Manly Tears of Regret

I haven't had all that many jobs in my life. I had the pleasure, dubious or otherwise, of getting started in my present career at a fairly young age, and before long was making more money in it than I could make elsewhere. Since bills tend to expand to consume available income, I couldn't just back out and do something else without suffering some loss in my standard of living. Thus I am what Karl Marx used to call a "wage slave." It’s not that I dislike what I do for a living. It’s just that my favorite job, without a doubt, was working at the landfill, and it didn't pay as well as other things.

Back in the 1970s the local county government operated a number of landfills, mostly intended to serve county residents. Most of them were very small and rather crude affairs that weren’t even staffed on a daily basis, but some of them accepted commercial trash hauling and were quite busy indeed. Over my two years of employment with the county I worked at all of them, though most of my time was spent at the Avondale landfill near Avondale, Arizona. I worked at pretty much every facet of landfill operation, or at least those facets of landfill operation that the county cared about.

Let's settle something now, at the outset. There is a difference between a landfill and a dump. Actually, there isn't such a thing as a landfill per se. The proper term is sanitary landfill, but it's hard to say the word sanitary when you work at the dump. For one thing, it's obviously unsanitary, and for another thing, sun-bronzed sweaty guys on bulldozers don't say words like "sanitary." Ever. Yes, it's hard to believe, but I was once a sun-bronzed sweaty guy on a bulldozer who refused to utter words like "sanitary" or "esteem-building" or "Baluchistan." But I digress.

Mostly I liked crushing things. The D6C dozer we used wasn't particularly large by dozer standards. It weighed about fifteen tons and produced about 150 horsepower, but you'd be amazed what you can crush with a fifteen-ton machine. I've seen them crush cars and pull buildings down, and I personally crushed many a TV set with one. My Inner Hooligan never tired of hearing the muffled whoomp of TV sets imploding under the tracks.

The only thing that I couldn't break with the D6 (and by that I mean I couldn't break it even after I set out to break it) was the canopy from a US Air Force RF-4B reconnaissance plane that Goodyear Aerospace threw out one day. I drove the dozer up one side and down the other of that canopy for quite some time, and all it did was push itself down into the ground.

People sometimes ask me "Didn't it stink?" Well, sure. It's a dump, for crying out loud. Dumps have a characteristic smell that's hard to really describe. It's somewhere between dirty socks and old potato peelings, but the truth is that after you've been at the dump for a half an hour, your nose goes numb to the stench and it simply no longer registers. The only time you notice a smell is when you pick up a whiff of something well out of the ordinary.

For instance, one day I was sitting on the dozer waiting for it to cool off. This was summer in Arizona, and our D6s tended to overheat. You could dig pretty hard for a half an hour or so, but the temperature would creep up the whole time, and eventually you'd have to stop and let the thing sit and blow off heat at fast idle for a while. So I was sitting on the dozer while it cooled off, and I kept getting a whiff of something good. Good as in tasty.

And then I saw it: a catering company had thrown away about four big aluminum pans of lasagna. There they were, sitting on top of the trash, four glittering pans of rich, cheesy, aromatic lasagna. Probably still piping hot. Bubbling. Full of ooey gooey cheese.

Dear God.

You see, lunch at the landfill was always a nightmare. I brought my own lunch, usually some variant of a sandwich and Twinkies. And the lunch sat in a lunch box all morning, getting good and hot. By lunchtime the the top slice of bread had already started to curl up into a shape akin to a horse saddle. The lunch meat was turning a greyish color that I imagine Sherwin-Williams would have called Gangrene. It wasn't uncommon for one's Twinkies to get so hot that they actually excreted their cream filling. (Veteran landfill employees never put lettuce or tomatoes on their sandwiches. Ever. Lettuce simply evaporated by lunchtime, as though it had never been there at all. Tomatoes almost evaporated, but they usually left behind a stringy rind and a vague smear of goo, which had by then heat-melded to the saddle-shaped piece of bread. Modern foodies would pay through the nose for such a thing, "dried tomato and crispy bread slabs", but back in those days, such things were about as welcome as skunks.)

And there was that lasagna. Sigh. I argued with myself for quite some time. "I'm sure it's still good! It doesn't look contaminated, and damn it smells good, and all I have to look forward to for lunch is gangrene-colored lunch meat and bread that's curled up like Seabiscuit's saddle. I could hop down off the dozer, rescue that lasagna, and I'd eat like a king!" Hell, if I rescued all the lasagna, I'd eat like a king for days!

In the end, common sense prevailed and I dozed the lasagna into the hole along with the rest of the trash, but not without the need to dash away the occasional manly tear of regret.