THE quarry road that leads to the Kailua dump is lined with gorgeous marshes. Unfortunately, those marshes are lined with rubbish. It’s hard to be nice
when it stinks outsideI always wondered why people would dump their garbage along this road when the actual dump is only a few hundred yards ahead. I mean, you go to all the trouble of loading up your truck and drive to the general vicinity of the dump, then dump your rubbish on the side of the road. Why?
Last weekend, there was even more rubbish dumped on the sides of the quarry road than usual. There was everything from household garbage to lawn cuttings, from small appliances to tires and car batteries. I'm a regular user of the dump. It's my little contribution to the environment. I know everything I dump ends up being burned to make electricity, so I feel like a regular John Denver knowing that I'm not just dumping, I'm recycling.
The landfill is closed now, so no matter what you are hauling you have to go through the large transfer station building, which I have dubbed "The Big Smelly." This is where rubbish is dumped into a gigantic empty swimming pool-type of thing and a bulldozer scoots it all around into large piles. It is loaded into trucks that go very slowly up the Pali Highway during peak traffic times, providing morning commuters with an olfactory experience similar to diving head first into a diseased dead donkey.
The transfer pit is where the astonishing smells originate. It is Gag Central, at least on nice warm days when the rubbish has a chance to percolate a bit. To the occasional visitor, this is something like electric-shock aroma therapy. John Denver never sang about these rubble mountains and the egrets who inhabit them. This is where the real environmental battle rages, John, not out there in tall-timber wuss country.
Anyway, because of the odious nature of dumps, it is easy to understand that the guys who work there aren't the most courteous fellows around. Their job is to first, get used to the horrible odor, and second, spend the entire day directing people where to dump junk that will cause the stink to increase. It's not rocket science, although I doubt even the Mars rover would survive climbing around this rank landscape. It's a thankless job, even though I try to thank the boys every time I visit the dump. But it's hard, because they can be a little testy.
Like when I told one guy I had nothing but lawn clippings except for a few pieces of drywall. He told me to dump the green stuff in one place and throw the drywall into a large dumpster. This is fine with me. I understand the necessity of separating greens from whites. It's a laundry thing.
So I dump the greens in one place and start tossing the drywall into a dumpster the size of Waipahu when another garbage- control engineer orders me to stop. I have to drive my truck about 30 yards and dump the drywall from the TOP of the dumpster, he says.
On a subsequent trip, the same guy makes me drive my truck exactly up to where he is standing so he can talk into my window without moving an inch. All this so he can tell me to move my truck up 20 feet more and wait for the next pit opening.
All this seems unnecessarily authoritarian and has just the slightest aroma of someone with a modicum of power exercising it to the hilt. With all this talk about privatization, I can't help but think that a private rubbish company would be happy to have my business, whereas, a unionized government dump doesn't give a rip.
And just for the slightest moment I was tempted to drive out of the dump all together and chuck my drywall on the side of the quarry road. I didn't. But I now have a better understanding of why some people do.