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.

 

My grandfather took it in with the calm practicality of someone raised in harder times. To him, waste still had categories. Some things might be repaired. Some things might be useful. Some things should never have been thrown away at all. He belonged to a generation that saved string, straightened nails, folded wrapping paper for another Christmas. I belonged to the generation learning that everything could be replaced.

 

It felt weird hopping out of his truck and walking in the soft ground that felt a little mushy.

 

What stayed with me most were the layers.

 

At the edge of certain cut banks, where earth had been pushed aside, you could see history in cross-section. Not ancient history—our history. Strata of consumer life. A seam of bottles. A dark Tangled metal. Plastic toys missing arms. Food wrappers already fading into a language of color and logos. Then another layer above it, and another.

 

It looked less like garbage than geology.

 

Even then, as a boy, I remember wondering what people in some distant future would make of it. If archaeologists one day dug through these hills, what story would they tell about us? That we worshiped convenience? That we changed brands often? That we loved packaging more than permanence? That we threw away objects long before they were finished with us?

 

They might study our jars and cans the way we study pottery shards. They might date us by soft drink logos, detergent boxes, fragments of plastic dolls, disposable diapers, safety razors, food wrappers, and the endless strata of plastic containers. They might conclude we were prosperous, restless, and never quite content.

Years later, in graduate school, I read Slow Learner, a collection of early stories by Thomas Pynchon, and was especially struck by one of them: “Low-lands.” In it, several men talk at the bottom of a landfill, surrounded by the castoffs of the world above. 

Pynchon uses the landfill not merely as setting but as metaphor. The lowlands are where the excess of modern life gathers—broken objects, failed dreams, and people who have slipped outside the bright story America tells about itself. Waste and landscape merge there. What society wants unseen does not disappear; it settles at the edges, shaping the lives of those who remain among it. Pynchon understood that the true byproducts of abundance are not only garbage, but loneliness, drift, and the things a culture would rather forget.

 

That may be the secret lesson of landfills. They are not endings. They are mirrors.

 

We like to think of ourselves through our monuments, our courthouses, our churches, our libraries, our family photographs. But another version of us exists in what we discard. Our private habits become public record there. The meals we ate. The products we trusted. The fashions we outgrew. The machines that briefly promised happiness.

 

Civilizations are often remembered by what they built. They may be understood just as well by what they buried.

 

I can still see my grandfather standing there in the Illinois wind, hands in his pockets, looking over that man-made landscape without sentimentality. He knew, perhaps better than I did then, that a society reveals itself not only in what it saves, but in what it is willing to waste.

 

And somewhere beneath the earth tonight, in landfills all over the world, under layers of dirt and time, lie the buried habits of our age—a vast museum of the modern human era, its exhibits unopened, its labels unwritten, waiting for the day someone digs down and asks who we were.