There are times when I think back to my childhood and marvel at our innocence. Not only as kids, but as a society. If you recall those days, you could go out for an entire day as a kid and there was a reasonable expectation that you’d return home alive. There wasn’t any such thing as an Amber Alert or even an Amber, girls were named Debbie, Tammy and Julie; Amber was a color not a girl’s name.
We didn’t have a lot of things we do now. There were only five or so channels. Games were played on boards or with cards, not on a computer or even a TV. We honored our fathers and mothers. If we didn’t they would slap us silly and there wasn’t a Child Protective Services to call.
We certainly didn’t recycle. In fact, at my house in Renton, the garbage man made his way down our drive to pick up the two cans by the side of the house. I still remember that we paid $12 every month for pickup, $2 of that for the “custom pick up service” they provided.
Our house had a second dump and looking back, I’m more than a bit embarrassed about it. In a pre-Earth Day world, it just seemed natural, a no-brainer, to toss stuff off the cliff that backed our yard.
I guess that’s been going on throughout the ages. People have been dumping stuff everywhere for eons. In Florida, they call the ones left by the Native Americans and other early inhabitants of this planet “middens.”
By definition, middens are deposits left behind by humans. In it are artifacts of their existence… shells, bones, tools, cookware, etc. Whatever they discarded and left behind to show proof they were here.
Archeologists use this to study the tribe and learn about their daily lives.
I take solace knowing that somewhere, someday, archeologists are going to come upon the Zerr tribe’s midden, located on that hillside, the cliff, behind our house in Renton.
In the interest of full disclosure to future generations of college grad students who will spend their summer excavating this site, there are others in the 28th Street quadrant. The Courtneys certainly had their own midden going, one far larger than ours. They even had a car or two, which would probably be prized antiques today if they hadn’t been reclaimed by Mother Nature.
Oh, to be able to rummage through that midden today. I’m sure I would find remnants of my childhood, discarded long ago, only to be found anew by some archeologist wannabe in grad school.
Of course, they’d have to watch out for the booby traps. Like any good archeology dig, it is thick with them. Even Indiana Jones would have a hard time making his way through that dense undergrowth without snagging a booby trap.
Shards of glass, jagged, rusted pieces of metal with razor sharp edges. Even some materials that have since been found to be very dangerous, teetering on toxic. Indiana would be best off wearing a haz-mat suit.
That is my father’s fault. He was a TV repairman. When a TV was no longer fixable, us boys would heave it over the edge of the cliff and delight as it cascaded down, its wood cabinet flying apart on its long trip to the bottom. TV picture tubes suffered a similar fate. My father was always careful to puncture the end of the tube before we let it fly. If you didn’t it would go off like a bomb with shards of glass flying through the air, projectiles of doom and death.
Our wheelbarrow almost met its own fate down there. I was just a wee little guy back then. Wanting to be like the big boys, I insisted on pushing the wheelbarrow. I was really good at it, so much so that on more than one occasion, the wheelbarrow went on a journey down the cliff along with its contents. I would hoist its handles high in the air, shimmy and shake it back and forth to loosen the contents and then, somewhere along the way, the wheelbarrow would best me, taking off down the hill on its one wheel.
The wheelbarrow eventually did join the midden, along with lots of other things from our house and yard.
I sometimes wonder if I should call the EPA to report a toxic dump site. I’m sure they would have plenty of work to do there. I myself have been tempted on several occasions to grab a metal detector and roam the cliff side once again in search of long lost family treasures (i.e., junk).
I know that someday, all this stuff will find its way into a museum and thousands will stand in front of display cases, marveling at all the artifacts (junk) that we left behind so long ago.
It’s funny how yesterday’s junk becomes important artifacts somewhere down the road. I guess the old saw, “what was yesterday’s trash is today’s treasures” really is true. I saw in the news today that they think they found Captain Henry Morgan’s ship in Panama. Everyone is oo-ing and ahh-ing over the things they’ve found – a sword or two, wood barrels and lead seals from bales of cotton or other fabric. These are supposedly amazing finds. Artifacts. They are actually Morgan’s junk, stuff he determined he didn’t really need so he left them behind to rot in a sunken ship.
The Zerr family midden will become a significant discovery in its own right. I can just see it now. A press conference with learned scientists from all over the world, announcing the amazing cache of 1960s era electronics they uncovered in Renton, Washington. A treasure trove of artifacts that will be put on display at museums all over the country. Papers will be published, pondering the cultural significance of these finds.
Sure, we were horrific polluters back then. But we will be the stuff archeological legends are made of in a hundred years or so. All because we tossed a bunch of garbage off a cliff.
In the Emerald City, my big blue bin overflowing with recyclables,
– Robb