.
A landfill, after all, is a disgusting place. It is not a place anyone should have to work in, or see, or smell. This is a 100-million-ton solid soup of diapers, Doritos bags, phone books, shoes, carrots, watermelon rinds, boats, shredded tires, coats, stoves, couches, Biggie fries, piled up right here off the I-605 freeway. It’s a place that smells like every dumpster you ever walked by—times a few hundred thousand. It’s a place that brings to mind the hell of civilization, a heap of waste and ugliness and everything denial is designed for. We throw stuff out. The stuff is supposed to go away. Disappear. We tend not to think about the fact that every time we throw a moist towelette or an empty Splenda packet or a Little Debbie snack cake wrapper into the trash can, there are people involved, a whole chain of people charged with the preposterously complicated task of making that thing vanish—which it never really does. A landfill is not something we want to bother thinking about, and if we do, we tend to blame the landfill itself for sitting there stinking like that, for marring the landscape, for offending a sanitized aesthetic. We are human, highly evolved creatures impatient with all things stinky and gooey and gross— remarkably adept at forgetting that a landfill would be nothing, literally nothing, without us.
In America, we produce more garbage than any other country in the world: four pounds per person each day, for a total of 250 million tons a year. In urban areas, we are running out of places to put all that trash. Right now, the cost of getting rid of it is dirt cheap—maybe $15 a month on a bill most people never even see, all of it wrapped into some mysterious business about municipal tax revenue. So why think about it?
Electricity used to be cheap too. We went for a long time not thinking about the true cost of that. Same with gas for our cars.
The problem of trash (and sewage, its even more offensive cousin) is the upside-down version of the problem of fossil fuel: too much of one thing, not enough of the other. Either way, it’s a mat- ter of managing resources. Either way, a few centuries of gorging and not thinking ahead has the people of the twenty-first century standing here scratching our heads. Now what?
The problem of trash, fortunately, is a wondrously provocative puzzle to scientists and engineers, some of whom lean, because of the inexorability of trash, toward the philosophical. The intrinsic conundrum—the disconnect between human waste and the human himself—becomes grand, even glorious, to the people at the dump. “I brought my wife up here once to show her,” Herman tells me. “I said, ‘Look, that’s trash.’ She couldn’t believe it. Then she couldn’t understand it. I told her, I said, ‘This is the Rolls-Royce of landfills.’ ”
“Nobody knows we’re even here,” Joe Haworth is saying as we make our way around the outside of the landfill, winding up and up past scrubby California oaks, sycamore trees, and the occasional shock of pink bougainvillea vine. He is driving his old Cadillac, a
1982 Eldorado, rusty black with a faded KERRY-EDWARDS sticker on the bumper. He has the thick glasses of a civil engineer, which is how he started, and the curls and paunch and demeanor of a crusty retired PR man, which is what he is now. He wears a Hawaiian print shirt and a straw hat, and the way he leans way back in the driver’s seat suggests an easy, uncomplicated confidence.
“People driving by on the highway think this is a park,” he says. “Or they’ll be, like, ‘What’s with all the pipes going around that mountain?’ ”
In fact, we are driving over trash, a half century’s worth, a heap so vast, there are roads and stop signs and traffic cops and a his- tory of motor vehicle accidents, including at least one fatality.
The outside of the landfill, the face the public sees, reminds me of Disney World, a perfectly crafted veneer of happiness belying a vastly more complicated core. The western side, facing the 605, is lush greens and deep blues, a showy statement of desert defiance, while the eastern face is quiet earth tones, scrubby needlegrass, buttonbush, and sagebrush; the native look on that side was re- quested by the people living in Hacienda Heights, a well-to-do neighborhood in the foothills of the dump. They wanted the mountain of trash behind them to blend in with the canyons reaching toward the sunset. A staff of fifty landscapers do nothing but honor such requests. The goal: Make the landfill disappear by making it look pretty.
“No matter what you do with your trash, nature has to process it,” Joe is saying. “Okay? Think about it.” We are making our way up to a lookout point where we can get an overview of the action of the trash trucks and bulldozers and scrapers, a good show and a good place to sit and think. Joe speaks with rapid-fire speed, constantly punctuating his lessons with Groucho Marx–style asides. “Look, we’d be up to our eyeballs in dinosaur poop if nature didn’t have any way to run this stuff around again,” he says. He loves this stuff. He is sixty-four years old, an environmental engineer, a Jesuit-trained fallen Catholic whose enthusiasm for waste management, solid, liquid, recycled, buried, burning, de- composing, is oddly infectious. I have come to regard him as the high priest of trash.
“Instead of being up to our eyeballs in dinosaur poop, we’re made of dinosaur poop,” he says. “You know? And other chemicals. We’ve got garbage in us. There’s a carbon cell from Napoleon in your elbow somewhere. It’s all nature running things around again, a continuous loop. It’s all done by bacteria breaking it down into carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, okay? Think about it!”
I tell him I’ll add it to my list, which keeps getting longer the longer I’m here. Joe retired from the landfill a couple of years ago, but he comes back to consult, to visit, to help Donny, his assistant who took over his job, and to sit and marvel. He entered the refuse world back in the 1960s, when people first awakened, as if from a lazy daydream, to the notion that trash not only matters but trash is matter, and matter never leaves. You can burn it. You can bury it. You can throw it into the ocean. You can try to hide it, but it still exists in some form: ash, sludge, gas, particulate matter floating in the air. “It all comes back to the idea of the cycle,” he says. “We’re going to keep reusing the same stuff, so let’s figure out how to use it responsibly so we don’t choke on it.”
He gives me an example. “See those pipes?” he says, pointing as we cruise up the landfill. “Those are sucking gas.” The pipes are fat and prominent, about two feet in diameter, and a constant source of wild wonder. Eighty miles of pipes encircle the landfill, pulling out a deadly mix of methane, carbon dioxide, and other gases continuously produced by the fermenting trash. The pipes are connected with seventy-five miles of underground trenches and to a network of fourteen hundred wells. The methane mix is highly explosive and smelly and in the past has been an environmental nightmare. As trash continues to ferment, the methane is unstoppable. And so the pipes—a kind of landfill miracle, a technology pioneered by Sanitation Districts engineers—deliver the methane downhill to the Gas-to-Energy Facility. The methane feeds a boiler, creates steam. The steam turns a turbine. The turbine generates fifty-eight megawatts of electricity—enough to power about seventy thousand Southern California homes.
Before I started hanging out at the landfill, I had no idea we could generate electricity from trash. “Most people don’t know this,” I say to Joe.
“Oh, a lot of people know it,” he says.
No, they don’t. I have checked. I have consulted folks back home, regular trash makers, average citizens going through cartons of Hefty bags, who think little beyond “Gotta take the trash out” when it comes to the final resting place of their garbage. “People don’t know we power homes with landfill gas,” I say. “Don’t you think people should know this?”
He looks at me, weary. “Why do you think I’ve been busting my ass at this for thirty years, lady?”
He blinks, removes his glasses, takes out a handkerchief, and wipes them clean. “That’s what I did,” he says. “I did nothing but tell people about what we do here. Now, how much time does society have to listen and understand? Well, the answer to that is, society’s interest level is pretty low. It doesn’t necessarily want to know where its waste goes. It’s embarrassed by its responsibility in this arena.”
Joe parks the car and we get out. We stand and peer down into the landfill, at trash, the very stuff Herman and his fellow truckers dumped earlier this morning. From this distance, the open landfill is a giant brown five-hundred-acre bowl, with a frantic line of trucks inside snorting and pregnant and awaiting release.
This is the cheapest place to dump trash in all of L.A. County, about $28 a ton, and so it is the first choice of most garbage companies. When the landfill reaches its 13, 200-ton daily capacity, usually by about noon, the guard at the gate will raise a flag visible from the freeway: a sign to truckers to keep on moving and find another place to dump. Anyone can dump here, any private citizen with a pickup full of junk willing to pay the fee.
Trash gets piled in as many as three active areas, or “cells,” daily. Each cell is about the size of a football field, and every hour an additional 1,200 tons of trash is put into it. A team of thirty heavy-equipment operators dances madly over the pile. Huge bull- dozers, ten feet tall, equipped with seventeen-foot blades, push and sculpt the trash into rows. Then the mighty Bomags, 120,000- pound compactors with 130,000 pounds of pushing power, smash and crunch and squish the trash, forcing out air, forcing it tighter and tighter to save space. All of these machines clamber impossibly close to one another, backward, forward, over steep hills of trash, clinging lopsidedly to edges. From up here, the sounds are all roar and backup beeps echoing around the bowl, and the view is a colorful shock of red and green and yellow and white, a smash of crawling color.
One of the cells has already reached capacity, and so the scrapers have moved in, the biggest machines of all, fifty-three feet long, sixteen feet high—the wheels alone are nine feet tall—and with their big belly hoppers pick up clean dirt, and dump it about a foot thick over the cell, sealing in odors, rats, bugs, concealing the left- overs of a yesterday everyone is more than ready to be done with.
Forgotten. Gone. By day’s end, there will be no trace of trash anywhere in the landfill.
The next day, the process repeats. Cell by cell, the garbage spreads across the landfill floor until it hits the far side, the edge of the bowl, and a new layer, or “lift,” is begun.
A constant parade of water trucks sprays the dirt to control dust, and a team of paper pickers runs madly on foot to catch anything the wind might pick up and try to carry away—the worst offender being plastic grocery bags that can take off like kids’ balloons. A chemical odor retardant is sometimes used when things get too bad, or again if the wind conspires, and there are a lot of seagulls waiting on a nearby ridge. Seagulls are a landfill nuisance because they fly away with food scraps and, as is their reputation, fight each other over them mid-flight, often losing them, and soon a lady has a half-eaten hamburger splashing into her backyard pool. For a time, engineers were utterly confounded by the seagull problem, firing off cannons to scare them away, piping in the sounds of hawks and owls—but the gulls got so used to the sounds they would stand on top of the cannons and inside the speakers. The solution was elegant and simple: tall, portable poles placed at intervals over the working face of the landfill, with nylon fishing line stretched between them. The lines disrupt the gulls’ unique spiral landing pattern; the birds give up before even trying. “And I guess they’re too stupid to walk on in under the wires,” Joe says. He’s got his sunglasses on now, and, together with the hat and the shirt and against the background of the lush foliage, he is the picture of vacation.
A more urgent and literally more pressing concern than birds in any landfill is leachate, the liquids that might ooze out. People are not supposed to throw away paint thinner or nail polish or batteries or transmission fluid or motor oil, but plenty do, plenty of it comes in on trucks, and plenty of it gets smashed and smushed, mixing with rainwater into an unpredictably toxic cocktail that, if it escapes the landfill and gets into the groundwater, could be deadly to nearby communities. And so a twelve-foot liner of clay, plastic, sand, and other barrier materials covers the walls and floor of the landfill—a diaper of the largest scale imaginable, designed to absorb and seal in wetness. Seventeen miles of pipes carry the leachate into collection areas. A team of field engineers specialize in monitoring the leachate, cleaning and purifying it. One of the ways a landfill engineer anywhere in the world earns bragging rights is if he can pour himself a glass of the leachate from his landfill and drink it.
All of this—the operational area of Puente Hills—is invisible to the public, thanks to earthen berms that rise ten feet above the working face. The scraper drivers keep adding to the top of the berm as the landfill fills, constantly building the fortress wall, so all the work goes unnoticed.
For their part, the scraper drivers refer to the berms as “visuals.” The most fun you can have on a scraper, they have told me, is steadying your 155,000-pound machine over the tip of a visual barely wider than the span of your tires. Once in a while a scraper will fall off a visual, sometimes sliding one hundred feet down or sometimes hanging there, half on and half off, until a crane can be summoned to rescue it. A driver who falls off a visual will get called “Tipsy Toes” or “Tipper” until the next guy does it and earns the torch of shame.
A bulldozer or Bomag driver who manages to roll his machine over into the trash will likewise have to endure the name “Flipper.” “You should go down there,” Joe says. “You should go down there and ride in the trash, get a feel for it.”
Mike “Big Mike” Speiser is the most famous Bomag driver at the landfill, and some say in the world. This is only incidentally because he looks, as much as a person can, like a Bomag. He is proudly boxy, enormous, bald, and he appears as though he could crush the trash without the assistance of machinery. He is forty-five years old and has impressive tattoos: a Grim Reaper, a skeleton with a dagger through the head, a skull with flames shooting out, and a skull with horns and a bullet hole in its head. “Like the Devil got shot in the head or something,” he says. “Basically.”
He is a shy man who blushes when he smiles, and he is known for being a gentleman. He is famous because he won first place on compactors—a test of agility and speed—in the recent Solid Waste Association of North America’s International Road-E-O in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “He is the best in the nation,” a few of the operators have told me. Mike does not himself brag about the honor, but he does allow: “I am very, very good at this.”
Mike and I stand at the edge of a cell of trash in motion, Bomag chugging, ready to roll. He climbs the ladder to the cab and offers his hand to help hoist me up. “The air conditioner works nice, and it’s a pressurized cab, so it keeps the smells out.” He shows off the air-ride feature of the cushioned seat, apologizing that there is only one. He takes the controls while I hunch behind him and hang on to his soft shoulders. We crawl slowly, as if in a tank, to- ward and into the cell of trash, about thirty feet deep. We are high above with a marvelous view of smeared paper plates, Target bags, egg cartons, Green Giant frozen peas, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, all manner of Hefty and Glad bags splayed open to reveal the guts of everyday American life. Effortlessly, we climb over a mattress and a TV and a tricycle and a rocking chair and soda bottles and deodorant, until pretty soon the eye refuses to differentiate the trash, refuses to register nonsense the mind can’t begin to place in anything close to a meaningful narrative. We go rolling through an acre of garbage, mounds and mounds of it cracking and turning to mush under the teeth of the Bomag.
“No doubt, we make a lot of trash in America,” Mike says. “No doubt. And this is a tiny piece of one day, in one landfill. But I don’t tend to think about that. Mostly I think about not getting run into by a dozer.”
We sink in, climb out, sink, climb. Mike keeps moving forward, pushing trash toward the edge of the cliff formed by the day’s massive pile—a ledge so high you can’t see what, if anything, is over it.
“You’re getting close to the edge,” I tell him.
“I have to get these verticals down as quick as possible,” he says, and without hesitation keeps moving forward. “You worry about smoothing things out afterwards. When we’re diving over the vertical you’ll see why.”
He chatters on about smoothing and grabbing and peeling, but the only words I take in are “diving over the vertical,” which we are about to do. We are about to free-fall over a cliff of trash three stories high. I make the point that this is scaring the shit out of me.
“A lot of guys I train cry their first couple of weeks,” he says. He assures me that the Bomag is extremely agile. He says the only worry, really, is tree stumps. “One time I was coming over a vertical, and on the way down I hit a stump about the size of a car. I started sliding down the slope sideways. You just kind of hold on and gun it and try to get off of it. That one gave me a pucker butt.” We drive straight toward the open sky, and head as if on a sui- cide mission over the cliff. I expect a crash, a violent tumble, death, but the Bomag clings to the trash like a squirrel, and we begin our slow descent down, about thirty feet straight down, into more trash—where six or seven bulldozers zoom about, backward, forward, pushing trash, sculpting the cell.
I ask Mike who’s in charge here, who has the right of way, what the pattern is, who yields to whom. He says everyone more or less figures it out as they go along. He talks about riding dirt bikes when he was five. “Experiences like that prepare you. You learn the limits of motion.” Any kid who grew up with dirt bikes and four- wheelers would obviously love a job like this, he says, adding that he considers himself blessed.
Before he started working here in 1990, Big Mike worked as an auto mechanic. “I could not take the stress of that life,” he tells me. Like so many of the people I meet at the landfill, he tells me he enjoys nature, being outdoors, and a good deal of solitude. We climb back up the cliff of trash to square off for another dive down, and he whistles. Then he invites me to join him for lunch later. “I mean, if you want.”
Between the leachate, the methane, all the enormous equipment, the dangerous dives, the brainpower, the rotating cells, the seagull lines, the irrigation, the bougainvillea vine—all the landscaping, all the field engineers, all the chemistry—I’m thinking: This is ridiculous. This is a lot to go through so people can continue living in denial, as if our trash has some magical way of just vanishing. At one point, I confess to Joe Haworth that I have no idea where, back home, my own trash goes after it leaves the end of my driveway, gets hauled off in a green truck while my dogs stand on the porch and bark stupidly at it. I have no idea whatsoever, and I certainly have no sense of my trash having a destiny of such complexity and such bother.
This, Joe tells me, is a preferable situation to when trash was simple. Throughout most of history, trash was a linear concern, the end of a simple four-beat pattern: you dig up raw materials, make something with them, use the something, and when the usefulness is over, you throw the thing away. One, two, three, trash. One, two, three, trash. One, two, three, trash. The piling of trash became a concern as soon as there were enough people clustered in one place to notice it. The city of Athens is said to have organized the first municipal dump in the Western world, in about 500 B.C. Citizens were required to dispose of their waste at least one mile from city walls. This was a remarkably forward- thinking plan, especially when you consider that, zooming all the way up to the eighteenth century, most Americans were simply throwing their trash out the window into the street—and this de- spite the fact that trash-related diseases such as bubonic plague, cholera, and typhoid fever had been known to alter the populations of Europe and influence monarchies around the world.
Burning trash became a big deal in the late 1800s with the invention of municipal incinerators as well as the practice of putting a match to the stuff in one’s own backyard. Burning trash was wonderful, magical, because it made it seem to disappear.
Throwing trash into the ocean had a similar effect, and for a while that practice joined burning as America’s solution. But stinky, ruined beaches and clogged harbors prompted the Supreme Court to ban trash-in-the-ocean in 1934. Even so, it’s worth noting that, thanks to lawbreakers and people in countries without regulations, a soup of plastic waste floating in the Pacific Ocean now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States. This expanse of debris, held in place by swirling underwater currents, stretches from about five hundred nautical miles off the California coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii, and almost as far as Japan. Scientists are still trying to figure out what to do about that one.
Joe Haworth grew up in downtown Los Angeles, and he re- members burning trash as a boy. “Everybody had a backyard incinerator,” he tells me. He’s sitting on one of the gas pipes on a lower ledge of the landfill, under an oak tree, taking in the shade. “I re- member looking at the wax melting off the milk carton, thinking,
‘Oh, that’s really cool.’ We put the ashes in a bucket, and the city would haul the ashes away. You’d separate the food scraps. They’d be taken to the pig farms. Then we had a mayor, Sam Yorty, saying,
‘Hey, if we throw all this stuff together, we can make it easier for the housewives, make it simpler for them; let’s put it all in one big can and haul it away.’ ” The story delights him, as so many stories do, and he bangs on the pipe to animate this next part. “Sam Yorty was elected, and housewives were bashing trash lids together, saying, ‘Bless you, Mayor Sam!’ Yup. Look up Sam Yorty. Y-O-R-T-Y.” And so, the urban landfill, which in the beginning was a dump on the edge of town. When the pile got too high, someone would light a match to it and make room for more. And more. And more. Volume became an absurdly huge problem, with the dawning of the baby boom and the quantity of trash exploding in the crazed TV-dinner consumerism following World War II. In 1955, Life magazine heralded the advent of the “throwaway society.”
Burn all that trash in a crowded place like Los Angeles and you contribute to the most famous smog problem in the world. In 1959 the American Society of Civil Engineers published a standard guide to “sanitary landfilling.” Instead of burning trash, the idea was to bury it. To guard against rodents and odors, the guide suggested compacting trash and covering it with a new layer of soil each day.
And so, the modern era of trash.
Joe Haworth and his college buddies were studying civil engineering at Loyola Marymount University at the time. Joe had not yet had his trash awakening, although he and his engineering friends, infected by the idealism of the time, the dawning of the environmental movement, were getting excited about . . . sewage.
“The whole nation’s plumbing was coming apart,” he tells me. “It was literally going to pieces. It was like the mayor’s idiot son ran the local sewage treatment.” There was no thinking. There was just expediency: Dump the crap into the river. In the big-picture tradition of the Jesuits, a professor at Loyola was urging Joe to do something with his life. The professor told him about sanitary engineering. He said there was a future, something big, bigger than anyone could imagine, and a chance to do something good.
There was no EPA yet. There were virtually no federal laws concerning pollution. Oil tankers were regularly dumping crank- case oil into oceans, air pollution was literally killing people— ninety-six in just four days in New York City—and in Ohio the Cuyahoga River burst into flames five stories high from floating chemicals.
And so, the awakening. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a cry of ecological radicalism meant to awaken a public lazily dependent on the chemical control of nature. The book ignited the first serious public dialogue about the dangers of pesticides and other chemicals. Ed Muskie, the famously cranky U.S.
senator, championed a national environmental policy, pushing the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act—much of the work born of his disgust over the polluted rivers in his native Maine.
In 1970, President Nixon created the EPA.
The modern environmental movement was nothing without sharp young minds capable of inventing change. Funds became available, traineeships at places like Stanford, Caltech, MIT. The best and brightest, including Joe, got free rides to study trash. Joe went to Stanford. “A lot of us felt the obligation to go into public service,” he says. He kicks the dirt. It all seems so adorable now. Boomers changing the world. What happened to all that? “This was such exciting stuff,” he says. “We were thinking up all- new ways of helping nature play catch-up after a couple of pretty messy centuries.” It was a thrilling time to be a sanitary engineer, even as the title gradually morphed into “environmental engineer.” In fact, these guys would go on to change the paradigm, inventing systems that would begin to provide relief to a planet choking on its own debris.
Joe never set out to be a PR guy. He was more or less called. So much was happening, so many innovations. His colleagues didn’t have the knack for putting multipart engineering concepts into the vernacular, but Joe had it in spades. He created the information office and became a mouthpiece.
Using landfill gas to generate electrical power—that was a good example. He remembers those early days with the fondness of an old man thinking of his first kid. It happened at Palos Verdes, one of the Districts’ older landfills, which was adjacent to a handsome neighborhood where a woman was complaining about her dead roses. She blamed the landfill: surely something disgusting was emanating out of that dump. She was right. Inspectors found that methane, the explosive gas they normally simply flared to get rid of, had migrated from the landfill into the neighborhood.
“So we said, ‘Whoa, we gotta do something,’ ” Joe says, standing up now, as if trying to solve the puzzle anew. “We dug a trench near her roses, put gravel in it. We figured, well, that stuff will just come up through the gravel because that’ll be the easiest road for it to travel. When that didn’t work, we put a pipe in, started to suck the gas out. Then our guys said, ‘You know what, we’re burning this stuff now just to get rid of it. That’s a pretty good-looking flame. I wonder if that would work in an engine.’ So our guys then began to run it through an internal combustion engine. And it ran the engine.”
It was one of those eureka moments: Use landfill gas to generate electricity! To a young environmental engineer, it was the most elegant example imaginable of closing the loop, reusing every- thing, making something useful out of, literally, garbage.
“One of our guys thought of putting a Christmas tree up on the landfill site,” Joe says. “Not a real big one. But running this little generator on landfill gas and lighting this Christmas tree. It got attention. Because it was such a curious thing.”
It worked. They built an energy station, and a couple of years later, dignitaries from around the world, including Prince Charles, came to visit the Palos Verdes landfill site to see energy come out of trash.
Currently, about 425 landfills in the United States produce land- fill gas (LFG), generating about 10 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. This is a green fuel, offsetting the use of 169 million barrels of oil per year or 356,000 railcars of coal. According to the EPA, the carbon reduction is the equivalent of removing the emissions from nearly 14 million vehicles on the road or planting nearly
20 million acres of forest.
All those complications of trash—the methane, the leachate, all the enormous equipment, all the landscaping, all the chemistry— have really nothing to do with enabling an irresponsible public intent on ignoring trash. That’s our own deal, our own psychology. In real-world terms, the complications of trash are the human inventions and human interventions intent on closing the cycle to restore nature’s severed loop.
“Think about it,” Joe says, squinting in the harsh glare of the noon sun. “What is pollution? Pollution’s just the wrong stuff in the wrong place at the wrong time. Any other time, it’s a resource. Okay? Think about that.”
When I enter the lunchroom with Big Mike, he lags be- hind, tells me to go ahead and get started. By now I know the dynamics of “second lunch,” at noon, and I wonder where Big Mike will sit. The place is stark and temporal, a large white double-wide with tables and bulletin boards and newspapers and buzzing fluorescent lights.
I head down to the long table where Steve, Wes, Patrick, Jamie, Tony, and the rest of the happy loudmouths of second lunch are diving into their lunch pails. Second lunch is almost all “Dirt,” the men who run the scrapers and push dirt. First lunch, at eleven thirty, is almost all “Rubbish,” the men like Big Mike who crush garbage. The Dirt crew is very gabby about the Rubbish crew. They say Rubbish is aloof, boring, and miserable. Dirt, they say, is happy, hilarious, and loving. I am trying to understand the source of these distinctions.
Each day the guys of second lunch seem excited to have a visitor in the lunchroom and, like schoolkids, talk at me all at once. “We are the biggest landfill in the nation,” one of them declares.
“We have awesome equipment,” says one. “We have eighteen D9s.”
“We have two D8s.”
“Compactors? We’ve got five of those.” “And two D10s—120,000 pounds each.”
“We have a D11 out at our Calabasas landfill, which is even bigger than that one.”
“I personally don’t think I’ve ever seen a D12. To be honest with you, I don’t think Caterpillar even makes them anymore.”
“They don’t.”
“We have the biggest machines in the world.” “We are number one.”
Steve, a scraper driver, tall, gangly, with long blond curls, holds court at the corner table. If he is the leader of this group, it is be- cause he can withstand constant jabbing and ridicule, mostly about his hair, with its history of bad cuts, bad bangs, Farrah Fawcett layers. Lately, the guys have been encouraging Steve to get a mullet. They have offered to pay him to do it. Steve emphatically refuses, but the image brings delight to Jamie, to Joe, and to Patrick, and somehow morphs into a discussion of the possibility of Steve one day making porn, mullet porn. There is no logical sequence to the evolution of this riff, but it takes on a life of its own, until soon midgets enter the story and the idea of Steve making midget mullet porn. The laughter is uproarious, and one guy spits out his Mountain Dew, and there is stomping of feet and pounding of tables until the lunchroom trailer shakes like a ship of drunken pirates.
I feel bad for Mike up there all alone. Mike usually eats at eleven thirty, with the rest of Rubbish, but he got delayed on ac- count of driving me around on his Bomag, so now he’s stuck here with Dirt.
I get up to go sit with Mike, but then Jamie, the youngest here, thin, clean-cut, offers me a peach, saying he picked it himself from his mother’s tree, so I sit back down.
“I drove on the Bomag with Big Mike today,” I tell the guys. “He dove me over verticals.”
“Yeah, we saw you out there,” says Wes, a guy with a wide brow wearing a Budweiser T-shirt. “Big Mike will take care of you.”
Big Mike waves from across the room. He’s an exception to the rule of second lunch, one of the few men in Rubbish whom Dirt doesn’t make fun of. This is on account of Big Mike’s win at the Road-E-O, his furthering the cause of making Puente Hills Land- fill number one.
“I also rode in a rig with Herman this morning,” I tell the guys.
“Herman?” “Miserable fucker—” “He’s not as bad now.”
“It was when he drove the water truck that he was really bad.” “His truck was number 6601. He would hide it.”
“He was, like, ‘That’s my water truck! You better not touch it.’ ”
“He had his cowboy hat. You better not touch his hat!” They crack up over the memory of Herman’s hat. Oh, that’s a good one. They are all gossip and cackle. I tell them they sound like girls.
Someone brings up rats.
“I’ve only seen one rat in all the years I worked here.”
“Coyotes eat the rats. The only rats we see are rats that other people bring in.”
They proudly agree that there are no rats at the landfill—and if there is one, it is only because it was hiding in a dumpster that got dumped. For the most part, the rats are crushed by the compactor, or the dozers, or buried alive in the dirt.
As for the occasional dead rats, these offer possibilities. Like the one time Patrick wrapped one in a soft tortilla shell, presented it to his supervisor, and said he was sick of people leaving their lunch around all the time.
Oh, that’s a good one. Oh, there have been so many good times here at the dump.
All of these men are lifers, most having worked their way up from paper pickers. Steve has been here for twenty-three years, Tony for nineteen, and Patrick for fourteen. For a heavy-equipment op- erator, getting a job with the Sanitation Districts is considered a ticket to paradise, given the benefits and good pay—about $80,000 a year before overtime—the steady year-round work, and the fact that trash is recession-proof. Most of the crew lives far east of the landfill, sixty, seventy, eighty miles away in the California desert, commuting more than two hours each way because this is L.A. and nothing is affordable. Because of the distance, and because they have to maintain squeaky-clean driving records in order to keep their jobs, they are not the sort of guys who leave work and hang out together in bars. They vanpool together, watch movies.
They spend their days alone, speedily pushing dirt from here to there, and so, aside from their time together in the van, all they have is the lunchroom.
They tell me that any of these operators can run any piece of equipment in the yard. All of the Dirt crew has at some point run Rubbish and vice versa, and even Dirt has to concede that Rubbish is more fun.
“Crushing things,” says one. “The biggest thrill at this entire landfill is crushing things.”
“Crushing boats. Just to destroy a boat. Or a trailer or some- thing like that. That’s probably the biggest thrill that I can think of.”
“I crushed a mobile once. What was neat about it was I didn’t know it was there, but when I came up to it, I kind of tagged onto the corner of it and I must have hit it just right, because when I hit it the whole thing just flattened.”
“Awwww!”
For all the joy in crushing things, the facts of the matter some- times give these guys pause.
“You’d be amazed at what gets thrown out,” one says. “Stuff that could be donated. We could write a book about the American way of waste.”
“Companies throw stuff away because of taxes. Like brand- new running shoes. These companies cut all their surplus shoes up so nobody can get them. But they would be perfectly fine. They could donate them. They could do something with them.”
“When I first started here, for, like, probably two or three weeks these big semitrailers were just dumping piles of brand-new computer typewriters. Piles! Sometimes there would be three trucks next to each other, dumping brand-new computer typewriters. Never been opened. Still in the box.”
“Waste. Waste. Waste. Sure, it bothers you, but what can you do about it?”
“There was a time someone dumped $2.1 million here. It’s buried in there.”
“That is not true.” “It’s true!”
“Remember when they dumped all them Susan B. Anthonys?” “Thought it was chocolate candy, but it was real.”
“That is not true, either.”
“It’s buried in there, I swear to God.” “How do you even know?”
“How do you know it’s not?”
“Remember the Sears that closed down? They had their big sale. Then whatever didn’t sell came into the landfill. Brand-new. Brand-new! Other customers would be here dumping, then run over and pick up brand-new chain saws.”
Salvaging is strictly prohibited at the landfill. This may sound like some picky rule, but the truth is, people who are stupid enough to dive in among the dozers to grab something sometimes end up dead. Private citizens who dump here are provided a separate dump- ing area away from the action of the machines, but that doesn’t stop them from walking over to the working cell and trying to go for the grab.
“We’ve had people crushed.” “Oh, yeah.”
“You can’t see them. You literally don’t know they’re there. No one is supposed to be there.”
“Remember that lady that got crushed?” “Oh, yeah.”
I make the point that with all this drama, Rubbish sounds way more exciting than Dirt. Maybe Dirt is jealous of Rubbish and that accounts for the animosity?
This analysis brings jeers.
“Those guys are miserable,” one says. “They hate each other.”
“No, they hate themselves.”
“It’s a body thing,” one says, and the group agrees on that one. Most of the Rubbish crew is in pain, or used to be in pain, or is fighting it. Typically, a man moves over to Rubbish only when his body can no longer take Dirt. Rubbish is soft. Dirt is hard. A man who spends eight or ten hours a day five days a week on a D10 pushing dirt is a man with jangled bones, achy joints, herniated disks. “Your longevity is what we’re talking about,” one says. Most of the Rubbish guys are old, nearing retirement, with a history of back and neck operations. “Going over to Rubbish is more or less being put out to pasture,” one says.
There are exceptions. Again, Big Mike, who occupies such a hallowed place in this landfill. He drove a scraper for just two years before his back got destroyed. He had surgery, a whole year in bed, and then he returned to have a terrific career in Rubbish on his Bomag, number one in the U.S.A.
But usually Dirt means you’re still young. Falling off visuals, straddling one, Tipper and Tipsy Toes. Dirt is the good old days.
These days are, of course, numbered. The landfill is scheduled to close in 2013. A skeleton crew of maintenance workers and field engineers will keep the Puente Hills infrastructure working—will monitor the leachate, maintain the gas wells and the power plant that will continue to transform methane into electricity for about thirty years. But there will be no more trash, no more trucks, no more verticals to crash over, and no more radical dirt moves on a D10. Most of the Rubbish crew is old enough to retire, while the Dirt crew will get absorbed somewhere within the enormous Sanitation Districts organization, so at least they’ll have jobs.
None of the guys in the lunchroom will admit to the possibility of ever missing this dump, this history, these good old days, and yet they scheme together about their bosses getting permits to open more space in the canyons, more space for trash, more time for Puente Hills.
“It’s a pipe dream,” one says. “Sooner or later, you just have to face the fact that this place is about to close.”
When the landfill closes, a Waste-by-Rail program will take over. The trash will be put in sealed boxcars and delivered two hundred miles west along the Union Pacific Railroad to the desert, to the new Mesquite Regional Landfill in Imperial County, a super- landfill said to last a hundred years.
And all this old trash will still be sitting here, fermenting, producing gas. In that way, the Puente Hills Landfill will stand as a kind of monument, the symbol of an era of new thought.
The mountain of trash will be capped, sealed, covered in layers and layers of stone and clay and soil, planted, and turned over to the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation, a place for people to play. Plans have been in the works for decades: Every time a truck dumps a ton of trash here, a dollar goes into a Puente Hills Landfill Native Habitat Preservation Authority fund. The goal of the fund is to maintain a wildlife corridor more than twice as large as the fill area. Already miles of hiking and horseback-riding trails traverse this land and even the landfill it- self, separated from daily operations.
Over time, the ground will settle in odd and unpredictable ways. You can’t construct buildings on a landfill, because the trash has a life of its own, much of it slowly decomposing and, surprisingly, much of it not. Trash specialists called “garbologists” have done archeological digs in older landfills and have found that, rather than decomposing, a lot of trash, due to the lack of oxygen in a landfill, is actually mummified there. Newspapers from the 1960s have been uncovered from deep inside the earth—with headlines and news items intact.
“Isn’t that hilarious?” Joe says. He loves the garbologist story, the mummy idea, all the crazy surprises.
We’re in the car again, marveling at the work of the landscaping guys, and he’s got his arm out the window pointing this way and that like some grandpa showing the old neighborhood. “See those little pipes?” he says, motioning toward small irrigation pipes snaking all over the ground.
“More pipes,” I say. “A lot of pipes.” It’s really nothing so sur- prising to see an arid landscape made lush with water flowing through irrigation pipes.
“Remember I showed you the sewage-treatment plant?” he says. He’s nodding knowingly and his shirtsleeve is flapping in the breeze. It takes me a moment to make the connection he’s making, between irrigation pipes and sewage—
“No—” I say.
“Yeah,” he says.
These pipes don’t just carry any water. They carry reclaimed wastewater from the Sanitation Districts’ nearby sewage treatment plant.
“Isn’t that neat?” he says.
He parks at a fence, up at the top of the landfill, just beyond the horse trails, where there is a strawberry farm. It’s on land adjacent to the landfill, rows and rows of fat green plants ready for picking. “Come see the strawberries,” he says, shoving the car door with his shoulder, and it reluctantly creaks open. “Okay, now see those
pipes?” he says.
“Oh, come on,” I say. “Not the strawberries.” “Yeah.”
The strawberry farm is dependent on recycled wastewater for its irrigation too.
“Isn’t that neat?” he says. He bends at his knees and then pops up with a little clap. “You should be writing about a sewage treat- ment plant,” he says. “That’s where the action is.”
There has been so much talk at this landfill about sewage, and apparently I can no longer avoid it. Joe and all the engineers here refer to it with a shrug. No big deal. This is just the way things work. Sewage water feeding flowers and strawberry plants. It has taken me a while to accept the notion that this, in fact, is the way things work.
“Oh, just think about it,” Joe says. “What is a sewage treatment plant? It’s an apology to nature for putting too many people in one place.”
He pauses, gives me a moment to mull that one over. He pulls his hat down to cut the sun. “Nature isn’t designed for us to live the way we do. Nature designed it more like the Native Americans had it: When the neighborhood started to smell, you picked up your tepee and went over there. There was some basic human rule that said you go thataway.” He points with both hands moving toward some imagined exit. “Primitive societies knew that nature would ultimately reclaim all that organic material so they could come back in a few years.”
Nature gave us rain, streams, rivers, and the ocean to finish the job of digestion. “This is just a straight environmental-engineering calculation,” he says, heading back to the car, and he opens my door for me so I climb in.
“Just about everybody in this country has one cubic foot of digester somewhere out there finishing the job that he or she couldn’t complete,” he says. “Your guts start the process and nature completes it. Now, where is that going to happen? If you let our sewage from this L.A. area with ten million people float into the ocean, you would have one really beat-up ocean.”
With that, he throws the car into reverse, then starts driving down the mountain. He pulls over to a lookout spot where we get a good view of the sewage treatment plant in the distance, just over the I-605, tucked into the hills. I feel I should say something complimentary, but it looks like every gray, flat, giant, boring industrial building you’ve ever hated for marring the landscape.
“We take the processes that occur in an ocean or a river and we do it in tanks,” he says. “The same bacteria that work in nature— basically a big bacterial soup that emulates what goes on in the ground or in a river—does the whole thing in a tank in a more concentrated fashion. So, instead of taking ten days in a river, we do it in eight hours inside a tank.”
There is something vaguely utopian about all of this. A beautiful landfill blooming with pink flowers, wastewater feeding straw- berries, fifty-eight megawatts of electricity out of garbage and sludge, hiking trails over trash. It would seem we were talking about an entirely different planet, not our own supposedly doomed one—where the sky is falling; where, because of our gluttony, we are in danger of making one final grand mess of the place, if not melting it or blowing it up. Those are all certainly viable outcomes. But there is more to the story: There are people on this very same planet having a rousing good time fixing the place, people motivated by the thrill of repair, the simple joy of invention, and an urge to do good.
The more time I spend at the landfill, the more I get the sense that I’m in a different dimension, listening to more highly evolved beings that have been here all along but, somehow, nobody ever noticed.
I meet up with Carol, the old lady who works the front gate and greets all the truckers who come in, starting with Herman each morning and then about three hundred more through the day. She is short, haggard, hunched over, with curls sprouting beneath a ball cap. The guard booth is a shack just big enough for Carol and her stool and her clip fan and her bag of birdseed. The shack has a back window opening to the landfill abutting it. This is the bottom of the landfill, the oldest layer of trash, nearly a half century of trash, and so trees and shrubs have long since taken over.
“I started out with just doves, and now I got, like, six different kinds of birds,” she tells me. “Bright yellow, and a small one with red on its chest. In the morning I see deer, coyotes, bobcat, mountain lion, some owls, some hawks, rattlesnakes, rabbits, and squirrels. That’s the whole reason I like this place so much.”
It is easily my biggest surprise, to hear so many people speak of enjoying nature as part of the landfill experience. What a weird and yet perfectly sensible link.
“I hold my breath a lot when the small trucks without tops come in,” she says. “It doesn’t hit till after they pass. I’ll say, ‘Oooh, the poochie truck went by!’
“I write poetry. I have to write the words down immediately or else I’ll lose them. I saw a wolf here once that inspired me. I wrote about his family. He kept searching for them and never found them. I called it ‘Long Lost Love.’ ”
In the end, I tour the newest building on the site, the Puente Hills Materials Recovery Facility, or MRF. I have been resisting this place. It could be because it looks so bland and sterile, like a mint- green shopping mall or a giant municipal office building, or it could simply be because I am reluctant to face my own responsibility in all of this. The MRF is to be the starting point of the Waste-by-Rail system; it’s where they’ll sort the trash, save and sell the good stuff, and then send only the unusable junk out on the expensive trip on the railways. Already the sorting has started, reclaiming some of the trash that would have ended up in the Puente Hills heap above.
Nearly all of the engineers I meet boast about the MRF: how huge it is—large enough to house three 747s; how the design is environmentally friendly, with over five hundred skylights, and recycled materials used throughout the project, from structural and reinforcing steel to ceiling and floor tiles.
Joe would like to highlight his own contribution: an observation deck where the public can come through and watch. “I insisted on this,” he says. “I said we have to be able to show people what’s happening to their trash.” He’s dressed today in a green flowered shirt, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes. He is excited to be here, like a man greeting a newcomer to his fancy new mansion. The observation deck is sleek and futuristic, a long glass corridor dimly lit by runway-style floor lights. Below us, the action of the MRF: Trucks pull in one end of the enormous building, dump garbage. Dozers move the garbage to the sorting floor, where bulky valuables, wood, carpet, and large chunks of cardboard are pulled out. This is commercial garbage intended for recycling—a minuscule fraction of L.A. County’s trash—but to Joe and his cronies it represents a beautiful outlook for, one day, all our trash. After the big stuff is picked out, the trash is sent via conveyor to an auto- mated picking system and finally to the picking line, where teams of sorters—women wearing safety glasses and bandannas and surgical masks—pick, Lucille Ball style, through the trash. One grabs paper, one grabs clear plastic, one aluminum, and so on. The separated materials are baled and stacked, awaiting purchase.
“Isn’t that impressive?” Joe says, hands on his hips, looking down.
“Actually, I find it pretty depressing,” I say. I lean into the glass and my breath makes fog. I feel like Ebenezer Scrooge and Joe’s the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing to where I’m headed: a world in which a whole lot of poor people have to pick through my garbage so the planet doesn’t suffocate. I sink, as perhaps anyone would, into recycle guilt.
“I sort of feel like it shouldn’t have come to this,” I say.
“Oh, forgodsakes, there’s no room for sentimentality,” he says, leading me to a bank of elevators.
Americans recycle about one and a half pounds of the five pounds of trash they produce each day—a national recycling rate of 32 percent. This is actually not horrible when you figure that, in
1989, when a barge called the Mobro 4000 famously carried three thousand tons of unwanted trash up and down the East Coast. looking for a place to dump, our recycling rate was just 16 percent. That barge caught the public’s attention: We have no place to put our trash! California led the recycling charge, enacting a 1989 law that said its cities had to recycle 50 percent of their garbage by 2000. Today, San Francisco has a recycling rate of 69 percent, the best of any American city.
The goal, in the larger and perhaps mythical sense, is 100 per- cent. Zero waste. The goal is to stop thinking of waste as a problem and to start thinking of it, simply, as the result of a design flaw in manufacturing: we should be reusing everything. “It’s just about closing the loop,” Joe says as we get into the elevator. “And maybe that starts with us first just getting hold of our gluttony. You know, we still have remnants of that old reptilian brain that tells us to just keep getting more, more, more in order to be happy.”
Reptilian?
“You know, a guy gets his first BMW, expects to be happy,” he says. “Then he’s off skiing with Bob, who has a better BMW. Damn. He was supposed to be happy! It didn’t work. So now he needs a four-thousand-square-foot house. You know the story.”
I tell him I don’t see Bob and his buddy slowing down anytime soon. We are a nation of consumers. We can’t seem to stop our- selves. We don’t seem to even want to stop ourselves.
He does not see this as a uniquely American or even a modern phenomenon. “We’re not smart enough yet,” he says. “We’re young. You can argue how long Homo sapiens have been around, but the guess is something like 150,000 years. We are amateurs at this. We have just barely gotten here in terms of the clock of the earth.” The elevator stops and he holds the door open, so I go first.
“We have our physics way ahead of our psyche,” he says when we reach the first floor. We head down a hallway so clean, our shoes squeak. “Like, we know how to make a lot of stuff,” he says. “But the notion of responsibility? We’re slower on that. The idea that you’re supposed to leave the world better than the way it was when you showed up? We’re onto it, but we’re not nearly there. We need to be able to take the next step and realize that the world’s ideas are bigger than just a bunch of stuff.”
The more he talks like this, the more optimistic he becomes: people will get smarter, more conscientious, more in tune with the needs of the next generation; chivalry will spread throughout the world!
I apologize for not seeing it. I confess that I don’t see this recy- cling thing really kicking in where I come from, where many peo- ple regard recycling as a quaint, retro 1990s fad. Rumor has it that there’s a paper glut, that no one knows what to do with all those plastic soda bottles other than make some silly belts out of them, that all this stuff just ends up in landfills in the end, so why bother? “In the early days of recycling, maybe,” he says. “Paper goods were mixed at probably a pretty low grade where the guy had it for six months in his yard, it got wet and turned into a huge spitwad. But the higher the cost of disposal goes, the more inventive people become.”
We stop in the workers’ locker room and Joe finds us both a hard hat and a pair of safety goggles.
It costs $29 a ton to dump here at Puente Hills. It will cost $60 a ton to haul trash by rail out of the Los Angeles basin. “People get really creative at $60 a ton,” he says. We talk about thriving markets in China: wastepaper is America’s number one export by volume to China. The ships that bring all those toys and TVs in from China now return full of our old paper, which they use to pack more goods made in China. And as for making new paper, 36 per- cent of the fiber that goes into new paper now comes from recycled sources.
“And now there are rug companies that will actually lease you a rug,” Joe says. “If someone spills on the little square, they pop up the square. The company takes the square back, they shave the fuzz off, they melt the plastic, make new fuzz, put it back on. Yeah. Isn’t that crazy? And it’s being done because of the disposal costs. It pushes backward.”
I ask him if there is any squashing his optimism.
“People are basically good-hearted until put in a very bad corner,” he says. “We just have to keep giving them reasons to be good- hearted—the opportunity to be good-hearted. You know, their inclination is to be good folks until it’s gone bad on them. Then they get defensive. What’s Churchill’s line? If you’re young and not liberal, you have no heart. If you’re old and not conservative, you have no brains.
“Look, environmental consciousness is not a religious thing. It doesn’t have holy precepts that say you can’t touch a plastic bag or you’re a horrible person. It’s more: Get a grip and find a balance. Life’s organic. It’s smelly and gooey. Get past it. It’s just science. I think as we get more people reconnected to science through recy- cling, we get them to understand the magic of this planet. They’ve forgotten the magic. The truth is, it doesn’t take that much connecting to go WOW! It’s like lying on your back in the mountains, looking at the stars. Being able to go WOW! And holy mackerel! It really doesn’t take a lot of study to appreciate this place.”
All geared up for our tour through the floor of the MRF, Joe pushes a door and we head in. It definitely has the feel of two air- plane hangars—a massive space with a sky-high ceiling. The sorting area with its clanking conveyor belts takes up a tiny corner of the building. Trash falls into it from a hopper above and goes marching along the belts while the women watch and grab and pull at it. I stand behind a pregnant Hispanic woman snatching dirty empty soda bottles out of a heap of garbage rolling by so fast, she nearly misses a perfectly good twenty-ounce Sierra Mist.
She catches my eye and I don’t quite know what to do with my shame, and so, stupidly, I smile and give her a thumbs-up.
Joe invites me out to dinner. First we have to stop home and pick up Shelly, his wife. We crawl on the crowded 605 in his old Cadillac and he looks tired, spent, and I have to think by now he is talked out.
“I just don’t know about God,” he says, apropos of nothing, and because he is not, and probably never will be, talked out. “I don’t know about an afterlife,” he says.
“Yeah, me neither,” I say. The ride is smooth and the leather seats stick to my legs. This was a damn fancy car in its day.
“I’m more about that Marxist thinking that religion is the opiate of the masses,” he says. “Calm the people down so that the kings can get away with murder.”
“Yeah—”
“But nature certainly seems to be hinting at an afterlife,” he says. “As much as I can be cynical about that sort of thing. Nature says, ‘Wait a minute, now, it’s all cycles.’ Nature does not seem to be telling us that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and then we all go boop.”
The sun is falling appropriately onto the horizon. We both flip our visors down. Even so, it’s blinding, and we’re not moving, and this is going to be a long ride home.
“The spiritual world could be just a part of the cycle that we don’t yet understand,” he says, opening his window to get some air, which is probably technically smog. We sit and stare into traffic.
“Of course, my wife swears that she was here before as a Spanish guy,” he says. “She remembers water coming in through the portholes, the whole bit. But she’s odd, anyway.”
The description turns out to be an apt setup. When we finally get to the house, Shelly won’t let us in because it’s too messy for company, and so we sit in the backyard and sip pinot grigio, and I marvel at the odd assortment of stuff in the yard and on the porch, a crooked little fake Christmas tree, an empty pond, little ceramic dwarfs, and a fat black cat. Shelly is as tall as Olive Oyl, with a handsome face and a jet-black mane, and she chain-smokes and speaks the same crazily observant language as her husband. The two get tangled in notions, in thinking about what it would be like if there were no more people on earth, in trying to remember the names of types of frogs, or the names of saints, until one of them has to run inside and get a book to look it up.
At one point, when Joe is inside trying to find his encyclopedia of movie actors, Shelly turns to me and holds her glass up to offer a toast. “To landfill people!” she says.
I raise my glass politely.
“Aren’t they the most ethical bunch?” she says. “It’s weird. So many of them were Jesuit-trained, so maybe it goes back to that, where doing your best for the common good is a paramount principle.” She takes a final drag of her cigarette, smashes the butt in an awaiting seashell. “But they approach their jobs in the most principled way. They’re taking the worst two things we have—trash and sewage—and turning them into golf courses and wonderful things.
“Isn’t that weird?” she says. “Seriously, it’s like a cause for these people. I’ve noticed it from the beginning, having to go to all these dreadful conferences and things. I used to think, ‘These should be our politicians. We should only elect people trained in landfill maintenance.’ ”
Joe comes back out. He didn’t find the encyclopedia. Instead, he’s carrying a journal article that reminded him of something funny. “No one knows where water came from,” he announces. “Some people think it came in as dirty snowballs. Asteroids. They’re not positive water started here. It may have come from space.”
“Oh, he loves this one,” Shelly says to me, as if to provide warning. “He is now going to tell you where molecules came from.”
“All the molecules came from space,” he says. “Ask any nuclear scientist about the origins of the bigger molecules: carbon and nitrogen and oxygen and all the stuff that makes up life—they were all hydrogen to begin with. They came out of the fusion process that takes place in the center of suns.”
“Wait for it—” Shelly says to me.
“So we’re stardust, literally,” he says. “We are atomic waste!” He slaps the table, more satisfied with that one than he has been with anything all day. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
Puente Hills Landfill
City of Industry, California
Herman asks me if I smell anything, and the way he says it I can’t tell if I’m supposed to lie. He says he loves being part of nature, enjoys watching the sunrise, and
then he says it again. “Do you smell anything?”
“Well, it is a landfill,” I say, finally. I’m trying to be polite. He is old, wiry, chewing a toothpick. He’s been at this for decades, always the first to arrive, pulling no. 72, the thirty-foot-long tractor-trailer full of trash assigned to him each day. Dumping is permitted to begin at 6:00 a.m., and he keeps his finger on a red button inside a panel on the truck and constantly checks his watch.
“Women smell things men can’t smell,” he says.
At this hour the landfill looks nothing like what most people picture when they imagine a landfill. Nothing messy, nothing gross, nothing slimy, no trash anywhere at all. It looks, perhaps disappointingly, like an enormous, lonesome construction site, a 1,365-acre expanse of light brown dirt hiding buried trash from yesterday and thousands of other yesterdays. The scale of the thing alone boggles the mind. To stop and ponder the fact that nearly fifty years of trash forms a foundation four hundred feet deep is simply to become fretful with some unnamed woe about America’s past and the planet’s future, and so I am trying not to do it. When fellow truckers arrive, pulling up next to Herman, the ground—so deep with trash—is so soft it bounces.
The Puente Hills Landfill, about sixteen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, was a series of canyons when people first started dumping here. Now it’s a mountain. In 1953 the film adaptation of H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel The War of the Worlds featured the Puente Hills as the landing site of the first spacecraft in the Martian invasion. Dumping started in 1965 in an area named the San Gabriel Valley Dump. In 1970 the dump was purchased by the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County, a partnership of twenty-four independent districts serving five million people in seventy-eight cities in Los Angeles County, and renamed the Puente Hills Landfill. Every day 13,200 new tons of trash are added. That’s enough trash to fill a one-acre hole twenty feet deep. The other way to look at it is a football stadium filled two stories high.
On November 1, 2013, the landfill will be out of room, and all that trash will have to go somewhere else.
At six o’clock, Herman pushes the button. The back end of the trailer rises and 79,650 pounds of debris comes thundering out, most of it wood and plaster and nails and shreds of wallpaper. Be- side him a truck is dumping decidedly more organic garbage, pun- gent indeed, and way down the row, off to the side, a guy is pouring a truck full of sludge, sterilized human waste, black as ink.
Herman gets a broom, sweeps his trailer clean. Unlike most of
the haulers who come here—the guys who drive for the conglomerates like Waste Management with their continuous fleet of shiny green packers—Herman works for the Sanitation Districts itself, moving trash from a central dumping station in the nearby town of Southgate. Thus, his priority status. He will make five trips in a day, stopping only once to eat Oodles of Noodles and cheese crackers and a cookie. On the ride home, he eats a green apple. “I’ve got my routine,” he says. “Every day I do it all exactly the same.” He talks to me about his philosophy of slowing down, not making mistakes, same way every day, the power of ritual. Peaceful. Using this method, he worked his way up from paper picker, day laborer, traffic director, water truck diver, on and on until he found his niche. There is honor, he says, in being first each day, all those other trucks parting at the gate so Herman can get through. He is careful to note that he is the only one of his entire eighth-grade graduating class of 1954 who has not yet retired. “Why would anyone retire from a place like this?” he asks. “Why would you?”
Having spent more than a week at the landfill, by now I am get- ting used to hearing workers here, from the highest to the lowest ranks, speak like this. Concerning the landfill, they are all pride and admiration and even thanks. It seemed, at first, like crazy talk.
A landfill, after all, is a disgusting place. It is not a place anyone should have to work in, or see, or smell. This is a 100-million-ton solid soup of diapers, Doritos bags, phone books, shoes, carrots, watermelon rinds, boats, shredded tires, coats, stoves, couches, Biggie fries, piled up right here off the I-605 freeway. It’s a place that smells like every dumpster you ever walked by—times a few hundred thousand. It’s a place that brings to mind the hell of civilization, a heap of waste and ugliness and everything denial is designed for. We throw stuff out. The stuff is supposed to go away. Disappear. We tend not to think about the fact that every time we throw a moist towelette or an empty Splenda packet or a Little Debbie snack cake wrapper into the trash can, there are people involved, a whole chain of people charged with the preposterously complicated task of making that thing vanish—which it never really does. A landfill is not something we want to bother thinking about, and if we do, we tend to blame the landfill itself for sitting there stinking like that, for marring the landscape, for offending a sanitized aesthetic. We are human, highly evolved creatures impatient with all things stinky and gooey and gross— remarkably adept at forgetting that a landfill would be nothing, literally nothing, without us.
In America, we produce more garbage than any other country in the world: four pounds per person each day, for a total of 250 million tons a year. In urban areas, we are running out of places to put all that trash. Right now, the cost of getting rid of it is dirt cheap—maybe $15 a month on a bill most people never even see, all of it wrapped into some mysterious business about municipal tax revenue. So why think about it?
Electricity used to be cheap too. We went for a long time not thinking about the true cost of that. Same with gas for our cars.
The problem of trash (and sewage, its even more offensive cousin) is the upside-down version of the problem of fossil fuel: too much of one thing, not enough of the other. Either way, it’s a mat- ter of managing resources. Either way, a few centuries of gorging and not thinking ahead has the people of the twenty-first century standing here scratching our heads. Now what?
The problem of trash, fortunately, is a wondrously provocative puzzle to scientists and engineers, some of whom lean, because of the inexorability of trash, toward the philosophical. The intrinsic conundrum—the disconnect between human waste and the human himself—becomes grand, even glorious, to the people at the dump. “I brought my wife up here once to show her,” Herman tells me. “I said, ‘Look, that’s trash.’ She couldn’t believe it. Then she couldn’t understand it. I told her, I said, ‘This is the Rolls-Royce of landfills.’ ”
“Nobody knows we’re even here,” Joe Haworth is saying as we make our way around the outside of the landfill, winding up and up past scrubby California oaks, sycamore trees, and the occasional shock of pink bougainvillea vine. He is driving his old Cadillac, a
1982 Eldorado, rusty black with a faded KERRY-EDWARDS sticker on the bumper. He has the thick glasses of a civil engineer, which is how he started, and the curls and paunch and demeanor of a crusty retired PR man, which is what he is now. He wears a Hawaiian print shirt and a straw hat, and the way he leans way back in the driver’s seat suggests an easy, uncomplicated confidence.
“People driving by on the highway think this is a park,” he says. “Or they’ll be, like, ‘What’s with all the pipes going around that mountain?’ ”
In fact, we are driving over trash, a half century’s worth, a heap so vast, there are roads and stop signs and traffic cops and a his- tory of motor vehicle accidents, including at least one fatality.
The outside of the landfill, the face the public sees, reminds me of Disney World, a perfectly crafted veneer of happiness belying a vastly more complicated core. The western side, facing the 605, is lush greens and deep blues, a showy statement of desert defiance, while the eastern face is quiet earth tones, scrubby needlegrass, buttonbush, and sagebrush; the native look on that side was re- quested by the people living in Hacienda Heights, a well-to-do neighborhood in the foothills of the dump. They wanted the mountain of trash behind them to blend in with the canyons reaching toward the sunset. A staff of fifty landscapers do nothing but honor such requests. The goal: Make the landfill disappear by making it look pretty.
“No matter what you do with your trash, nature has to process it,” Joe is saying. “Okay? Think about it.” We are making our way up to a lookout point where we can get an overview of the action of the trash trucks and bulldozers and scrapers, a good show and a good place to sit and think. Joe speaks with rapid-fire speed, constantly punctuating his lessons with Groucho Marx–style asides. “Look, we’d be up to our eyeballs in dinosaur poop if nature didn’t have any way to run this stuff around again,” he says. He loves this stuff. He is sixty-four years old, an environmental engineer, a Jesuit-trained fallen Catholic whose enthusiasm for waste management, solid, liquid, recycled, buried, burning, de- composing, is oddly infectious. I have come to regard him as the high priest of trash.
“Instead of being up to our eyeballs in dinosaur poop, we’re made of dinosaur poop,” he says. “You know? And other chemicals. We’ve got garbage in us. There’s a carbon cell from Napoleon in your elbow somewhere. It’s all nature running things around again, a continuous loop. It’s all done by bacteria breaking it down into carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, okay? Think about it!”
I tell him I’ll add it to my list, which keeps getting longer the longer I’m here. Joe retired from the landfill a couple of years ago, but he comes back to consult, to visit, to help Donny, his assistant who took over his job, and to sit and marvel. He entered the refuse world back in the 1960s, when people first awakened, as if from a lazy daydream, to the notion that trash not only matters but trash is matter, and matter never leaves. You can burn it. You can bury it. You can throw it into the ocean. You can try to hide it, but it still exists in some form: ash, sludge, gas, particulate matter floating in the air. “It all comes back to the idea of the cycle,” he says. “We’re going to keep reusing the same stuff, so let’s figure out how to use it responsibly so we don’t choke on it.”
He gives me an example. “See those pipes?” he says, pointing as we cruise up the landfill. “Those are sucking gas.” The pipes are fat and prominent, about two feet in diameter, and a constant source of wild wonder. Eighty miles of pipes encircle the landfill, pulling out a deadly mix of methane, carbon dioxide, and other gases continuously produced by the fermenting trash. The pipes are connected with seventy-five miles of underground trenches and to a network of fourteen hundred wells. The methane mix is highly explosive and smelly and in the past has been an environmental nightmare. As trash continues to ferment, the methane is unstoppable. And so the pipes—a kind of landfill miracle, a technology pioneered by Sanitation Districts engineers—deliver the methane downhill to the Gas-to-Energy Facility. The methane feeds a boiler, creates steam. The steam turns a turbine. The turbine generates fifty-eight megawatts of electricity—enough to power about seventy thousand Southern California homes.
Before I started hanging out at the landfill, I had no idea we could generate electricity from trash. “Most people don’t know this,” I say to Joe.
“Oh, a lot of people know it,” he says.
No, they don’t. I have checked. I have consulted folks back home, regular trash makers, average citizens going through cartons of Hefty bags, who think little beyond “Gotta take the trash out” when it comes to the final resting place of their garbage. “People don’t know we power homes with landfill gas,” I say. “Don’t you think people should know this?”
He looks at me, weary. “Why do you think I’ve been busting my ass at this for thirty years, lady?”
He blinks, removes his glasses, takes out a handkerchief, and wipes them clean. “That’s what I did,” he says. “I did nothing but tell people about what we do here. Now, how much time does society have to listen and understand? Well, the answer to that is, society’s interest level is pretty low. It doesn’t necessarily want to know where its waste goes. It’s embarrassed by its responsibility in this arena.”
Joe parks the car and we get out. We stand and peer down into the landfill, at trash, the very stuff Herman and his fellow truckers dumped earlier this morning. From this distance, the open landfill is a giant brown five-hundred-acre bowl, with a frantic line of trucks inside snorting and pregnant and awaiting release.
This is the cheapest place to dump trash in all of L.A. County, about $28 a ton, and so it is the first choice of most garbage companies. When the landfill reaches its 13, 200-ton daily capacity, usually by about noon, the guard at the gate will raise a flag visible from the freeway: a sign to truckers to keep on moving and find another place to dump. Anyone can dump here, any private citizen with a pickup full of junk willing to pay the fee.
Trash gets piled in as many as three active areas, or “cells,” daily. Each cell is about the size of a football field, and every hour an additional 1,200 tons of trash is put into it. A team of thirty heavy-equipment operators dances madly over the pile. Huge bull- dozers, ten feet tall, equipped with seventeen-foot blades, push and sculpt the trash into rows. Then the mighty Bomags, 120,000- pound compactors with 130,000 pounds of pushing power, smash and crunch and squish the trash, forcing out air, forcing it tighter and tighter to save space. All of these machines clamber impossibly close to one another, backward, forward, over steep hills of trash, clinging lopsidedly to edges. From up here, the sounds are all roar and backup beeps echoing around the bowl, and the view is a colorful shock of red and green and yellow and white, a smash of crawling color.
One of the cells has already reached capacity, and so the scrapers have moved in, the biggest machines of all, fifty-three feet long, sixteen feet high—the wheels alone are nine feet tall—and with their big belly hoppers pick up clean dirt, and dump it about a foot thick over the cell, sealing in odors, rats, bugs, concealing the left- overs of a yesterday everyone is more than ready to be done with.
Forgotten. Gone. By day’s end, there will be no trace of trash anywhere in the landfill.
The next day, the process repeats. Cell by cell, the garbage spreads across the landfill floor until it hits the far side, the edge of the bowl, and a new layer, or “lift,” is begun.
A constant parade of water trucks sprays the dirt to control dust, and a team of paper pickers runs madly on foot to catch anything the wind might pick up and try to carry away—the worst offender being plastic grocery bags that can take off like kids’ balloons. A chemical odor retardant is sometimes used when things get too bad, or again if the wind conspires, and there are a lot of seagulls waiting on a nearby ridge. Seagulls are a landfill nuisance because they fly away with food scraps and, as is their reputation, fight each other over them mid-flight, often losing them, and soon a lady has a half-eaten hamburger splashing into her backyard pool. For a time, engineers were utterly confounded by the seagull problem, firing off cannons to scare them away, piping in the sounds of hawks and owls—but the gulls got so used to the sounds they would stand on top of the cannons and inside the speakers. The solution was elegant and simple: tall, portable poles placed at intervals over the working face of the landfill, with nylon fishing line stretched between them. The lines disrupt the gulls’ unique spiral landing pattern; the birds give up before even trying. “And I guess they’re too stupid to walk on in under the wires,” Joe says. He’s got his sunglasses on now, and, together with the hat and the shirt and against the background of the lush foliage, he is the picture of vacation.
A more urgent and literally more pressing concern than birds in any landfill is leachate, the liquids that might ooze out. People are not supposed to throw away paint thinner or nail polish or batteries or transmission fluid or motor oil, but plenty do, plenty of it comes in on trucks, and plenty of it gets smashed and smushed, mixing with rainwater into an unpredictably toxic cocktail that, if it escapes the landfill and gets into the groundwater, could be deadly to nearby communities. And so a twelve-foot liner of clay, plastic, sand, and other barrier materials covers the walls and floor of the landfill—a diaper of the largest scale imaginable, designed to absorb and seal in wetness. Seventeen miles of pipes carry the leachate into collection areas. A team of field engineers specialize in monitoring the leachate, cleaning and purifying it. One of the ways a landfill engineer anywhere in the world earns bragging rights is if he can pour himself a glass of the leachate from his landfill and drink it.
All of this—the operational area of Puente Hills—is invisible to the public, thanks to earthen berms that rise ten feet above the working face. The scraper drivers keep adding to the top of the berm as the landfill fills, constantly building the fortress wall, so all the work goes unnoticed.
For their part, the scraper drivers refer to the berms as “visuals.” The most fun you can have on a scraper, they have told me, is steadying your 155,000-pound machine over the tip of a visual barely wider than the span of your tires. Once in a while a scraper will fall off a visual, sometimes sliding one hundred feet down or sometimes hanging there, half on and half off, until a crane can be summoned to rescue it. A driver who falls off a visual will get called “Tipsy Toes” or “Tipper” until the next guy does it and earns the torch of shame.
A bulldozer or Bomag driver who manages to roll his machine over into the trash will likewise have to endure the name “Flipper.” “You should go down there,” Joe says. “You should go down there and ride in the trash, get a feel for it.”
Mike “Big Mike” Speiser is the most famous Bomag driver at the landfill, and some say in the world. This is only incidentally because he looks, as much as a person can, like a Bomag. He is proudly boxy, enormous, bald, and he appears as though he could crush the trash without the assistance of machinery. He is forty-five years old and has impressive tattoos: a Grim Reaper, a skeleton with a dagger through the head, a skull with flames shooting out, and a skull with horns and a bullet hole in its head. “Like the Devil got shot in the head or something,” he says. “Basically.”
He is a shy man who blushes when he smiles, and he is known for being a gentleman. He is famous because he won first place on compactors—a test of agility and speed—in the recent Solid Waste Association of North America’s International Road-E-O in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “He is the best in the nation,” a few of the operators have told me. Mike does not himself brag about the honor, but he does allow: “I am very, very good at this.”
Mike and I stand at the edge of a cell of trash in motion, Bomag chugging, ready to roll. He climbs the ladder to the cab and offers his hand to help hoist me up. “The air conditioner works nice, and it’s a pressurized cab, so it keeps the smells out.” He shows off the air-ride feature of the cushioned seat, apologizing that there is only one. He takes the controls while I hunch behind him and hang on to his soft shoulders. We crawl slowly, as if in a tank, to- ward and into the cell of trash, about thirty feet deep. We are high above with a marvelous view of smeared paper plates, Target bags, egg cartons, Green Giant frozen peas, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, all manner of Hefty and Glad bags splayed open to reveal the guts of everyday American life. Effortlessly, we climb over a mattress and a TV and a tricycle and a rocking chair and soda bottles and deodorant, until pretty soon the eye refuses to differentiate the trash, refuses to register nonsense the mind can’t begin to place in anything close to a meaningful narrative. We go rolling through an acre of garbage, mounds and mounds of it cracking and turning to mush under the teeth of the Bomag.
“No doubt, we make a lot of trash in America,” Mike says. “No doubt. And this is a tiny piece of one day, in one landfill. But I don’t tend to think about that. Mostly I think about not getting run into by a dozer.”
We sink in, climb out, sink, climb. Mike keeps moving forward, pushing trash toward the edge of the cliff formed by the day’s massive pile—a ledge so high you can’t see what, if anything, is over it.
“You’re getting close to the edge,” I tell him.
“I have to get these verticals down as quick as possible,” he says, and without hesitation keeps moving forward. “You worry about smoothing things out afterwards. When we’re diving over the vertical you’ll see why.”
He chatters on about smoothing and grabbing and peeling, but the only words I take in are “diving over the vertical,” which we are about to do. We are about to free-fall over a cliff of trash three stories high. I make the point that this is scaring the shit out of me.
“A lot of guys I train cry their first couple of weeks,” he says. He assures me that the Bomag is extremely agile. He says the only worry, really, is tree stumps. “One time I was coming over a vertical, and on the way down I hit a stump about the size of a car. I started sliding down the slope sideways. You just kind of hold on and gun it and try to get off of it. That one gave me a pucker butt.” We drive straight toward the open sky, and head as if on a sui- cide mission over the cliff. I expect a crash, a violent tumble, death, but the Bomag clings to the trash like a squirrel, and we begin our slow descent down, about thirty feet straight down, into more trash—where six or seven bulldozers zoom about, backward, forward, pushing trash, sculpting the cell.
I ask Mike who’s in charge here, who has the right of way, what the pattern is, who yields to whom. He says everyone more or less figures it out as they go along. He talks about riding dirt bikes when he was five. “Experiences like that prepare you. You learn the limits of motion.” Any kid who grew up with dirt bikes and four- wheelers would obviously love a job like this, he says, adding that he considers himself blessed.
Before he started working here in 1990, Big Mike worked as an auto mechanic. “I could not take the stress of that life,” he tells me. Like so many of the people I meet at the landfill, he tells me he enjoys nature, being outdoors, and a good deal of solitude. We climb back up the cliff of trash to square off for another dive down, and he whistles. Then he invites me to join him for lunch later. “I mean, if you want.”
Between the leachate, the methane, all the enormous equipment, the dangerous dives, the brainpower, the rotating cells, the seagull lines, the irrigation, the bougainvillea vine—all the landscaping, all the field engineers, all the chemistry—I’m thinking: This is ridiculous. This is a lot to go through so people can continue living in denial, as if our trash has some magical way of just vanishing. At one point, I confess to Joe Haworth that I have no idea where, back home, my own trash goes after it leaves the end of my driveway, gets hauled off in a green truck while my dogs stand on the porch and bark stupidly at it. I have no idea whatsoever, and I certainly have no sense of my trash having a destiny of such complexity and such bother.
This, Joe tells me, is a preferable situation to when trash was simple. Throughout most of history, trash was a linear concern, the end of a simple four-beat pattern: you dig up raw materials, make something with them, use the something, and when the usefulness is over, you throw the thing away. One, two, three, trash. One, two, three, trash. One, two, three, trash. The piling of trash became a concern as soon as there were enough people clustered in one place to notice it. The city of Athens is said to have organized the first municipal dump in the Western world, in about 500 B.C. Citizens were required to dispose of their waste at least one mile from city walls. This was a remarkably forward- thinking plan, especially when you consider that, zooming all the way up to the eighteenth century, most Americans were simply throwing their trash out the window into the street—and this de- spite the fact that trash-related diseases such as bubonic plague, cholera, and typhoid fever had been known to alter the populations of Europe and influence monarchies around the world.
Burning trash became a big deal in the late 1800s with the invention of municipal incinerators as well as the practice of putting a match to the stuff in one’s own backyard. Burning trash was wonderful, magical, because it made it seem to disappear.
Throwing trash into the ocean had a similar effect, and for a while that practice joined burning as America’s solution. But stinky, ruined beaches and clogged harbors prompted the Supreme Court to ban trash-in-the-ocean in 1934. Even so, it’s worth noting that, thanks to lawbreakers and people in countries without regulations, a soup of plastic waste floating in the Pacific Ocean now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States. This expanse of debris, held in place by swirling underwater currents, stretches from about five hundred nautical miles off the California coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii, and almost as far as Japan. Scientists are still trying to figure out what to do about that one.
Joe Haworth grew up in downtown Los Angeles, and he re- members burning trash as a boy. “Everybody had a backyard incinerator,” he tells me. He’s sitting on one of the gas pipes on a lower ledge of the landfill, under an oak tree, taking in the shade. “I re- member looking at the wax melting off the milk carton, thinking,
‘Oh, that’s really cool.’ We put the ashes in a bucket, and the city would haul the ashes away. You’d separate the food scraps. They’d be taken to the pig farms. Then we had a mayor, Sam Yorty, saying,
‘Hey, if we throw all this stuff together, we can make it easier for the housewives, make it simpler for them; let’s put it all in one big can and haul it away.’ ” The story delights him, as so many stories do, and he bangs on the pipe to animate this next part. “Sam Yorty was elected, and housewives were bashing trash lids together, saying, ‘Bless you, Mayor Sam!’ Yup. Look up Sam Yorty. Y-O-R-T-Y.” And so, the urban landfill, which in the beginning was a dump on the edge of town. When the pile got too high, someone would light a match to it and make room for more. And more. And more. Volume became an absurdly huge problem, with the dawning of the baby boom and the quantity of trash exploding in the crazed TV-dinner consumerism following World War II. In 1955, Life magazine heralded the advent of the “throwaway society.”
Burn all that trash in a crowded place like Los Angeles and you contribute to the most famous smog problem in the world. In 1959 the American Society of Civil Engineers published a standard guide to “sanitary landfilling.” Instead of burning trash, the idea was to bury it. To guard against rodents and odors, the guide suggested compacting trash and covering it with a new layer of soil each day.
And so, the modern era of trash.
Joe Haworth and his college buddies were studying civil engineering at Loyola Marymount University at the time. Joe had not yet had his trash awakening, although he and his engineering friends, infected by the idealism of the time, the dawning of the environmental movement, were getting excited about . . . sewage.
“The whole nation’s plumbing was coming apart,” he tells me. “It was literally going to pieces. It was like the mayor’s idiot son ran the local sewage treatment.” There was no thinking. There was just expediency: Dump the crap into the river. In the big-picture tradition of the Jesuits, a professor at Loyola was urging Joe to do something with his life. The professor told him about sanitary engineering. He said there was a future, something big, bigger than anyone could imagine, and a chance to do something good.
There was no EPA yet. There were virtually no federal laws concerning pollution. Oil tankers were regularly dumping crank- case oil into oceans, air pollution was literally killing people— ninety-six in just four days in New York City—and in Ohio the Cuyahoga River burst into flames five stories high from floating chemicals.
And so, the awakening. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a cry of ecological radicalism meant to awaken a public lazily dependent on the chemical control of nature. The book ignited the first serious public dialogue about the dangers of pesticides and other chemicals. Ed Muskie, the famously cranky U.S.
senator, championed a national environmental policy, pushing the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act—much of the work born of his disgust over the polluted rivers in his native Maine.
In 1970, President Nixon created the EPA.
The modern environmental movement was nothing without sharp young minds capable of inventing change. Funds became available, traineeships at places like Stanford, Caltech, MIT. The best and brightest, including Joe, got free rides to study trash. Joe went to Stanford. “A lot of us felt the obligation to go into public service,” he says. He kicks the dirt. It all seems so adorable now. Boomers changing the world. What happened to all that? “This was such exciting stuff,” he says. “We were thinking up all- new ways of helping nature play catch-up after a couple of pretty messy centuries.” It was a thrilling time to be a sanitary engineer, even as the title gradually morphed into “environmental engineer.” In fact, these guys would go on to change the paradigm, inventing systems that would begin to provide relief to a planet choking on its own debris.
Joe never set out to be a PR guy. He was more or less called. So much was happening, so many innovations. His colleagues didn’t have the knack for putting multipart engineering concepts into the vernacular, but Joe had it in spades. He created the information office and became a mouthpiece.
Using landfill gas to generate electrical power—that was a good example. He remembers those early days with the fondness of an old man thinking of his first kid. It happened at Palos Verdes, one of the Districts’ older landfills, which was adjacent to a handsome neighborhood where a woman was complaining about her dead roses. She blamed the landfill: surely something disgusting was emanating out of that dump. She was right. Inspectors found that methane, the explosive gas they normally simply flared to get rid of, had migrated from the landfill into the neighborhood.
“So we said, ‘Whoa, we gotta do something,’ ” Joe says, standing up now, as if trying to solve the puzzle anew. “We dug a trench near her roses, put gravel in it. We figured, well, that stuff will just come up through the gravel because that’ll be the easiest road for it to travel. When that didn’t work, we put a pipe in, started to suck the gas out. Then our guys said, ‘You know what, we’re burning this stuff now just to get rid of it. That’s a pretty good-looking flame. I wonder if that would work in an engine.’ So our guys then began to run it through an internal combustion engine. And it ran the engine.”
It was one of those eureka moments: Use landfill gas to generate electricity! To a young environmental engineer, it was the most elegant example imaginable of closing the loop, reusing every- thing, making something useful out of, literally, garbage.
“One of our guys thought of putting a Christmas tree up on the landfill site,” Joe says. “Not a real big one. But running this little generator on landfill gas and lighting this Christmas tree. It got attention. Because it was such a curious thing.”
It worked. They built an energy station, and a couple of years later, dignitaries from around the world, including Prince Charles, came to visit the Palos Verdes landfill site to see energy come out of trash.
Currently, about 425 landfills in the United States produce land- fill gas (LFG), generating about 10 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. This is a green fuel, offsetting the use of 169 million barrels of oil per year or 356,000 railcars of coal. According to the EPA, the carbon reduction is the equivalent of removing the emissions from nearly 14 million vehicles on the road or planting nearly
20 million acres of forest.
All those complications of trash—the methane, the leachate, all the enormous equipment, all the landscaping, all the chemistry— have really nothing to do with enabling an irresponsible public intent on ignoring trash. That’s our own deal, our own psychology. In real-world terms, the complications of trash are the human inventions and human interventions intent on closing the cycle to restore nature’s severed loop.
“Think about it,” Joe says, squinting in the harsh glare of the noon sun. “What is pollution? Pollution’s just the wrong stuff in the wrong place at the wrong time. Any other time, it’s a resource. Okay? Think about that.”
When I enter the lunchroom with Big Mike, he lags be- hind, tells me to go ahead and get started. By now I know the dynamics of “second lunch,” at noon, and I wonder where Big Mike will sit. The place is stark and temporal, a large white double-wide with tables and bulletin boards and newspapers and buzzing fluorescent lights.
I head down to the long table where Steve, Wes, Patrick, Jamie, Tony, and the rest of the happy loudmouths of second lunch are diving into their lunch pails. Second lunch is almost all “Dirt,” the men who run the scrapers and push dirt. First lunch, at eleven thirty, is almost all “Rubbish,” the men like Big Mike who crush garbage. The Dirt crew is very gabby about the Rubbish crew. They say Rubbish is aloof, boring, and miserable. Dirt, they say, is happy, hilarious, and loving. I am trying to understand the source of these distinctions.
Each day the guys of second lunch seem excited to have a visitor in the lunchroom and, like schoolkids, talk at me all at once. “We are the biggest landfill in the nation,” one of them declares.
“We have awesome equipment,” says one. “We have eighteen D9s.”
“We have two D8s.”
“Compactors? We’ve got five of those.” “And two D10s—120,000 pounds each.”
“We have a D11 out at our Calabasas landfill, which is even bigger than that one.”
“I personally don’t think I’ve ever seen a D12. To be honest with you, I don’t think Caterpillar even makes them anymore.”
“They don’t.”
“We have the biggest machines in the world.” “We are number one.”
Steve, a scraper driver, tall, gangly, with long blond curls, holds court at the corner table. If he is the leader of this group, it is be- cause he can withstand constant jabbing and ridicule, mostly about his hair, with its history of bad cuts, bad bangs, Farrah Fawcett layers. Lately, the guys have been encouraging Steve to get a mullet. They have offered to pay him to do it. Steve emphatically refuses, but the image brings delight to Jamie, to Joe, and to Patrick, and somehow morphs into a discussion of the possibility of Steve one day making porn, mullet porn. There is no logical sequence to the evolution of this riff, but it takes on a life of its own, until soon midgets enter the story and the idea of Steve making midget mullet porn. The laughter is uproarious, and one guy spits out his Mountain Dew, and there is stomping of feet and pounding of tables until the lunchroom trailer shakes like a ship of drunken pirates.
I feel bad for Mike up there all alone. Mike usually eats at eleven thirty, with the rest of Rubbish, but he got delayed on ac- count of driving me around on his Bomag, so now he’s stuck here with Dirt.
I get up to go sit with Mike, but then Jamie, the youngest here, thin, clean-cut, offers me a peach, saying he picked it himself from his mother’s tree, so I sit back down.
“I drove on the Bomag with Big Mike today,” I tell the guys. “He dove me over verticals.”
“Yeah, we saw you out there,” says Wes, a guy with a wide brow wearing a Budweiser T-shirt. “Big Mike will take care of you.”
Big Mike waves from across the room. He’s an exception to the rule of second lunch, one of the few men in Rubbish whom Dirt doesn’t make fun of. This is on account of Big Mike’s win at the Road-E-O, his furthering the cause of making Puente Hills Land- fill number one.
“I also rode in a rig with Herman this morning,” I tell the guys.
“Herman?” “Miserable fucker—” “He’s not as bad now.”
“It was when he drove the water truck that he was really bad.” “His truck was number 6601. He would hide it.”
“He was, like, ‘That’s my water truck! You better not touch it.’ ”
“He had his cowboy hat. You better not touch his hat!” They crack up over the memory of Herman’s hat. Oh, that’s a good one. They are all gossip and cackle. I tell them they sound like girls.
Someone brings up rats.
“I’ve only seen one rat in all the years I worked here.”
“Coyotes eat the rats. The only rats we see are rats that other people bring in.”
They proudly agree that there are no rats at the landfill—and if there is one, it is only because it was hiding in a dumpster that got dumped. For the most part, the rats are crushed by the compactor, or the dozers, or buried alive in the dirt.
As for the occasional dead rats, these offer possibilities. Like the one time Patrick wrapped one in a soft tortilla shell, presented it to his supervisor, and said he was sick of people leaving their lunch around all the time.
Oh, that’s a good one. Oh, there have been so many good times here at the dump.
All of these men are lifers, most having worked their way up from paper pickers. Steve has been here for twenty-three years, Tony for nineteen, and Patrick for fourteen. For a heavy-equipment op- erator, getting a job with the Sanitation Districts is considered a ticket to paradise, given the benefits and good pay—about $80,000 a year before overtime—the steady year-round work, and the fact that trash is recession-proof. Most of the crew lives far east of the landfill, sixty, seventy, eighty miles away in the California desert, commuting more than two hours each way because this is L.A. and nothing is affordable. Because of the distance, and because they have to maintain squeaky-clean driving records in order to keep their jobs, they are not the sort of guys who leave work and hang out together in bars. They vanpool together, watch movies.
They spend their days alone, speedily pushing dirt from here to there, and so, aside from their time together in the van, all they have is the lunchroom.
They tell me that any of these operators can run any piece of equipment in the yard. All of the Dirt crew has at some point run Rubbish and vice versa, and even Dirt has to concede that Rubbish is more fun.
“Crushing things,” says one. “The biggest thrill at this entire landfill is crushing things.”
“Crushing boats. Just to destroy a boat. Or a trailer or some- thing like that. That’s probably the biggest thrill that I can think of.”
“I crushed a mobile once. What was neat about it was I didn’t know it was there, but when I came up to it, I kind of tagged onto the corner of it and I must have hit it just right, because when I hit it the whole thing just flattened.”
“Awwww!”
For all the joy in crushing things, the facts of the matter some- times give these guys pause.
“You’d be amazed at what gets thrown out,” one says. “Stuff that could be donated. We could write a book about the American way of waste.”
“Companies throw stuff away because of taxes. Like brand- new running shoes. These companies cut all their surplus shoes up so nobody can get them. But they would be perfectly fine. They could donate them. They could do something with them.”
“When I first started here, for, like, probably two or three weeks these big semitrailers were just dumping piles of brand-new computer typewriters. Piles! Sometimes there would be three trucks next to each other, dumping brand-new computer typewriters. Never been opened. Still in the box.”
“Waste. Waste. Waste. Sure, it bothers you, but what can you do about it?”
“There was a time someone dumped $2.1 million here. It’s buried in there.”
“That is not true.” “It’s true!”
“Remember when they dumped all them Susan B. Anthonys?” “Thought it was chocolate candy, but it was real.”
“That is not true, either.”
“It’s buried in there, I swear to God.” “How do you even know?”
“How do you know it’s not?”
“Remember the Sears that closed down? They had their big sale. Then whatever didn’t sell came into the landfill. Brand-new. Brand-new! Other customers would be here dumping, then run over and pick up brand-new chain saws.”
Salvaging is strictly prohibited at the landfill. This may sound like some picky rule, but the truth is, people who are stupid enough to dive in among the dozers to grab something sometimes end up dead. Private citizens who dump here are provided a separate dump- ing area away from the action of the machines, but that doesn’t stop them from walking over to the working cell and trying to go for the grab.
“We’ve had people crushed.” “Oh, yeah.”
“You can’t see them. You literally don’t know they’re there. No one is supposed to be there.”
“Remember that lady that got crushed?” “Oh, yeah.”
I make the point that with all this drama, Rubbish sounds way more exciting than Dirt. Maybe Dirt is jealous of Rubbish and that accounts for the animosity?
This analysis brings jeers.
“Those guys are miserable,” one says. “They hate each other.”
“No, they hate themselves.”
“It’s a body thing,” one says, and the group agrees on that one. Most of the Rubbish crew is in pain, or used to be in pain, or is fighting it. Typically, a man moves over to Rubbish only when his body can no longer take Dirt. Rubbish is soft. Dirt is hard. A man who spends eight or ten hours a day five days a week on a D10 pushing dirt is a man with jangled bones, achy joints, herniated disks. “Your longevity is what we’re talking about,” one says. Most of the Rubbish guys are old, nearing retirement, with a history of back and neck operations. “Going over to Rubbish is more or less being put out to pasture,” one says.
There are exceptions. Again, Big Mike, who occupies such a hallowed place in this landfill. He drove a scraper for just two years before his back got destroyed. He had surgery, a whole year in bed, and then he returned to have a terrific career in Rubbish on his Bomag, number one in the U.S.A.
But usually Dirt means you’re still young. Falling off visuals, straddling one, Tipper and Tipsy Toes. Dirt is the good old days.
These days are, of course, numbered. The landfill is scheduled to close in 2013. A skeleton crew of maintenance workers and field engineers will keep the Puente Hills infrastructure working—will monitor the leachate, maintain the gas wells and the power plant that will continue to transform methane into electricity for about thirty years. But there will be no more trash, no more trucks, no more verticals to crash over, and no more radical dirt moves on a D10. Most of the Rubbish crew is old enough to retire, while the Dirt crew will get absorbed somewhere within the enormous Sanitation Districts organization, so at least they’ll have jobs.
None of the guys in the lunchroom will admit to the possibility of ever missing this dump, this history, these good old days, and yet they scheme together about their bosses getting permits to open more space in the canyons, more space for trash, more time for Puente Hills.
“It’s a pipe dream,” one says. “Sooner or later, you just have to face the fact that this place is about to close.”
When the landfill closes, a Waste-by-Rail program will take over. The trash will be put in sealed boxcars and delivered two hundred miles west along the Union Pacific Railroad to the desert, to the new Mesquite Regional Landfill in Imperial County, a super- landfill said to last a hundred years.
And all this old trash will still be sitting here, fermenting, producing gas. In that way, the Puente Hills Landfill will stand as a kind of monument, the symbol of an era of new thought.
The mountain of trash will be capped, sealed, covered in layers and layers of stone and clay and soil, planted, and turned over to the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation, a place for people to play. Plans have been in the works for decades: Every time a truck dumps a ton of trash here, a dollar goes into a Puente Hills Landfill Native Habitat Preservation Authority fund. The goal of the fund is to maintain a wildlife corridor more than twice as large as the fill area. Already miles of hiking and horseback-riding trails traverse this land and even the landfill it- self, separated from daily operations.
Over time, the ground will settle in odd and unpredictable ways. You can’t construct buildings on a landfill, because the trash has a life of its own, much of it slowly decomposing and, surprisingly, much of it not. Trash specialists called “garbologists” have done archeological digs in older landfills and have found that, rather than decomposing, a lot of trash, due to the lack of oxygen in a landfill, is actually mummified there. Newspapers from the 1960s have been uncovered from deep inside the earth—with headlines and news items intact.
“Isn’t that hilarious?” Joe says. He loves the garbologist story, the mummy idea, all the crazy surprises.
We’re in the car again, marveling at the work of the landscaping guys, and he’s got his arm out the window pointing this way and that like some grandpa showing the old neighborhood. “See those little pipes?” he says, motioning toward small irrigation pipes snaking all over the ground.
“More pipes,” I say. “A lot of pipes.” It’s really nothing so sur- prising to see an arid landscape made lush with water flowing through irrigation pipes.
“Remember I showed you the sewage-treatment plant?” he says. He’s nodding knowingly and his shirtsleeve is flapping in the breeze. It takes me a moment to make the connection he’s making, between irrigation pipes and sewage—
“No—” I say.
“Yeah,” he says.
These pipes don’t just carry any water. They carry reclaimed wastewater from the Sanitation Districts’ nearby sewage treatment plant.
“Isn’t that neat?” he says.
He parks at a fence, up at the top of the landfill, just beyond the horse trails, where there is a strawberry farm. It’s on land adjacent to the landfill, rows and rows of fat green plants ready for picking. “Come see the strawberries,” he says, shoving the car door with his shoulder, and it reluctantly creaks open. “Okay, now see those
pipes?” he says.
“Oh, come on,” I say. “Not the strawberries.” “Yeah.”
The strawberry farm is dependent on recycled wastewater for its irrigation too.
“Isn’t that neat?” he says. He bends at his knees and then pops up with a little clap. “You should be writing about a sewage treat- ment plant,” he says. “That’s where the action is.”
There has been so much talk at this landfill about sewage, and apparently I can no longer avoid it. Joe and all the engineers here refer to it with a shrug. No big deal. This is just the way things work. Sewage water feeding flowers and strawberry plants. It has taken me a while to accept the notion that this, in fact, is the way things work.
“Oh, just think about it,” Joe says. “What is a sewage treatment plant? It’s an apology to nature for putting too many people in one place.”
He pauses, gives me a moment to mull that one over. He pulls his hat down to cut the sun. “Nature isn’t designed for us to live the way we do. Nature designed it more like the Native Americans had it: When the neighborhood started to smell, you picked up your tepee and went over there. There was some basic human rule that said you go thataway.” He points with both hands moving toward some imagined exit. “Primitive societies knew that nature would ultimately reclaim all that organic material so they could come back in a few years.”
Nature gave us rain, streams, rivers, and the ocean to finish the job of digestion. “This is just a straight environmental-engineering calculation,” he says, heading back to the car, and he opens my door for me so I climb in.
“Just about everybody in this country has one cubic foot of digester somewhere out there finishing the job that he or she couldn’t complete,” he says. “Your guts start the process and nature completes it. Now, where is that going to happen? If you let our sewage from this L.A. area with ten million people float into the ocean, you would have one really beat-up ocean.”
With that, he throws the car into reverse, then starts driving down the mountain. He pulls over to a lookout spot where we get a good view of the sewage treatment plant in the distance, just over the I-605, tucked into the hills. I feel I should say something complimentary, but it looks like every gray, flat, giant, boring industrial building you’ve ever hated for marring the landscape.
“We take the processes that occur in an ocean or a river and we do it in tanks,” he says. “The same bacteria that work in nature— basically a big bacterial soup that emulates what goes on in the ground or in a river—does the whole thing in a tank in a more concentrated fashion. So, instead of taking ten days in a river, we do it in eight hours inside a tank.”
There is something vaguely utopian about all of this. A beautiful landfill blooming with pink flowers, wastewater feeding straw- berries, fifty-eight megawatts of electricity out of garbage and sludge, hiking trails over trash. It would seem we were talking about an entirely different planet, not our own supposedly doomed one—where the sky is falling; where, because of our gluttony, we are in danger of making one final grand mess of the place, if not melting it or blowing it up. Those are all certainly viable outcomes. But there is more to the story: There are people on this very same planet having a rousing good time fixing the place, people motivated by the thrill of repair, the simple joy of invention, and an urge to do good.
The more time I spend at the landfill, the more I get the sense that I’m in a different dimension, listening to more highly evolved beings that have been here all along but, somehow, nobody ever noticed.
I meet up with Carol, the old lady who works the front gate and greets all the truckers who come in, starting with Herman each morning and then about three hundred more through the day. She is short, haggard, hunched over, with curls sprouting beneath a ball cap. The guard booth is a shack just big enough for Carol and her stool and her clip fan and her bag of birdseed. The shack has a back window opening to the landfill abutting it. This is the bottom of the landfill, the oldest layer of trash, nearly a half century of trash, and so trees and shrubs have long since taken over.
“I started out with just doves, and now I got, like, six different kinds of birds,” she tells me. “Bright yellow, and a small one with red on its chest. In the morning I see deer, coyotes, bobcat, mountain lion, some owls, some hawks, rattlesnakes, rabbits, and squirrels. That’s the whole reason I like this place so much.”
It is easily my biggest surprise, to hear so many people speak of enjoying nature as part of the landfill experience. What a weird and yet perfectly sensible link.
“I hold my breath a lot when the small trucks without tops come in,” she says. “It doesn’t hit till after they pass. I’ll say, ‘Oooh, the poochie truck went by!’
“I write poetry. I have to write the words down immediately or else I’ll lose them. I saw a wolf here once that inspired me. I wrote about his family. He kept searching for them and never found them. I called it ‘Long Lost Love.’ ”
In the end, I tour the newest building on the site, the Puente Hills Materials Recovery Facility, or MRF. I have been resisting this place. It could be because it looks so bland and sterile, like a mint- green shopping mall or a giant municipal office building, or it could simply be because I am reluctant to face my own responsibility in all of this. The MRF is to be the starting point of the Waste-by-Rail system; it’s where they’ll sort the trash, save and sell the good stuff, and then send only the unusable junk out on the expensive trip on the railways. Already the sorting has started, reclaiming some of the trash that would have ended up in the Puente Hills heap above.
Nearly all of the engineers I meet boast about the MRF: how huge it is—large enough to house three 747s; how the design is environmentally friendly, with over five hundred skylights, and recycled materials used throughout the project, from structural and reinforcing steel to ceiling and floor tiles.
Joe would like to highlight his own contribution: an observation deck where the public can come through and watch. “I insisted on this,” he says. “I said we have to be able to show people what’s happening to their trash.” He’s dressed today in a green flowered shirt, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes. He is excited to be here, like a man greeting a newcomer to his fancy new mansion. The observation deck is sleek and futuristic, a long glass corridor dimly lit by runway-style floor lights. Below us, the action of the MRF: Trucks pull in one end of the enormous building, dump garbage. Dozers move the garbage to the sorting floor, where bulky valuables, wood, carpet, and large chunks of cardboard are pulled out. This is commercial garbage intended for recycling—a minuscule fraction of L.A. County’s trash—but to Joe and his cronies it represents a beautiful outlook for, one day, all our trash. After the big stuff is picked out, the trash is sent via conveyor to an auto- mated picking system and finally to the picking line, where teams of sorters—women wearing safety glasses and bandannas and surgical masks—pick, Lucille Ball style, through the trash. One grabs paper, one grabs clear plastic, one aluminum, and so on. The separated materials are baled and stacked, awaiting purchase.
“Isn’t that impressive?” Joe says, hands on his hips, looking down.
“Actually, I find it pretty depressing,” I say. I lean into the glass and my breath makes fog. I feel like Ebenezer Scrooge and Joe’s the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing to where I’m headed: a world in which a whole lot of poor people have to pick through my garbage so the planet doesn’t suffocate. I sink, as perhaps anyone would, into recycle guilt.
“I sort of feel like it shouldn’t have come to this,” I say.
“Oh, forgodsakes, there’s no room for sentimentality,” he says, leading me to a bank of elevators.
Americans recycle about one and a half pounds of the five pounds of trash they produce each day—a national recycling rate of 32 percent. This is actually not horrible when you figure that, in
1989, when a barge called the Mobro 4000 famously carried three thousand tons of unwanted trash up and down the East Coast. looking for a place to dump, our recycling rate was just 16 percent. That barge caught the public’s attention: We have no place to put our trash! California led the recycling charge, enacting a 1989 law that said its cities had to recycle 50 percent of their garbage by 2000. Today, San Francisco has a recycling rate of 69 percent, the best of any American city.
The goal, in the larger and perhaps mythical sense, is 100 per- cent. Zero waste. The goal is to stop thinking of waste as a problem and to start thinking of it, simply, as the result of a design flaw in manufacturing: we should be reusing everything. “It’s just about closing the loop,” Joe says as we get into the elevator. “And maybe that starts with us first just getting hold of our gluttony. You know, we still have remnants of that old reptilian brain that tells us to just keep getting more, more, more in order to be happy.”
Reptilian?
“You know, a guy gets his first BMW, expects to be happy,” he says. “Then he’s off skiing with Bob, who has a better BMW. Damn. He was supposed to be happy! It didn’t work. So now he needs a four-thousand-square-foot house. You know the story.”
I tell him I don’t see Bob and his buddy slowing down anytime soon. We are a nation of consumers. We can’t seem to stop our- selves. We don’t seem to even want to stop ourselves.
He does not see this as a uniquely American or even a modern phenomenon. “We’re not smart enough yet,” he says. “We’re young. You can argue how long Homo sapiens have been around, but the guess is something like 150,000 years. We are amateurs at this. We have just barely gotten here in terms of the clock of the earth.” The elevator stops and he holds the door open, so I go first.
“We have our physics way ahead of our psyche,” he says when we reach the first floor. We head down a hallway so clean, our shoes squeak. “Like, we know how to make a lot of stuff,” he says. “But the notion of responsibility? We’re slower on that. The idea that you’re supposed to leave the world better than the way it was when you showed up? We’re onto it, but we’re not nearly there. We need to be able to take the next step and realize that the world’s ideas are bigger than just a bunch of stuff.”
The more he talks like this, the more optimistic he becomes: people will get smarter, more conscientious, more in tune with the needs of the next generation; chivalry will spread throughout the world!
I apologize for not seeing it. I confess that I don’t see this recy- cling thing really kicking in where I come from, where many peo- ple regard recycling as a quaint, retro 1990s fad. Rumor has it that there’s a paper glut, that no one knows what to do with all those plastic soda bottles other than make some silly belts out of them, that all this stuff just ends up in landfills in the end, so why bother? “In the early days of recycling, maybe,” he says. “Paper goods were mixed at probably a pretty low grade where the guy had it for six months in his yard, it got wet and turned into a huge spitwad. But the higher the cost of disposal goes, the more inventive people become.”
We stop in the workers’ locker room and Joe finds us both a hard hat and a pair of safety goggles.
It costs $29 a ton to dump here at Puente Hills. It will cost $60 a ton to haul trash by rail out of the Los Angeles basin. “People get really creative at $60 a ton,” he says. We talk about thriving markets in China: wastepaper is America’s number one export by volume to China. The ships that bring all those toys and TVs in from China now return full of our old paper, which they use to pack more goods made in China. And as for making new paper, 36 per- cent of the fiber that goes into new paper now comes from recycled sources.
“And now there are rug companies that will actually lease you a rug,” Joe says. “If someone spills on the little square, they pop up the square. The company takes the square back, they shave the fuzz off, they melt the plastic, make new fuzz, put it back on. Yeah. Isn’t that crazy? And it’s being done because of the disposal costs. It pushes backward.”
I ask him if there is any squashing his optimism.
“People are basically good-hearted until put in a very bad corner,” he says. “We just have to keep giving them reasons to be good- hearted—the opportunity to be good-hearted. You know, their inclination is to be good folks until it’s gone bad on them. Then they get defensive. What’s Churchill’s line? If you’re young and not liberal, you have no heart. If you’re old and not conservative, you have no brains.
“Look, environmental consciousness is not a religious thing. It doesn’t have holy precepts that say you can’t touch a plastic bag or you’re a horrible person. It’s more: Get a grip and find a balance. Life’s organic. It’s smelly and gooey. Get past it. It’s just science. I think as we get more people reconnected to science through recy- cling, we get them to understand the magic of this planet. They’ve forgotten the magic. The truth is, it doesn’t take that much connecting to go WOW! It’s like lying on your back in the mountains, looking at the stars. Being able to go WOW! And holy mackerel! It really doesn’t take a lot of study to appreciate this place.”
All geared up for our tour through the floor of the MRF, Joe pushes a door and we head in. It definitely has the feel of two air- plane hangars—a massive space with a sky-high ceiling. The sorting area with its clanking conveyor belts takes up a tiny corner of the building. Trash falls into it from a hopper above and goes marching along the belts while the women watch and grab and pull at it. I stand behind a pregnant Hispanic woman snatching dirty empty soda bottles out of a heap of garbage rolling by so fast, she nearly misses a perfectly good twenty-ounce Sierra Mist.
She catches my eye and I don’t quite know what to do with my shame, and so, stupidly, I smile and give her a thumbs-up.
Joe invites me out to dinner. First we have to stop home and pick up Shelly, his wife. We crawl on the crowded 605 in his old Cadillac and he looks tired, spent, and I have to think by now he is talked out.
“I just don’t know about God,” he says, apropos of nothing, and because he is not, and probably never will be, talked out. “I don’t know about an afterlife,” he says.
“Yeah, me neither,” I say. The ride is smooth and the leather seats stick to my legs. This was a damn fancy car in its day.
“I’m more about that Marxist thinking that religion is the opiate of the masses,” he says. “Calm the people down so that the kings can get away with murder.”
“Yeah—”
“But nature certainly seems to be hinting at an afterlife,” he says. “As much as I can be cynical about that sort of thing. Nature says, ‘Wait a minute, now, it’s all cycles.’ Nature does not seem to be telling us that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and then we all go boop.”
The sun is falling appropriately onto the horizon. We both flip our visors down. Even so, it’s blinding, and we’re not moving, and this is going to be a long ride home.
“The spiritual world could be just a part of the cycle that we don’t yet understand,” he says, opening his window to get some air, which is probably technically smog. We sit and stare into traffic.
“Of course, my wife swears that she was here before as a Spanish guy,” he says. “She remembers water coming in through the portholes, the whole bit. But she’s odd, anyway.”
The description turns out to be an apt setup. When we finally get to the house, Shelly won’t let us in because it’s too messy for company, and so we sit in the backyard and sip pinot grigio, and I marvel at the odd assortment of stuff in the yard and on the porch, a crooked little fake Christmas tree, an empty pond, little ceramic dwarfs, and a fat black cat. Shelly is as tall as Olive Oyl, with a handsome face and a jet-black mane, and she chain-smokes and speaks the same crazily observant language as her husband. The two get tangled in notions, in thinking about what it would be like if there were no more people on earth, in trying to remember the names of types of frogs, or the names of saints, until one of them has to run inside and get a book to look it up.
At one point, when Joe is inside trying to find his encyclopedia of movie actors, Shelly turns to me and holds her glass up to offer a toast. “To landfill people!” she says.
I raise my glass politely.
“Aren’t they the most ethical bunch?” she says. “It’s weird. So many of them were Jesuit-trained, so maybe it goes back to that, where doing your best for the common good is a paramount principle.” She takes a final drag of her cigarette, smashes the butt in an awaiting seashell. “But they approach their jobs in the most principled way. They’re taking the worst two things we have—trash and sewage—and turning them into golf courses and wonderful things.
“Isn’t that weird?” she says. “Seriously, it’s like a cause for these people. I’ve noticed it from the beginning, having to go to all these dreadful conferences and things. I used to think, ‘These should be our politicians. We should only elect people trained in landfill maintenance.’ ”
Joe comes back out. He didn’t find the encyclopedia. Instead, he’s carrying a journal article that reminded him of something funny. “No one knows where water came from,” he announces. “Some people think it came in as dirty snowballs. Asteroids. They’re not positive water started here. It may have come from space.”
“Oh, he loves this one,” Shelly says to me, as if to provide warning. “He is now going to tell you where molecules came from.”
“All the molecules came from space,” he says. “Ask any nuclear scientist about the origins of the bigger molecules: carbon and nitrogen and oxygen and all the stuff that makes up life—they were all hydrogen to begin with. They came out of the fusion process that takes place in the center of suns.”
“Wait for it—” Shelly says to me.
“So we’re stardust, literally,” he says. “We are atomic waste!” He slaps the table, more satisfied with that one than he has been with anything all day. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B007T8RB7G
- Publisher : Berkley (September 13, 2012)
- Publication date : September 13, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 1101 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 338 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 042526727X
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,008,881 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #416 in Social Classes & Economic Disparity
- #623 in 21st Century History of the U.S.
- #1,365 in Sociology of Class
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
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Jeanne Marie Laskas is the New York Times best selling author of eight books, including the forthcoming TO OBAMA, a diary of the nation during the Obama years, and CONCUSSION, the basis for the 2015 Golden Globe nominated film starring Will Smith. She is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, a correspondent at GQ, and a two-time National Magazine Award finalist. Her stories have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Esquire. She serves as Distinguished Professor of English and Founding Director of the Center for Creativity at the University of Pittsburgh, and lives on a farm in Pennsylvania with her husband and two children.
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Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 23, 2012
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 17, 2017
Ridiculously fascinating book. She spends a great deal of time with one group of America's workers after the other ... coal miners, blueberry pickers, truck drivers, gun retailers, oil rig workers, landfill workers. No overt politics here. No finger pointing. But, oh my, how interesting it is to spend quality time with Americans who have chosen to-- primarily -- do work with a significant physical component. Loved meeting them. Wished many times to have been her and had her experiences. Read her book on Concussions before this and recognized there that she was a fine reporter. This is an earlier book well worth the read as we navigate our current dangerous political waters.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 11, 2015
I enjoyed reading about the people Ms. Laskas met and learned a lot about professions that I really didn't think about very often. I still wonder how Sputter is doing today and feel sadness about TooDogs. I hope the air traffic controllers finally got their new tower, that the young cowboy has met a woman and is now married, and the migrant worker was able to save his home in North Carolina. Hidden America not only taught me about roles some people are doing in our country today but also made me care about some of those people.
I really enjoyed this book and will recommend it to many people.
I really enjoyed this book and will recommend it to many people.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 23, 2016
I found the book very interesting and educational. I will never understand why any author has to use the "f" word so very much. The book would have been just as readable, educational, and enjoyable, if not more so, without that word on almost every page. I taught history for years. This would be a good addition to high school curriculum, but I cannot recommend it because f the profanity in it.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 31, 2016
That Jeanne Marie Laskas had a vision of writing about the subject of unusual and unusual vocations impressed me in the first place. Then to appreciate the research and time invested to follow these professions impressed me more. Ms. Laskas writing style is so enjoyable in this book that I was drawn into every chapter. The book made me remember to appreciate all of our special vocational talents.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 11, 2012
I was going on a cruise and thought the book with its many chapters could be enjoyed in bite size pieces and I was right. Each chapter stands alone. The stories give interesting and unique insights into jobs/professions we have all heard of but have not thought about. So, of course, some stories are preferred over the others. They are well written and therefore keep your interest. Unfortunately, the stories are more like appetizers without a main course. Glad I read them, but did not take anyway any overall conclusion, except it must have been a lot of fun for the author doing all the field research to get the stories.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 21, 2020
Excellent perspective for an American public that has lost its sense of decency and its love of hard work to the envy and victim mentality.
These are real people who make America truly great.
These are real people who make America truly great.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 23, 2015
This book enlightens us as to who REALLY should have the kudos of this world! The "Hidden People" who bring our food and stuff to our lives - and with such sacrifice of their own lives. I will be forever grateful and will not miss a day of saying a Prayer of Thanks to those wonderful people! Thank you, Jeanne Laskas!! Wonderful, enlightening book! Out of the dark, into the light - just like the Coal Miners.
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Iqbal iqbal
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hidden america
Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on April 4, 2017
it is a commonly agreed truth that the empiredom of america is constructed on the graves of the aborigines namely the Arawak. this book further throws enough light to understand the recent past history of america and the labour on which the modern United States is constructed and being constructed. excellent.
