Honolulu Lite
Honolulu Lite
Getting stumped
at the dumpOne day, the garbage-to-energy H-Power plant is going to blow up and it's probably going to be my fault. That's what a large, agitated man at the Kapaa rubbish transfer station is telling me as we stare thoughtfully at an equally large and agitated tree stump sitting in the back of my pickup truck.
This gentleman, in the rusty T-shirt that doesn't quite cover everything that needs to be covered, is one of two gatekeepers at the dump, the guys who categorize your debris by some system I haven't quite smoked out yet. Animal, vegetable, mineral? Green, brown or fuchsia? Pre-Colombian vs. Late-Ariyoshi? Combustible or not? Who knows?
In any case, the stump under consideration managed to get by the first gatekeeper at the bottom of the hill. Of course, it was camouflaged by other refuse, including a small refrigerator suffering from a fatal case of bad attitude. The fate of the refrigerator was incontestable. It was bound for the sad little community of discarded appliances, where cast-off refrigerators, stoves and washers stand like Stonehenge, were it sponsored by Sears.
But the tree stump, that was the stumper, so to speak. I always think it best to let a professional do his job, so I stood by while my man considered the gnarled root mass. The problem seemed to be that 1) The guy down below shouldn't have let it in to begin with, and 2) Now that it was at the transfer building, just where should it go? Anything flammable goes into the large pit where it is hauled to the H-Power plant to make electricity to run, in my case, the electric chain saw I use to cut down trees in my yard. The stump was probably ignitable but, man, it was big. It might get jammed in the garbage ingestor at H-Power causing the a fiery explosion of accusations as to which idiot let this root bomb into system.
That's when my guy pointed out in a friendly way that one day H-Power was going to blow up and that it would be the fault of people like me who sneak around trying to feed enormous tree portions into a facility designed for milk cartons and paper towel rolls.
I nodded my head in a meaningful way as if to say I appreciated his counsel but the stump would either stop here or accidentally fall out of the truck somewhere down the road because I definitely wasn't taking the brute back home.
Trying to be helpful I suggested that we ignore the fact that it is a tree stump and pretend it is, say, a couch. Where would you dump an old couch?
It was the breakthrough we needed and soon the stump was in the large dumpster reserved for broken furniture, smashed televisions and, from what I could see, lost dreams. These things would be buried in a landfill to slowly but gradually remain there for all time. Except my tree trunk, saved from the fiery pits of H-Power, perhaps one day to push a fragile green spout through the landfill crust and live again.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com