Dumpmageddon

Tragedy at the transfer station

What holds a small town together? 

During World War II, soldiers sent letters home to the corner store just 200 yards down the street from me, so they could be posted on the community bulletin board. In the 1970s, when I was a kid, I went to that store all the time, to buy licorice from the jar on the counter. If you subscribed to The Laconia Citizen, there was a newspaper there waiting for you, with your last name scrawled in cursive in the upper right corner on the front page. 

The Corner Store shut down the week I moved to town, in 2015. Everyone was just going to WalMart. Meanwhile, Fox News was thriving, and Donald Trump was already starting up his first (and ultimately successful) presidential campaign, so that when I took walks at night I could see him looming and glowering on large screen TVs, and I began to think of each house I passed as another lonely node in a network of smoldering contempt. The town Facebook page only heightened the rancor. 

Back in 2015, though, we still had the dump, and in a town without trash pickup, the dump is a place where locals meet on terms that are at once equal and humble. Everyone–and I mean everyone–needs to go to the dump to get rid of their trash. It doesn’t matter if you work in the governor’s office, heading up some fancy task force, and move about town acting like your shit doesn’t stink. You still have to go to the dump. 

In 2015, the town lived and breathed on a patch of pavement in front of the recycling bins. There, as the citizens shuffled about cradling cardboard and cans, they were thrown together in a humdrum, low-stakes setting and they found themselves, almost invariably, connecting. They let their guards down, and warm, casual comments floated in the odoriferous air.

“Bill, how’s the writing going?”

“Good enough. When are you gonna slaughter those chickens?”

The dialogue was glancing but also important. It reminded us that, even as we bickered on Facebook, we had common cause. We recycled our mayonnaise jars in the same bins. We lived, in many cases, within earshot of the same clanging Sunday morning church bells.

And sometimes the conversations were not throwaway.  In 2021, when I reluctantly brought an antique chair to the dump after a leg broke, I ran into a local carpenter named John Manning and remembered how, back in 1979, I’d spent eight dusty hours removing planks and cross beams from the second floor of our barn, so as to open up a lovely, cathedral-like space. Hired by my grandmother, John took that lumber and shaped it into a rough-hewn gazebo on our lawn. 

Even before the gazebo was finished, my grandmother held a “grand opening” party to honor the new structure.  A reporter for The Suncook Valley Sun came. His writeup recited almost the entire guest list–50 people–before conceding that some names “passed in the night as we passed time at the three bars.”

At the dump, as I carried that broken chair, John stopped me. He’s got this thing these days for fixing up old furniture. “Bill,” he said, “I’m gonna rescue this one.”

It felt good to hand John that chair. I felt like I lived in a place where people knew my story and cared about me. I felt like I lived in a town where the past had its own attentive stewards and the survival of individual artifacts mattered.

But interactions like that chair exchange do not happen at the dump anymore.

In April 2023, our selectmen abruptly fired all but one of our four dump employees. I’ll spare you the details. They’re tawdry. They’re fraught, and I don’t want to lose friends. The upshot, in any case, is that all the people that work on the recycling area, kibitizing with the locals–they’re  gone now, and they will not be replaced. A new money-saving scheme has us doing single-stream recycling, watched over by a single dump employee. Nobody is happy with the arrangement. The single-stream Dumpster is small. Every day, it fills up with cardboard, sometimes as early as 10:30 am. After that, locals are forced to start throwing their recyclables into the trash compactor. When they get home, they log onto Facebook and make nasty comments about town officials.  

I don’t even try to recycle at the dump anymore. I have a friend who lives in Massachusetts, and I just take my recyclables down there. It’s less depressing. And so my trips to the dump are cursory now. All I do there now is toss my garbage into the compactor. 

The guy who operates the compactor, the sole remaining dump employee–he’s worked there for years. But I don’t know his name. He sits on the upper floor of a shack whose window overlooks the compactor. He is remote, and because the compactor is loud and also shrouded in dangers, he cannot chat. He just watches the dump’s patrons, waiting to lash out. “No loose trash!”  he will shout from on high, “Get your hand out of the dumpster!” His is the voice of an angry god presiding over a world stripped clean of joy.

We throw our trash in the compactor quickly now, hoping to avoid reprimand. Then we drive the long, winding road back to town, each one of us alone in our vehicle.

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Paid subscribers, click here for the full text of the 1979 Suncook Valley Sun story and an October 2023 photo of carpenter John Manning.