At the dump

It turns out that getting married means you end up with a lot of duplicate stuff, plus a lot of new better stuff comes to replace your old stuff. And since there’s not a lot of people clamoring for my old pillows, half-empty freshman year notebooks, and broken chairs, off to the dump we went.

The Palo Alto landfill is located right next to the recycling drop-off center, a place we’d visited before to recycle the endless boxes that contained wedding gifts and my near-daily Amazon Prime shipments. We paid $5 to drive our SUV full of trash into the dump area, and had the choice of using a nearly-full dumpster at the entrance or “driving to the end of the road”. It didn’t look like our load would fit in the dumpster so we set off down the dirt road.

We saw dozens of white dumpsters on the right side that looked promising, but that wasn’t the end of the road so we kept driving. Further down on the right we saw impressive machinery and a giant plow tractor pushing dirt around. The road climbed up and around to where the tractor was, up a steep inclined path in the dirt. We drove up and around, but saw only dirt, so we figured we had gone too far.

Before we left, however, another truck full of trash bags like ours pulled up. They went all the way to the edge of the plateau we were on, and a man and woman jumped out and began unloading. We followed them over, and there saw a pile of trash bags sitting on the dirt.

The tractor driver saw us and motioned for us to bring our bags to the pile, which we did. Once our 12 bags sat on top of the pile, I waved to the driver and headed back to the car.

As I got in, I saw him drive toward the pile and push it, with a single motion, off the edge of the plateau. Scanning the terrain, I realized that there was just a giant pit beyond the edge, full of all the trash, undifferentiated and piled together.

It’s hard to describe the feelings I had watching this. I guess living in such a clean and curated place as Silicon Valley, I felt that somehow the trash I put out at the curb every Friday went through a cleansing process, maybe incineration or grinding to a fine powder, maybe even nanobots ate my trash and turned it into something nice, like pure mountain spring water.

Nope. It gets pushed into a hole, and covered with dirt.