My yard, as you may recall, has been besieged by the expansion of recent emergency projects (sinkhole) into "hey-also" projects, to include a partial excavation of my side yard and a portion of the backyard behind the garage. The need for these additional projects came about, in part, from my and my husband's own over enthusiasm, as well as a lack of awareness of the fleeting nature of Time ("Hey, it's winter already!"). In sum, last year we politely declined the ever-so-reasonable offers from our previous contractors to kindly remove debris left over from their own work, mistakenly confident we could manage, DIY-style, and thus "save money." Oh, to be able to rewind the clock!
So, after our sinkhole was filled in, we had the Guy in the Big Yellow Backhoe scrape a little dirt from here, and some wood chippings from there, and push them around our yard a bit, you know, to even things out. The rest, we said, we could do ourselves. This is what it looked liked when the GBYB left our yard:
Have I mentioned there were two 60-foot cottonwood trees chopped out of that side yard? Yep, those are residual 6" diameter "roots" wrapping around the base of my garage.
As you can imagine, digging that area out was (and I don't say this lightly) a motherfucker. Implements of destruction included shovels, rakes, hoes, a 3-foot crowbar (shout-out to our kitchen remodel crew for accidentally leaving that in our crawlspace!), and a lopper (affectionately named, of course, Cyndi).
I may have also neglected to mention that this has been a record-setting summer in Anchorage for both heat and sun. And while 75-80 degrees with low humidity sounds perfect to most people, summer-wise, it's less than ideal for us Alaskans who are used to summers of 60 degrees and cloudy with cold breezes blowing around. Throw in some dive-bombing killer mosquitoes and you've got the general idea.
I'll leave out the interim steps involving buying the wrong size trailer hitch for my husband's truck, the hilarity of our local U-Haul office, and the requisite marital bickering this sort of situation is ideal for cultivating, and just skip to the part where my husband and I (mostly I, as even he would admit) busted up the yard and pushed wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of dirt, rocks and roots into a U-Haul trailer. This, as an example, was one day's husband-free labor:
Yep, I'm badass. Tiny But Fierce.
My husband's truck has a load-weight of 3500 pounds, so we tried to estimate exactly how much dirt and rocks and roots we were loading into said trailer. I estimated the wheelbarrow loads to weigh about a hundred pounds each; my husband thought fifty. I thought he was nuts, but didn't actually know so we split the difference at 75. How many loads? I'd already done at least a dozen from the backyard before we even started the side yard. Maybe another six or so after that? We should stop loading. So we did.
I had a coupon for a free dump load courtesy of our local gas utility, probably for paying them over $1000 a year to heat our house. In any case, we pulled up to the weigh station, and the woman thought we maybe had more than was allotted by the coupon; she didn't specify whether she meant weight (1000 pounds) or dimensions (8ft x 5.5ft x 3ft). We'd have to pay cash. No problem. We weighed in at 8800 pounds (sounds heavy, doesn't it?).
As it turns out, living in Anchorage these fifteen years, I've never been to the dump. Well, not to THIS dump. The "dump" I'd been to is a relatively tidy little parking lot where you back your truck up to a big covered cement room where guys drive around in encaged plows pushing piles of our civilization's refuse around the cement floor. It's kinda fun -- while simultaneously tidying up your home, you can break glass on the floor, or try to hit the guys in the plows (accidentally, of course).
As it turns out, compared to the Anchorage Regional Landfill, the dump I'd previously visited is fucking Disneyland. The REAL dump is a huge vapid wasteland of dune after dune of humans' discarded goods. I've never been to Calcutta, but it was the first thought that popped into my head.
And, the smell. I thanked my husband for not having chosen a hotter day for this particular task (it was a blissfully cool 65 degrees and overcast this morning). I can only imagine and prefer not to, what it must smell like on a hot sunny day. So I won't, though I did wonder aloud if the workers just got used to the smell, and if any of them were married.
I was immediately sickened, not so much by the smell but by the same idea I have every time I walk past rack after rack of clothing or shelves full of goods at WalMart, JC Penney's, or even Nordstrom's:
What do we need with all this STUFF?!? What ultimately happens to it when it gets "old"? I could feel the weight of excess crushing me with guilt: of being American; of being relatively wealthy, especially compared to the world's population; of not trying harder to not generate waste. This thing that I never have had to look at, this wasteland of detritus, staring me in the face. It sickened me. It did.
Fortunately, my inner pop-culture goddess was also in the mix, and she reminded me this area looked like something straight out of Mad Max's post-apocalyptic landscape. I half-expected to see these guys pull up and say Hi:
[Reality Check: Mad Max came out in 1979, The Road Warrior in 1981. It sadly occurs to me some of my readers may be too young to have ever seen these movies (you can skip the Tina Turner one -- Auntie Entity, indeed). Let it be known, The Road Warrior is mandatory viewing for cinephiles; remember, this was before any of us knew what an anti-semitic nut job Mel Gibson was, so please be gentle in your judgment of us.]
My husband, overall less philosophical, was less burdened. In fact, he was borderline rapturous. I quickly discerned the source:
I confess, even I wanted a turn at the wheel of that bad boy! Truthfully, I was most impressed with the Art Nouveau beauty and geometry of the plow-face and kept wondering how, engineering-wise, that was the BEST design for its purpose. Meanwhile, I could hear my husband making little "Vroom-vroom" noises under his breath. It was cute.
So here was our load, left to unburden:
Suffice it to say, it took longer than I expected. Yet another hour of backbreading dusty, hot, stinky work with hand tools.
But finish we did, and so we bid a fond farewell to the dump, but not before seeing way too many of these lying around:
(Drink tap water, people. We're killing the planet.)
We pulled up to the weigh station & check -out window. It was $74.24. My husband asked how much weight we'd had: 2560 pounds.
Two thousand, five hundred, sixty pounds.
One point two-eight tons of dirt, rocks, roots.
That we moved TWICE: once into the trailer, then out of the trailer into the dump.
And also, boy did we exceed the weight limit on my husband's trailer!
But all's well that ends well, and now our side yard looks like this:
and back of the garage like this:
So I guess it was worth it. I mean, in my mind it justified tonight's dinner:
But I think the Landfill should be mandatory field trip for kids, at some point when they're old enough to "get it." (Who am I kidding? I know plenty of adults who still don't "get it.") It certainly has stuck with me and, I hope, will continue to influence at least some of my lifestyle choices.
In any case, I am officially done with the Backyard Project. If a meteor drops on my yard tomorrow morning, I'm just gonna walk right past it on my way towards my morning swim at the YMCA. Maybe put up a "For Sale: Cheap" sign.
No comments:
Post a Comment