The Way the World Works: Essays Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the smell; for unknown reasons, Biddefordians sited their incinerator in the center of town. I told Jim the Manager that our dump was looking very clean these days. When Jim took over a year ago, the place was a mess; now everything’s in order, and there’s no smell. “Every night we clean out all the recycling cans with a mixture of Simple Green, bleach, and water,” Jim said. “We don’t get any bees. When I got here, there were a lot of bees.”
    Agamenticus Road is the way to the dump. Agamenticus is the name of a mountain nearby; there are rare plants that grow only on Mount Agamenticus, but I’ve never seen them. There is a pile of rocks on top of Mount Agamenticus, too. Indians supposedly had a tradition of commemorating a sacred burial site by arranging a large pile of rocks; now visitors to the mountain bring their rocks as well. I’ve been to the top of Mount Agamenticus once; I’ve been to the dump hundreds of times, often with my son. You take aright at the Civil War statue onto Agamenticus Road; you drive past some houses and a cemetery; and then, just after the ice cream stand and potted plant store, you take a left and you’re in a paved area in front of the dump’s main building, a brown shed. Next to it is a yawning opening—a sort of double-high garage door—into which people toss their clear bags of trash. One of the pleasures here is in throwing: today I flung each bag underhand, so that it had a final airborne moment of multicolored spin before it fell into the compaction pit. Sometimes I overturn the whole garbage can (which I’ve brought in the back of my van) and shake out its contents, holding it high over my shoulder: the bags emerge slowly, hissing slightly, held by the vacuum I created several days earlier when I stuffed the bags down into the can in order to close the lid. The bags holding regular trash must be transparent, so that the dump attendants can verify that you’re not throwing in something forbidden, like cat litter. Cat litter goes into another enormous container separate from the main one, a receptacle entirely devoted to mattresses, old couches, and cat litter.
    There are three windows in the main building—one window is labeled “Brown,” one says “Green,” and one says “Clear.” Formerly the windows were fitted with swinging flaps of Plexiglas, but the flaps have been removed now—an improvement. Into these windows we throw bottles and jars. When the bottles fall into the bins on the other side of the swinging flaps (or where the swinging flaps were when there were flaps), the clinks they make are painfully loud. When the bottles break it’s a relief: shattering is noticeably less noisy than intact clinking. Why? Perhaps because some of the kinetic energy is used up in the breakage, and there are no broken inner bottle-hollows to muffle the radiating noise.
    Down a slope and to the left of the main building are two dark-green containers, each the size of a mobile home. One holds newspapers and magazines, and one holds cardboard. You can flip pizza boxes like Frisbees into the container for cardboard, hoping to lodge them at the top of the pile, way back in the shadows. Often the boxes slide back out again. I took several bags of newspapers into the newspaper-and-magazine bin. There is a partition up halfway back, to hold the four-foot-high tide of paper from pouring forward. It’s hushed and warm deep in this news-vessel; the shiny advertising inserts make slushy whispering noises as you release them from the bag.
    The most exciting place in the dump is the little shack with a cement floor and a sign over it saying “Swap Shop,” where people leave their serviceable junk. Today at the Swap Shop I noticed three toasters, two toaster ovens, a bike, a textbook of surgery, many pairs of shoes, two tape recorders, and an infant’s car seat. A man with a large, high stomach dropped off a green and white poolside chair that he had no use for; half an hour