What We Buried
In the 1960s, when I was a boy growing up in Illinois, my grandfather sometimes took me with him to the local landfill. My grandfather was a refuse collector, he hauled garbage from a dozen stores in downtown LaSalle, as well as the high school and a plastics factory in Peru. Before the landfill opened, he took the garbage to the LaSalle dump, south of town. Whereas a dump felt blunter and somehow more honest, a landfill on the other hand, sounds engineered, respectable, almost civilized. A dump was exactly what it said it was: the place where everything unwanted went. For a child, it was both fascinating and unsettling. You would arrive and be met first by the smell—ripe, chemical, sour, and strangely alive. Birds circled overhead; rats scurried across the garbage. Trucks backed up with a metallic groan and tipped their loads onto the earth. Then came the bulldozers, patient yellow beasts pushing bags of garbage, broken furniture, toys, and everything in between. ...
