Once there was another pile of garbage here, and now it is gone. There are almost no traces of it anymore, but millions of us know it existed, because we smelled it: the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
It was garbage, as Ippolito “Izzy” Annunziato of Teamsters Local 831 once said, that “you could stack high enough to reach the [expletive deleted] moon or fill the Grand [expletive deleted] Canyon if that sort of thing is more to your liking. Anyways, it was a ton of effing garbage, ya know?” Hundreds of millions of tons, to be exact. They can keep Machu Picchu and have their Taj Mahal, because you got all of this. It was a time when you just had to stick your head out of your window on Emmons Avenue to hear the horns blaring from the Belt Parkway with steaming, smoldering piles of trash. You watched as the seagulls circled the massive mounds in the landfill, thinking this must’ve been what Neil Armstrong felt like when he ambled across the lunar surface for the very first time. You fell asleep to the melodies of sanitation workers weaving obscenities together like Penelope at the loom.
You woke up holding your nose in the summer heat, knowing exactly what your neighbors ate for dinner, as well as what they didn't. You knew the difference between a halibut and a salmon simply by aroma. The wafting scent of rotting fish rolling down the boulevard on a breezy afternoon transports you to that place. Bags used to break all the time back then. There was no compost. At least not like now. If you didn’t like something, you threw it over an embankment. No one recycled. You sorted vinyl records, not refuse.
All over your garbage route, sanitation workers would hang off the back of trucks and everyone knew their names. You didn’t donate things. You burned them in a pit or tossed them into an open manhole when no one was looking. Cashiers never asked, “paper or plastic?” That landfill is gone now, compacted into itty-bitty cubes by time, machinery, corruption, and fun. You forgot what it tasted like when the barges cruised on by, spilling excess debris into the city's twin estuaries. Kayakers had to watch out for these toxic bogies, skillfully paddling to avoid contamination. Dumpster diving was a one-way activity in those days – if you went in, you never came out. You were better off on the sidewalk, admiring the heap from a distance.
You tossed anything and everything into the river – with the driftwood from a decaying ship and the bodies from the latest mob war. You can still litter today, but it’s not the same. Someone’s always there to pick it right up. Strangers scold and lecture you about the environment, imploring you to care. But you couldn’t spell “environment” if your life depended on it. Not with that first "n" rubbing elbows with the word's sole "m." Raw connoted sewage, not sushi. There weren’t any blue containers. Commingling meant carousing on Bell Boulevard when you’d exhausted every haunt in South Brooklyn. And going green only happened when you ate a bad clam.
Fresh Kills having seen one too many fresh kills, is a burgeoning greenspace. When that final transformation takes place, you will mourn the bygone filth and forgotten swill. You will remember the stack for what it was, and for what it wasn't. The city doesn't need more park benches or nature trails. It has enough of those. But a place for our garbage, our mistakes, our regrets, our past - that's too much apparently.
That garbage is hidden now. In jet black bags, scooped up late at night by quiet men in overalls. It may be camouflaged, but it’s still there. You can’t escape it. Under bottle caps and plum pits, electronics that aren’t supposed to be thrown out and CO2 canisters from your new soda stream - strewn across the five boroughs. On corners and stoops, in gutters and old cars.
Fresh Kills wasn’t the only landfill, it was just the best. Garbage was everywhere – once. I suppose the whole world is a landfill now. In the not-too-distant future, garbage may be eliminated. Vaporized. Sent down a wormhole garbage chute to a distant galaxy, or reanimated by the tireless work of underpaid, though well-unionized robot garbagemen. Whatever happens, you’ll miss it when it's finally gone. You’ll vividly recall the guy eating buffalo wings on the subway, licking his fingers and tossing bones on the floor for others to worry about. There will be some New Yorker futilely attempting to conjure up images of empty soda cans, crinkled plastics and egg cartons - a long lost city with more garbage than God.
Will you remember when our cans and crates were left overflowing on the curbside? Will you tell stories of backyard leaf burning parties during the first days of Autumn? You can get rid of plastic bottles and plastic bags, shame people for using plastic straws, but what about us when we're gone? We're sustainable, to a point. Compostable, in a way. But mostly, we're garbage, too. No better than the rusty soup can or the coffee-stained envelope. No worse either.
Remember to recycle yourself.
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