Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (9 page)

Today, though, Alderson was showing off a restoration triumph. We continued paddling south, toward an empty barge and a mesh fence that stretched across the channel to a bulkhead. The creek was wider here and the current a little stronger. Alderson had warned me on the phone that debris barriers and booms would separate me from my dream of paddling around mounds of trash. But suddenly, he became animated. “Hey, it’s open,” he shouted. If we kept to the eastern shore, we could just sneak through the opening in the barrier. “I’ve never seen this open before,” he said, angling us toward the bulkhead and ducking as we glided under a slimy rope. Beyond the bulkhead was exactly what was supposed to be out here—a gently sloped, perfectly functioning tidal marshland.

“We did a three-acre restoration, with a thousand linear feet of shoreline,” he said. “The grasses act as erosion control and natural filters. They pull out excess nutrients, metals, pesticides, and herbicides. They also mitigate storms and provide plant and animal habitat.” We couldn’t see it from sea level, but Alderson’s team had also created a surface-water capture basin in there, made of berm and rock. It acted as a secondary means of purifying runoff by capturing surface sediment before it hit the creek.

In Alderson’s perfect world, all the waterways around the landfill, where ecologically appropriate, would be planted with salt marsh vegetation. “Landfill engineers didn’t have this in their consciousness before,” he said. “We brought them square into a new paradigm.”

Going north took longer than going south. It wasn’t the wind that made it difficult but the water: the tide was going out. The mudflats on either side of us, though I couldn’t be sure, looked twice as broad as they had twenty minutes ago. I wondered how we’d get the boat all the way back to the Toyota. We paddled doggedly for ten minutes, until a loud and scolding “Yo!” drew our attention to the western shore.

A sanitation sedan was parked on the lowest contour of Section 3/4. “Shit,” Alderson said.

“Paddle over here,” shouted a figure in uniform. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Alderson bellowed his name and Parks Department affiliation, then said that he’d been checking on his salt marsh. The san man wasn’t impressed: “I don’t care who you are, I’m giving you a summons.”

“I can’t get over there!” Alderson shouted. There was fifty feet of leachate-suffused mud between solid ground and the cleat on our bow. Even if we had clear sailing and weren’t afraid of running out of tide to reach our takeout point, the idea of presenting ourselves to receive punishment beggared common sense.

“Where are you parked?”

“Travis.”

“Get your boat over here! You are trespassing on—”

I didn’t hear the rest. Alderson had morphed into an angry beast.

“I built that fucking salt marsh for you!” he shouted without a hint of levity. I could feel his anger coursing through the roto-molded plastic of the boat. “You’re telling me I can’t paddle in public waters from a wildlife refuge around a landfill owned by the city?” All that shouting interfered with his stroke. I sank a little lower in my seat but continued paddling away from the sanitation cop, in a gesture of moral support. “Talk to Phil Gleason!” he continued. “He’ll tell you who I am. If you’re gonna give me one summons, you gotta give me a hundred. Give me a hundred and fifty! I’ve been in your creek a hundred and fifty times!”

We were out of voice-shot now and the cop got into his car. Alderson instantly calmed down. “I’m sorry,” he said to me. “I was reverting to the language of the landfill.”

Chapter Three

Stalking the Active Face

I
drove out to Pennsylvania on the first warm spring day of the year, full of zeal for my quarry and eager to leave the winter-weary city behind. Route 78, known as the garbage interstate, was abuzz with eighteen-wheelers hauling putrescible waste across New Jersey to one of Pennsylvania’s fifty-one landfills. Pennsylvania imports ten million tons of waste per year from neighboring states, more than any other state in the union. The garbage traffic fills state coffers with surcharges (in 2002, fees for out-of-state trash added up to $40 million), but it also brings danger. During one eight-day crackdown in the spring of 2001, inspectors found 849 trucks with violations so serious they were ordered off the road. Altogether, 86 percent of the more than 40,000 trucks inspected had safety and environment-related violations, such as leaks or improperly covered loads.

The landscape of rural Pennsylvania bespoke the geography of iron ore—gouged hills and twisting hollows of second-growth hardwoods, the towns depressed and faded. My destination lay a few easy miles north of Route 78, on the bucolically named Applebutter Road. I had figured Applebutter for a new road that cut through a former apple orchard. Instead, it was an old road that still had its orchards, and its eighteenth-century stone farmhouses, and its hillsides of goats and sheep. But across the road from the sheep was an enormously ugly power plant, and all around the plant were the rusty dregs of Bethlehem Steel—railcars and tracks, blackened hulks of hangars and factories. The Bethlehem property was the largest brownfield, or industry-polluted site, in the state.

My plan was to follow my kitchen trash to its final resting place, at the landfill in Bethlehem. The dump was owned by IESI, the same company that owned my transfer station down on Court Street, which I thought would make things easy, in terms of getting access. But I was wrong. Nothing in garbage was easy.

The landfill’s manager, Sam Donato, didn’t return my calls, so I phoned his boss, in Texas. Mickey Flood was IESI’s founder and CEO, and he’d been friendly when we first spoke, months earlier. He’d griped to me about New York’s rate cap on commercial carting: he said he couldn’t make any money hauling restaurant waste, which was wet and heavy, if he could charge only $12.20 a yard for it. “It costs me fourteen dollars a yard!” Flood said. “But I know someone’s picking it up, and they’re either philanthropists or they’re cheating.” I had sympathized with Flood’s predicament, and he had cleared the way for me to visit the Court Street station.

This time, Flood wasn’t so helpful. In fact, he didn’t return a single one of my calls, so I continued to hound Donato until he accidentally picked up his phone one day and reluctantly agreed to a tour.

Donato hadn’t been warm on the phone, and he wasn’t warm in person, either. He was a medium-size man with puffy cheeks, dressed in a white oxford-cloth shirt with the IESI pine tree logo. We met in the landfill office, a prefab building with vinyl siding. I sensed that Donato was rushed, so I tried to minimize my questions—a little landfill history, its capacity, and so on. When I had signed the register at the front desk I noticed that a groundwater-testing company had recently made several visits. I asked Donato about his leachate discharge, and he said, “I can’t answer that, technically.” The cell phone in his pocket kept buzzing, and he kept answering, chipping away at our time together. I cut to the chase: “Maybe we should just go up and see the landfill and I can ask you questions while we drive.”

“I’ll show you the recycling area, but you can’t see the landfill,” he said, leading me outside.

“But you said you’d show me the landfill,” I said.

“I’m a little busy today.”

“Could someone else show it to me? I just want a quick peek at the active face.”

“No, no one else can show you. There’s nothing to see—just look up there.” He pointed uphill to Area 3D, a five-acre section way up at the top of an ocher-colored mound. A tractor-trailer was grinding its way through the lower gears, up one switchback and then another. I saw the truck’s profile against the blue sky, then a puff of black exhaust escaped from its tiny stack and lingered over the cab like a cartoon cloud.

And that’s all I saw. I assumed an excavator dug out the truck or maybe a hydraulic piston pushed a plate out and the compacted garbage spilled onto the ground. It didn’t really matter what it looked like: anyone who reads magazines or watches TV can picture a vast amount of garbage, can understand the enormity of First World wastefulness. Or so I told myself. But I really did want to experience the whole thing. After all, it had been my garbage.

“When we spoke on the phone you said I could see the active face. I drove three hours this morning to get here.”

“I’m sorry about that, but no.” Donato didn’t look the least bit sorry. In fact, I think he was smiling to himself. “I’ll show you the recycling.” He started walking toward a Dumpster behind the weigh station, but I stood my ground in the parking lot.

“I don’t care about the recycling,” I said. “It’s not my plastic or metal or glass. I want to see where you’re dumping trash, my trash.”

“It’s just too dangerous,” Donato said.

“I won’t get out. I’ll ride up with a truck driver if you don’t have time.”

“No. There are liability issues. Those are private trucks.”

“But you’re vertically integrated! Those are your trucks. And I’ve already talked to Mr. Flood. He let me into the transfer station; he knows what I’m doing.”

“There are no IESI trucks from New York today.”

“Then I could ride with another driver.”

“No.”

I was running out of steam. “Okay, well, tell me this: is it a big hole up there or are you building layers?”

“Layers. It’s flat. They try to work in small sections, maybe a hundred feet by fifty. Then they cover it. Or they put a tarp over it. We can do that.”

“How high will it be when you’re done?”

“We have a plan. There’s a final heighth [
sic
].”

“All right.”

“Thanks for coming out,” he said jovially.

“Yeah.”

I got into my car and started writing notes, hoping to make Donato, who still stood in the parking lot, nervous. I used the Bethlehem landfill pen I’d picked up in his conference room. When Donato went back inside, I went driving around. I talked to his neighbors about the smell of the place, the trucks on the road, the gulls kettling over the trash mountain, which was really—from a distance—a simple-looking thing, Bactrian and brown. I viewed the hump from the south and the west and points in between, trespassing on dirt roads and around the backyards of cabins. The trucks were dumping toward the north and the east, but there were no roads near those heavily wooded slopes. I wanted to find a way to get into the landfill on foot, but a tall chain-link fence topped by three strands of barbed wire surrounded it, and the woods were heavily posted.

After my sixth pass down Applebutter Road, I noticed a creek flowing out of the landfill property and under the chain-link fence. I parked near a cabin, hoping no one would call the police about my out-of-state plates, and dove into the woods. Darting from tree to tree, I made my way to the creek, crossed it on a rotting log, wriggled under a gap in the fence, and headed north, toward the rounded mounds of trash.

My dull canvas coat was good cover in the early-spring woods, and it was also good protection against wild raspberry and rose thorns. The landfill, it turned out, was like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, protected on its lower slopes by a thick overgrowth of spiky brambles. A cottontail rabbit and a white-tailed deer bounded away from me. I found a length of deer vertebrae in the leaf litter. With a start, I realized I was having a wilderness experience right at the edge of a landfill. There was actually very little trash in here—and no human footprints, beer bottles, or condoms, baseline evidence of recreation—which made it easy to imagine I was part of an elite minority, one of the few civilians to hike these woods in modern times.

Closer to the forest’s edge I crept. When I hit the landfill proper—the place where the ground started to rise and no trees grew—I made a quick reconnaissance. No one was in sight. Winter-matted brown grasses covered the slope. I ran up a small foothill, dodging an aloe plant and brushing past goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. At the top, I peeked over the edge, prairie dog style. Damn! A white pickup was parked on a switchback a quarter mile up. I ducked down and retreated to the woods, then plotted an easterly course and reemerged onto the landfill. Again, I crept up a foothill. Another truck! Were they watching me? I regretted not bringing my binoculars. As I tiptoed back into the woods, I heard a tractor-trailer coming down the switchback. Donato had said that seventy trucks entered the landfill each day, dumping 750 tons, but only fifteen to twenty of them were eighteen-wheelers. By modern-day standards, the Bethlehem landfill was petite. Over in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, Waste Management was doing more than thirteen times that amount.

I waited for the pickups to leave. A turkey vulture circled incessantly just fifty feet overhead. “Go away,” I whispered, beginning to feel nervous. I imagined Donato appearing from the brambles and grabbing me by the ear. Why did he care so much about keeping me out? I knew now that I’d never make it up to the active face on my own: there were five switchbacks to clear in half a mile of open terrain, the two lurking pickups, and the rest of those tractor-trailers rumbling up and down. Why was this landfill being guarded like a strategic target? Many small-town dumps were still open to the drive-in public seven days a week. I had recently seen a movie in which Richard Gere careens into a Westchester County dump in the dead of night to tip a body wrapped in a carpet. (Naturally, the body was discovered the next morning: all garbage workers have finely honed search images for bodies rolled up in carpets.) But that was Hollywood. In the real world, garbage had become increasingly privatized and removed from the public eye. Where the town dump had once been open, an area of social congress, landfills were now fenced and gated, so that fees could be charged and large equipment could operate freely. Gleaners and scavengers, who’d once performed a useful public function, were no longer welcome. The garbage was still garbage, but it was hidden—except from those unlucky enough to live near the landfill’s edge or downwind from its active face. People preferred their waste out of sight, but that distance also cultivated secrecy.

When I got home I phoned Al Wurth, the political scientist from Lehigh College, which was just a few miles from the Bethlehem landfill. Wurth had a lot to say about my naïveté. “They may arrange a tour for a class of third-graders, but they’re not going to let a writer in,” he said. I asked if there was a citizens group that had been fighting the landfill; he said that when the township signed its host agreement with IESI, such activism had been forbidden.