Trash Talk
The cologne-scented pages of the May GQ feature a wonderful story about, of all things, garbage. In "This is Paradise," Jeanne Marie Laskas describes with pungent detail the Puente Hills Landfill near Los Angeles and the philosophical men and massive machines who work there, burying some of the 250 million tons of garbage that Americans throw out each year. Here Laskas introduces the main theme of her story with this great nut paragraph:
A landfill, after all, is a disgusting place. This is a 100-million-ton solid soup of diapers, Doritos bags, phone books, shoes, carrots, watermelon rinds, boats, shredded tires, coats, stoves, couches, Biggie Fries, piled up right here off the 605 freeway. It’s a place that brings to mind the hell of civilization, a heap of waste and ugliness and everything denial is designed for. We tend not to think about the fact that every time we toss out a moist towelette or an empty Splenda packet or a Little Debbie snack-cake wrapper, there are people involved, a whole chain of people charged with the preposterously complicated task of making that thing vanish—which it never really does. A landfill is not something we want to bother thinking about, and if we do, we tend to blame the landfill itself for sitting there stinking like that, for marring the landscape, for offending a sanitized aesthetic. We are human, highly evolved creatures, remarkably adept at forgetting that a landfill would be nothing, literally nothing, without us.
The story is full of marvelous scenes, such as this one where Laskas visits the home of Joe Haworth, a retired environmental engineer who likes to visit the landfill, and his wife, Shelly:
We stop at the house and Shelly won’t let us in because it’s too messy for company, and so we sit in the backyard and sip Pinot Grigio and I marvel at the odd assortment of stuff in the yard and on the porch, a little crooked fake Christmas tree and an empty pond and little ceramic dwarfs. Shelly is as tall as Olive Oyl, with a handsome face and a jet-black mane, and she chain-smokes and speaks the same crazily observant language as her husband. The two get tangled in notions, in thinking about what it would be like if there were no more people on earth, in trying to remember names of species of lizards, or names of saints, until one of them has to run inside and get a book to look it up.
At one point, when Joe is inside trying to find his encyclopedia of movie actors, she turns to me and says: “Did you notice anything funny about landfill people? They’re the most ethical bunch of people. So many of them were Jesuit trained, so maybe it goes back to that, where doing your best for the common good is a paramount principle. But they approach their jobs in the most ethical way. They’re taking the worst two things we have—trash and sewage—and turning them into golf courses and wonderful things.
“Isn’t that weird? It’s like a cause for these people. I’ve noticed it from the beginning, having to go to all these dreadful conferences and things. I used to think, These should be our politicians. We should only elect people trained in landfill maintenance.” http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_6769