August 11, 2005

• Dumps and Dumpsters

  My beloved Old Fart Greyfox
  told me about a recent conversation he had with Mike, his
  landlord.  Greyfox had pulled several big black garbage bags out
  of the Felony Flats dumpster and dragged them over to a table behind
  his neighbor’s cabin where he could dig through them in relative
  comfort.  Mike was on his way to the dumpster with is own bag of
  garbage.  He stopped and they chatted.  Their conversation
  centered on what an ecological shame and a travesty of justice it is
  that citizens are no longer permitted to salvage things from the public
  landfills.

  Yes, there are hazards at the dump.  Local governments were
  willing to let us accept the risks until some irresponsible and
  litigious citizens tried to make the government pay for the illnesses
  or injuries they’d incurred during their scrounging.  Then the
  bean counters, lawyers and legislators got into the act.  I think
  I’ve mentioned previously how I feel about an over-protective
  government.  I’d willingly sign a waiver to get to scrounge, but
  that’s not happening.  Occasionally, the borough declares a free
  day when people don’t have to pay to dump their garbage, but they’re
  not opening the gates to let us take stuff out.  Give me a moment
  here to untwist my shorts and limber up the tight jaws, and I’ll tell
  some trashy stories.

  
  mongo n. material or goods salvaged from items intended for disposal.

  English.
  NYC.
  Slang.
  United States. New evidence from the unpublished Lexicon of Trade Jargon, compiled by the Works Progress Administration, has a form of this word from before 1938: mungo,
  referring to the person who salvages discarded items, rather than the
  things being salvaged. This term appears to be specific to New York
  City.
  

  Double-Tongued Word Wrester Dictionary

  I am a born mungo, runs in the
  family.  Most of the nicest things I own are mongo.  It has
  been that way all my life.  As a kid, I had a tricycle assembled
  from parts found at the dump and a playhouse built from salvaged
  lumber, among other mongo goodies.  I pulled the nails from the
  old boards myself and straightened them for my father to reuse.  I
  wouldn’t have had the trike or the playhouse otherwise.  There
  wasn’t enough money for such things.

  I am grateful now for the dent in the lid that fits my big soup
  pot.  When I scrounged the big pot years ago, it didn’t have a
  lid.  The person who threw away that lid recently probably would
  have kept it if not for the dent.  A pot lid doesn’t, in my
  opinion, need to be pretty.  It just needs to be functional.

  I’m
  pleased with the repair job I did on the big blue enamel colander
  Greyfox found in the dumpster. (like the big one on the left) 
  It’s something you might see in a Williams-Sonoma catalog.  I
  don’t even go into the shops where such pricey items are sold.  I
  can’t afford to shop there and don’t want to be tempted to
  shoplift.  Each of its handles is held on by two screws that are
  threaded directly into the handles themselves, and the enamel finish is
  protected by rubber washers.  It probably was discarded because
  one of the screws was gone.  The only screw I had with matching
  threads was a bit long, so I improvised a thick “washer” by using an
  old rubber swim-type ear plug.  I poked a hole through it. 
  It amuses me now to see the little rubber tab sticking up.  It was
  meant to be used to pull the plug out of an ear, but it serves to
  remind me of Greyfox’s useful find and my clever repair job.

  Weekend
  trips with my parents to the Alviso garbage dump when I was little were
  more fun for me than some of the fishing trips we’d take on other
  weekends.  It wasn’t just the promise of possible toys or other
  useful things we might find.  There were interesting things to see
  along the way to the dump out on the bottom corner of San Francisco
  Bay.  On one of those trips, as we were passing Moffett Field, we
  stopped alongside the road to watch a helicopter make multiple takeoffs
  and touch down again.  I had never seen a helicopter.  My parents were as interested as I
  was.  These things were rare back then, in the late 1940s. 
  It was a Bell model 47, and my mother said it looked like a big
  grasshopper.

  The old Alviso Landfill is closed now.  It isn’t just no longer in
  operation, but is a restricted area due to toxic chemical
  contamination.  It was always a smelly and fly-infested place due
  to the garbage and the nearby sewage treatment plant.  The sewage
  treatment plant (now called “wastewater” treatment), I’ve read, is
  still in operation.  The landfill solution to trash accumulation
  isn’t satisfactory.  Neither is the recycling system in its
  current state in our culture.  But let me kick aside my little
  soapbox and get back to the stories….

  My mother would wait in the car while Daddy and I wandered over the
  piles of garbage at the dump and watched the bulldozers pushing it
  around.  She was too finicky and squeamish to get out there and
  dig around with us.  She’d wrinkle her nose when we got back in
  the car.  After my father died, there were no more trips to the
  dump until after I was married.  I really didn’t get back into
  ragpicking until the late 1960s.  It was a hip thing to do, if one
  was a hippie, and my early experience gave me a leg up when it came to
  dumpster diving.  The substantial loss of my sense of smell gives
  me an advantage there, too.

  When I got picked up in Colorado on the fugitive warrant from Oregon in
  1972,  the month or so I spent in the Boulder City-County Jail
  turned out to give me some advantages once I got out.  Boulder had
  become the new San Francisco after the death of Hip on the Coast. 
  A small but steady stream of hip chickies passed through the jail on
  charges such as disorderly conduct, trespassing and leash law
  violations while I was there.  From them I learned the locations
  of the most productive dumpsters in Boulder and Denver.  One of
  the Axioms of Mungo is that if you live in a small town near a bigger
  city, it is always worthwhile to make an occasional dumpster run into
  the city.

  One of those women, also named Kathy (Asshole Kathy actually — she was
  a member of the Asshole Family… I wonder what ever happened to the
  Assholes, and the sTp’ers.  Haven’t heard of them or seen the sTp
  graffito for years… but I digress), told me about a particular
  alleyway in suburban Denver that had both Goodwill and Salvation Army
  collection boxes as well as a row of supermarket dumpsters.  She’d
  lived briefly in the Salvation Army box, a plywood structure as big as
  Greyfox’s cabin at Felony Flats.  It had a flap-covered chute at
  the front for donations and a locked door at the back for
  pickups.  In it, she could burrow into the collected clothing for
  warmth at night and leave next morning dressed in “new” duds.  She
  told a story of waking to the sound of someone unlocking the door, and
  hurriedly diving out the chute shoeless, to avoid a trespassing bust.

  I dived into and crawled out of that box a few times on trips to Denver
  with Stoney after I was out of jail.  On one of the trips, I never
  got to the Sally Ann box because I didn’t get past the Safeway
  dumpsters.  One was full and the other half full of out-of-date
  eggs.  We filled our trunk and back seat.  When we got back
  to Breckinridge, everyone we knew had stacks of dozens of frozen eggs
  in the snow outside their cabins.

  When I got out of jail in Boulder and for a few weeks after that,
  before being fired for drinking on the job, Stoney worked on a garbage
  truck in Boulder.  I still have some housewares and art that he
  scrounged there.  The garbage collectors have the best access of
  all to the mongo stream.  They’re not supposed to take the stuff,
  of course, but they do.  Who could resist?  I mean, nobody
  loses if they salvage trash headed for the landfill, and everybody
  loses if they don’t.

  Then, I moved to Alaska.  Charley wasn’t into dumpster diving when
  I met him.  He’d been more into taking things other people hadn’t
  discarded, but he soon saw that there was profit in the trash,
  too.  We had lived in relative affluence during the pipeline
  construction boom.  Afterward, when the jobs dried up, we were
  still relatively prosperous compared to a lot of people who weren’t
  into mongo.  Both of us are handy at fixing things, and we sold
  what we found and fixed at flea markets.  It was then that I
  noticed the way things seem to come in bunches.  At one time, I
  had three waffle irons.  Then there was a series of finds
  involving Lego bricks. 

  A real bonanza came when a jeans store at a mall had a big sale with a
  trade-in deal.  They gave a discount if you brought in an old pair
  of jeans.  All the old jeans went into the dumpster.  We went
  back several times during the course of that sale and salvaged dozens
  of pairs of like-new jeans as well as even more pairs of well-broken-in
  and comfy pants.

  A shoe store in the same mall always put a splotch of red spray paint
  on any shoes that were returned, before they discarded them.  For
  years I wore perfectly good moccasins and moon boots that were
  besmirched with red paint.  My red badge of practicality.

  When Charley and I moved here to the Susitna Valley in 1983, there were
  three open landfills within easy driving distance.  This was when
  I became acquainted with the Guardian Spirit that I at first called the
  Dump Fairy.  Greyfox started calling her the Dumpster Deva and I
  followed his lead.  I became aware of the Garbage Guardian’s
  existence after several incidents of two types:  one, I’d be
  passing by the dump on my way to somewhere else and have a strong urge
  to stop in.  When I stopped, I’d invariably find things I could
  use.

  The other type of incident was when I’d have a particular need for
  something, and then that very thing would be there next time I went to
  the dump.  This Mongo Mojo tended to freak me out for a while, but
  I soon got used to it and just offered my thanks to the Spirit whenever
  it happened.  It’s still happening.  Last week I needed a
  shelf or cabinet or some such thing for a corner of the little storage
  cabin here, and there it was beside the Felony Flats dumpster when I
  was ready to come home Thursday night.  I grabbed my leather
  gloves, wrestled it on top of my car, bungeed it to my roof rack
  (always carry bungees) and brought it home.  It’s grungy and
  rickety, but it’ll do.  It’s just what I needed.

  After a couple of years out here, Charley and I initiated our own
  little tradition of the Mother’s Day Dump Run.  We were so broke
  that a lot of the time gasoline for a trip to town was hard to come
  by.  Presents for birthdays and holidays were improvised or
  non-existent.  We discovered that the Saturday before Mother’s Day
  was a time when many people did spring cleaning.  We were doing
  most of our dump visits on Sundays anyway because Monday was the day
  Dirty Ernie trailered his Cat to the dump to bury the latest
  accumulation.  I had quite a few years of bounteous Mother’s Days
  before the borough closed the local landfills, put in big dumpsters
  behind tall chain-link fences with little guard boxes at the gates to
  take our disposal fees so they could truck the trash to the central
  landfill.  Now, if we don’t catch it at the little dumpsters
  before the garbage men do, it’s gone for good.
  

  • 6:51 pm
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