As a teenage garbage man, I had one responsibility: pick up what other people were putting down, wherever they put it. I had three territories to practice my trade: the railway, roadside, and the park’s 2400 sprawling acres.
The railway work was regional. In the 1960's, a local rail line had pulled up track, opening the state’s longest dump along the 26-mile cinder right-of-way. For the next three decades, contractors and homeowners took advantage of the unsecured avenue, offloading small appliances on top of building materials, then soaking it all with the occasional drum of spent Quaker State. We found thousands of asphalt shingles and hundreds of bald tires. We found the remains of a Polaris snowmobile on top of a Datsun station wagon in the Paulinskill River, and we retrieved it all, loading the bed of our abused pickup with discarded archaeological finds.
It was the world’s slowest and most cumbersome relay. An illegal dumper would drive to the trail and roll a refrigerator off his truck. We’d show up a decade later, muscle it back up the steep bank, then shuttle it to the thirty-yard dumpster waiting back at the park. Once a week, the roll-off truck would run the third leg to a garbage barge, which would promptly drop its contents into the Hudson River. I’m certain that someday the state will pay to dredge the Hudson, and the race will start again.
Roadside was a little closer to the park. Our task on Roadside was simply picking up an endless stream of litter from the miles of frontage road owned by the park. We often worked alongside people performing community service sentences, each time insisting we were on roadside duty as hired help, not as court-ordered flunkies. Once the orange vest was on, we were all equally guilty in the eyes of the public.
The park was simple foot patrol, and our three Clean Communities crews rotated weekly to ensure the park grounds were spotless...ish. Each day was spent on foot, patrolling camp sites, picnic groves, and beach areas for all things discarded. Most patrons knew of our efforts, and contributed to our job security each day by emptying their cars in the lot and their coolers where they sat. The rules of "carry in, carry out" and "take only photographs, leave only footprints" have never applied to the dignitaries visiting Swartswood State Park.
Four years of picking up trash might tempt you to think that I believe people are pigs, but I don’t–far from it. Pigs love garbage. They eat it, roll around in it, and enjoy it. They’re intimate with their filth, but we humans are embarrassed by it. Pigs happily accept trash as a way of life, but we seem appalled that so many "other people" can make such a formidable mess. We hide it, run from it, throw it out our windows, and drop it when we think no one is looking. We pile it into great mountains (as long as that mountain isn’t in our neighborhood), and hope those mountains won’t leak into the groundwater and give us cancer. If we thought about it for too long, it might take us to places we simply don’t like.
In my final year at the park, we witnessed one of our own finally snap. On the Monday following a long Fourth of July weekend, a kid we called Beta was assigned to our crew to help us repair the damage of the previous three days. He’d graduated a year ahead of us, but still lived in his mom’s basement watching reruns of Voltron and Family Ties. He loved weed, and would show up at least 4 days a week with red-rimmed eyes and an easy-going manner. Nobody seemed to mind until our breaktime snacks began to disappear.
My friend Carl was an understated genius who had a weakness for Hostess Fruit Pies, the kind with the sugar glaze, fruit filling, and waxed paper wrapper. The highlight of his trash-picking day was the 10 am break, when he scrubbed up, chowed down, and kicked back with the flavor of the day. At 17, it was his longest standing vice, and was the single deciding factor as to whether he’d finish the day in a good mood or a sour one. Carl’s Fruit Pies were tucked away inside his lunch bag and hidden in the fridge’s crisper, and he was seriously pissed when they started going AWOL. He’d narrowed down the list of suspects to a middle aged simpleton who’d written high school ‘dilpoma’ on her employment application, and Beta.
Beta had been scheduled to work on railway cleanup, and he was looking forward to catching a 35 minute nap during the drive to the dump site we’d discovered the previous week. The normally pristine park grounds looked like a county fair had thrown up a parade, and Beta was not pleased that he’d been reassigned to help us. He was also slightly hung over, and the combination of smothering humidity and mountains of trash had left him uncharacteristically irritable.
At 10:30, Carl smelled blood in the water knowing his Fruit Pie mystery was about to be solved. His ire had been raised when he’d found six waxed paper wrappers under the driver’s seat of Beta’s unlocked Dodge Omni, but he needed hard evidence to convict. The night before, he’d spiked the filling of a Blueberry pie with several ounces of nighttime Benadryl (he said it was only Benadryl), then set the lunchtime treat in its usual spot in the crisper. The thief would be sleepy and erratic soon, and Carl would have his revenge.
The combined effects made Beta a walking time bomb. Tired, nauseous, and now drowsy with a chance of meatballs, he shuffled along swearing quietly until he came to the group picnic shelter. The remnants of streamers swayed slowly in the hazy air, flies settled on leftover chicken bones, and several overflowing bags oozed dark fluids where rib bones poked through. As the "Benadryl" took full effect, Beta dropped to his knees and began to sob. He had started his day with a simple walk in the park, but was now lost in another reality. We couldn’t be sure what he was seeing, but thought we heard him saying, "pigs, so many pigs..." over and over as he cried.
Beta stopped smoking so much after that. The fear of another bad experience weighed on him, and his appetite diminished, too. With our break time snacks secure, we enjoyed a time of relative peace until the end of the summer.
The railway work was regional. In the 1960's, a local rail line had pulled up track, opening the state’s longest dump along the 26-mile cinder right-of-way. For the next three decades, contractors and homeowners took advantage of the unsecured avenue, offloading small appliances on top of building materials, then soaking it all with the occasional drum of spent Quaker State. We found thousands of asphalt shingles and hundreds of bald tires. We found the remains of a Polaris snowmobile on top of a Datsun station wagon in the Paulinskill River, and we retrieved it all, loading the bed of our abused pickup with discarded archaeological finds.
It was the world’s slowest and most cumbersome relay. An illegal dumper would drive to the trail and roll a refrigerator off his truck. We’d show up a decade later, muscle it back up the steep bank, then shuttle it to the thirty-yard dumpster waiting back at the park. Once a week, the roll-off truck would run the third leg to a garbage barge, which would promptly drop its contents into the Hudson River. I’m certain that someday the state will pay to dredge the Hudson, and the race will start again.
Roadside was a little closer to the park. Our task on Roadside was simply picking up an endless stream of litter from the miles of frontage road owned by the park. We often worked alongside people performing community service sentences, each time insisting we were on roadside duty as hired help, not as court-ordered flunkies. Once the orange vest was on, we were all equally guilty in the eyes of the public.
The park was simple foot patrol, and our three Clean Communities crews rotated weekly to ensure the park grounds were spotless...ish. Each day was spent on foot, patrolling camp sites, picnic groves, and beach areas for all things discarded. Most patrons knew of our efforts, and contributed to our job security each day by emptying their cars in the lot and their coolers where they sat. The rules of "carry in, carry out" and "take only photographs, leave only footprints" have never applied to the dignitaries visiting Swartswood State Park.
Four years of picking up trash might tempt you to think that I believe people are pigs, but I don’t–far from it. Pigs love garbage. They eat it, roll around in it, and enjoy it. They’re intimate with their filth, but we humans are embarrassed by it. Pigs happily accept trash as a way of life, but we seem appalled that so many "other people" can make such a formidable mess. We hide it, run from it, throw it out our windows, and drop it when we think no one is looking. We pile it into great mountains (as long as that mountain isn’t in our neighborhood), and hope those mountains won’t leak into the groundwater and give us cancer. If we thought about it for too long, it might take us to places we simply don’t like.
In my final year at the park, we witnessed one of our own finally snap. On the Monday following a long Fourth of July weekend, a kid we called Beta was assigned to our crew to help us repair the damage of the previous three days. He’d graduated a year ahead of us, but still lived in his mom’s basement watching reruns of Voltron and Family Ties. He loved weed, and would show up at least 4 days a week with red-rimmed eyes and an easy-going manner. Nobody seemed to mind until our breaktime snacks began to disappear.
My friend Carl was an understated genius who had a weakness for Hostess Fruit Pies, the kind with the sugar glaze, fruit filling, and waxed paper wrapper. The highlight of his trash-picking day was the 10 am break, when he scrubbed up, chowed down, and kicked back with the flavor of the day. At 17, it was his longest standing vice, and was the single deciding factor as to whether he’d finish the day in a good mood or a sour one. Carl’s Fruit Pies were tucked away inside his lunch bag and hidden in the fridge’s crisper, and he was seriously pissed when they started going AWOL. He’d narrowed down the list of suspects to a middle aged simpleton who’d written high school ‘dilpoma’ on her employment application, and Beta.
Beta had been scheduled to work on railway cleanup, and he was looking forward to catching a 35 minute nap during the drive to the dump site we’d discovered the previous week. The normally pristine park grounds looked like a county fair had thrown up a parade, and Beta was not pleased that he’d been reassigned to help us. He was also slightly hung over, and the combination of smothering humidity and mountains of trash had left him uncharacteristically irritable.
At 10:30, Carl smelled blood in the water knowing his Fruit Pie mystery was about to be solved. His ire had been raised when he’d found six waxed paper wrappers under the driver’s seat of Beta’s unlocked Dodge Omni, but he needed hard evidence to convict. The night before, he’d spiked the filling of a Blueberry pie with several ounces of nighttime Benadryl (he said it was only Benadryl), then set the lunchtime treat in its usual spot in the crisper. The thief would be sleepy and erratic soon, and Carl would have his revenge.
The combined effects made Beta a walking time bomb. Tired, nauseous, and now drowsy with a chance of meatballs, he shuffled along swearing quietly until he came to the group picnic shelter. The remnants of streamers swayed slowly in the hazy air, flies settled on leftover chicken bones, and several overflowing bags oozed dark fluids where rib bones poked through. As the "Benadryl" took full effect, Beta dropped to his knees and began to sob. He had started his day with a simple walk in the park, but was now lost in another reality. We couldn’t be sure what he was seeing, but thought we heard him saying, "pigs, so many pigs..." over and over as he cried.
Beta stopped smoking so much after that. The fear of another bad experience weighed on him, and his appetite diminished, too. With our break time snacks secure, we enjoyed a time of relative peace until the end of the summer.
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