Dopecentury XII --- The Dump
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
The landscape is mounded, rolling hills that extend off over the horizon. Though describing it as “landscape” isn’t accurate, since the actual land beneath is generally flat and swampy. “Landscape” in the abstract then, like the way one might describe the “landscape” of a crumbled sheet left on a bed. Though not as abstract as something like the “landscape” of public policy, for like the sheet this landscape does have physical dimensions. It spreads out on the x and y axis, and rises and falls on the z axis. It’s not not a landscape, I just mean that it’s not what one thinks of when one thinks of “land.” For nothing grows here, and growing things feel like a key element of a conventional understanding of landscape.
Nothing grows here because it is filled with mounds of refuse, that is, garbage. It is a dump, a rubbish tip, landfill. And it is vast. Nothing grows here, but the dump itself, which flourishes and thrives. It grows ever upward and outward. The growth is not even, but guided by the operators, who sit up high in the cabs of their heavy compactors. They crawl slowly back and forth over the hills, crushing down the waste outflow of the big cities beneath their crenelated steel wheels, trying to make the embarrassment of civilization as small as possible.
In one corner of the dump, the working face accepts new loads. Streams of garbage flow into the working face, hauled in by lines of trucks that never end and unloaded from rail cars strung out for miles waiting their turn to enter the dump site. The working face gets worked, crushed and pushed, driven up the mounds, ever farther back and farther in.
Efforts are made to reclaim valuable materials. Metals are redirected to another corner of the dump. There, the mounds get angles and sharp edges. Flattened vehicles are stacked up in columns that reach equally as high as the mounds. The columns lean against each other for support. Liquefied rust and oils run down the columns in drips and irregular streams until they pool in the dirt that gets ground and churned by the weight of the trucks and machines that pass by. Hills of metal, separated by material: steel, aluminum, copper, and iron; arise around every curve of the truck road that winds through the area. The metals are valuable, so this corner is secured by steel fencing topped with razor wire.
That steel fencing is mostly to keep the trash pickers out. The trash pickers are a critical part of the system. They find value in the embarrassment. They scrape value from nothing, and recover the valuable that should never have been disposed. They traverse the mounds under the beating sun, in the noisome (an opportunity to use the word correctly, though it seems like “stinking” would be better here) heat, a cloak over the shoulders, a hood over the head, a stick or pole in hand to turn aside the waste and peer down searching for the hint of value. The highest ranked among them own gloves. The poorest search out morsels of even food waste, heating it over fires of burning plastic, depending on the notion that if they make the food hot enough, it will not poison them.
Between the mounds, leachate settles in pools of wet toxic sludge. When this happens, the operators use the machine’s enormous scoops to push material down from the tops of the hills to fill in the depressions. Eventually the mounds and hills begin to level out into a flat raise plain, a mesa of waste that runs out to the horizon. Over the horizon during the day, smoke rises from waste incinerators. At night flaring gases make the horizon glow red in the darkness.
Under the wheels of the compactors the garbage is continually crushed down: mattresses, office furniture, broken shelves and picture frames, bloated carcasses of animals picked up off the highway, the cracked porceline of toilets and vanities, books and paper sogged with liquids, crunching broken glass bottles and window panes, wooden bedroom furniture that cracks and splinters under the weight, and endless piles of black and white bags of plastic whose contents regularly burst forth and spew down the steep sides of the mounds. Everywhere the compactors move, liquids spill out like the innards of some small mammal stuck under the wheels of a backing vehicle. The liquids are squeezed out of the trash, sink down, seep into other areas, and then are squeezed out again. Each time they collect more oil, more bacteria, more toxins.
The sun heats the waste from above, and the action of the microbes that chomp on the organic wastes while studiously avoiding the plastics, heat the waste from below. The whole landscape stews and the compactors stir the pot and the trash pickers and the microbes wander in search of tasty morsels.