Swartswood: Four Year Workboots

At the end of my very last day as a teenage garbage man, I was emotionally composed, but my right workboot completely fell to pieces. I’d bought them both brand new four years earlier, embarrassed by how new and unused they’d looked, and eager to break them in so I wouldn’t look so completely inexperienced. That afternoon as I sat in the passenger seat of Carl’s Audi, my right boot looked sadly up at me, obviously disappointed that it had taken the last four years so much more seriously than I.

My toes quickly chilled as the air conditioning chilled the footwell, but it did little to cool the anger and resentment I felt from that boot. The left one was resigned to giving me the silent treatment, but the right one was clearly burning. Its Vibram sole had torn free from its leather upper, and its tongue was clenched in anger at the way I’d soiled its reputation.

They’d shown up each day simply to work. With little self-discipline or internal restraint, I had showed up each day only for my paycheck. It was fitting they should predict I wouldn’t be welcomed back to Swartswood, and they didn’t seem to want to return anyway. They were now the ones embarrassed of me, and just weren’t up for another season contributing to my stupidity.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if something is too "wrong" to laugh at. When I first watched the Farrelly brothers films Kingpin and Something About Mary, I wasn’t sure it was okay to laugh, even though my sides hurt and I was crying from things I’d never seen before on film. While I was a teenage garbage man, I laughed just as hard all the time, but didn’t develop the sense that it might be "wrong" except in hindsight. I watched a Junior Ranger give himself a wicked chemical burn after he mistakenly used drain cleaner to clean a toilet seat. We watched one of our own torment a middle-aged crew leader until the crew leader threatened to beat him. We watched a full time maintenance worker hoard adult magazines picked out of the trash in a locked desk drawer, then violently swear at us each morning after we urinated on his collection.

Nothing was sacred, nothing was off limits, and no weakness was unexploited. My boots knew this, but were way ahead of me in maturity. They would never have endorsed willfully jumping out of a moving pickup truck and claiming the crew leader pushed me. They were ashamed of what was poured into the coffee pot, the glovebox, and the refreshment stand snow cone machine during our shifts, but these were our milestones toward ending the summer successfully entertained.
As Carl and I pulled out of the park for the last time, I realized it was pointless to keep those worn-out boots. They were beyond repair and obviously hated me, so I hit the automatic window button and tossed them out. Let someone else pick up for a change, I figured.

Carl was surprised when I asked him to pull over just seconds after rolling the window back up, but he pulled onto the sharp gravel shoulder and watched me walk fifty yards back in my dirty socks to retrieve those boots from the weeds. For the first time in four years, I was picking up something because it was the right thing to do, not because I had to. Maybe it was just a boot, but I think it smiled at me a little, knowing there might be hope for me after all.

Swartswood: A Walk in the Park

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.

Swartswood: Little Green Men

The Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) is a voracious eater. It is a grazing animal which brazenly gathers en masse to do three things: eat, complain, and relieve itself. The Canada Goose is paranoid, convinced there are hungry predators lurking in the tall grass waiting to devour it. Thus, it primarily restricts its movements to manicured lawns and wide open spaces. They honk at each other incessantly, spend the entire day eating and leave prolific amounts of filth in their wake … sort of like the patrons of Swartswood State Park.

Unlike park patrons, the geese leave behind only their scat. These are small, green pellets about the size and shape of a packing peanut. They’re whitish on the ends, consist mostly of digested grass, and change from sticky to dry and brittle as they age. Prior to being a teenage garbage man, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you any of that, but time working for the state has a way of providing interesting life skills.

For each of the four summers spent working at Swartswood, the first day was always the same. We’d gather in the maintenance building lunchroom for an orientation from Doug, the aging park superintendent. Sounding like Bob Newhart, he’d slowly review rules and regulations, procedures and policies, then hand out copies of the State Park Seasonal Employee Handbook, or "Trash-Picker’s Bible." The TPB was our list of do’s and don’t-get-caughts, and contained a special appendix listing hazardous items we were never to touch. Among these were body parts, dead animals, and most importantly, fecal matter. We were never supposed to touch fecal matter, even if it offered us a quarter to rub its feet.

Scat was off-limits to us garbage pickers, and was only to be handled by the maintenance crews. They had fancy latex gloves and carried bleach, and we were glad to let them do it. We watched the maintenance crews pick up after little kids who couldn’t make it from the beach to the bathhouse, and bigger kids who just didn’t want to walk that far. We watched maintenance crews clean unspeakable things out of water fountains after disgruntled campers were told they couldn’t park six Camaros in one camp site. We even watched them repeatedly scrape clean the pit toilet lids after my friend Carl began a "Phantom Dumper" campaign while on daily litter patrol.

All of that changed when the old park super retired at the beginning of my fourth summer, and Big Stan arrived. Noble, honest, physically fit, clever and likeable, fashionable in a well-fitting uniform—none of these terms accurately described the new superintendent. The only thing he was super at was straining the buttons on his brown state-issue uniform. To our horror, his first act of duty was to wage war on the geese, enlisting our garbage picker crews as his foot soldiers.

Big Stan’s war on the geese began after putting himself in the shoes of the average park visitor, and finding the soles of those shoes covered in poo. He knew that when a guest arrived for a day at the beach, that patron would first pay an entry fee at the gate house, then drive their IROC-Z through a large open lawn often filled with geese. They would park on the acres of hot asphalt, and upon approaching the bathhouse, realize their way was blocked by an army of little green men. Lot, lawn, and beach–even the concrete area under the bathhouse breezeway–it was all occupied territory.

We quickly learned that while our handbook specifically forbid our crews from coming into contact with fecal matter, in Big Stan’s eyes, the geese were chronic litterbugs and not just poorly housetrained. "Stay out of this, kid," he said, pushing me and my copy of the handbook aside, "You’ll pick it up, or you’ll be out of a job." So we picked it up. We used snow shovels and filled garbage bags. We used little brooms and tip-over dust pans. We used long aluminum pickers, and we used our imaginations to make games out of it.

"Hey! These little green men are having a picnic..." as we stacked them in neat piles on each long wooden picnic table. "Check out how many little green men are on the roof of the bathhouse..." as we launched them by the dozen onto the brand-new facility. "Little green men sure like the beach..." as we buried them in shallow graves. With our snow shovels, we excavated quick holes where footpaths ended at the beach, then backfilled them with poo before covering them with a thin layer of sand. It wasn’t really fair to those who got green ankles, but Big Stan had said "pick it up" and never specified where to put it down.

Little green men began to appear everywhere. They liked to play in the water fountains, hide in park vehicle glove boxes, and even in the lunchroom microwave. We played spirited games of lacrosse using our little brooms as sticks. We played baseball, using our pickers as bats. Bags of them made fabulous parting gifts, as Big Stan would learn later that year.

Big Stan’s thank you note arrived on October 7^th, exactly 5 days after discovering my other going away present. I had returned to Meraki College at the end of August, but before leaving, had posted a small pencil drawing commemorating him as the new park superintendent. It depicted a balding man with bulging buttons and a name tag that read "S. EMMETS" storming the beach, ordering his troops to "Pick up those feces...er...I mean, that LITTER!" while trash pickers threw gobs of the stuff in the background, and it had been carefully glued to the October section of the lunchroom calendar by a pair of little green men.
　
　

　
　
　
　
　

Swartswood: The Inappropriate Name Tag

Nicknames have always been a part of my world, and I’ve long been fascinated by the way they are ascribed to a person.  By age 12, the funniest nickname I knew was for an older kid named Thomas, whom my cousin had dubbed “Scro-Tom,” thus ruining the name for me from that day on.  By 13, I was aware that some friends no longer expected to hear their given names from anyone but parents and teachers.  Spaz.  Helmet.  Spock.  Moo.  Whether you had a nervous twitch, anchorman hair, anchorman hair with big ears, or were a developing girl raised on a dairy farm, there was little a person could do to reclaim their given name.  They had been labeled, and like it or not, labels are sticky and sometimes take years to wear off.  To this day I still answer “fine, and yours?” when someone asks, “Hey, Orphan, how was your weekend?”

At Swartswood, my favorite nickname was a sleeper, assigned to Craig Litts at birth, and awakening the first day I saw his name tag.  The thick plastic name tags distributed by the Park Service were a signal to the public that if they had a question, you could help.  They were bright red with engraved white letters, and displayed the first letter of a person’s first name followed by the full last name of the wearer. 

Mine would have read “S. WHEELING,” but only employees who were expected to interact with the public were required to display theirs above their left breast pocket.  Since I was expected to interact with the public’s discarded picnic leftovers, I was exempt, but Craig Litts was a Junior Ranger.  He spoke to the public every day, which is why every day he pinned a piece of thick plastic with “that word” on his shirt and hoped no one would notice. 

We noticed.  EVERYONE noticed.  With most nicknames, once we got over the initial laughter, life would go on and we’d go on with it.  But Craig’s name was a gift, because while WE had long since gotten used to it, HE met new people every day.  Each day while roaming the park with our garbage bags, we might see the eyes of another sweaty patron widen a little before stifling a laugh and nudging his wife, who would blush and pretend to cough.

The next summer, Craig didn’t return to his seasonal post as a Junior Ranger.  One of my friends heard a rumor that he’d taken a job at the Shop-Rite, where people called him Litts-terine.  The name tags at Shop Rite only displayed the employee’s first name, so Craig accepted the new title cheerfully enough.  He had started the mouthwash habit while working closely with the public at Swartswood, so nobody would have an excuse to pick on him for having bad breath.

Swartswood: Roadside

People in North Jersey will throw anything out their car windows. As a teenage garbage man, I’d pick up empty Snapple bottles and their "clicker caps," sandwich wrappers, potato chip bags, and a remarkable number of domestic beer cans. Sober driving was viewed a little like celibacy in our neck of the woods—one way to get you to your destination, but certainly not the only way.

Once a week, I’d don an orange safety vest and start walking. If I didn’t want to wear the vest, I could choose from several clothing options abandoned along the shoulder. Socks and shoes, farm and feed hats, dirty black t-shirts with heavy metal silkscreening–on roadside day, I could usually find enough stray clothing be considered well-dressed at any North Jersey social, as long as I took off the orange vest first. If it wasn’t food, it was clothes, if it wasn’t clothes, it was porn, if it wasn’t porn, it had been used to wipe a body part. Everything got thrown out the window next to Swartswood.

Then there was the day we found the baby.

My second year at Swartswood, my childhood friend Carl and I were assigned to the same crew, which lasted for exactly one week. Compared to me, Carl was an inch shorter, 10 pounds lighter, and five times smarter. He only looked and sounded like an idiot, which always left people surprised after he’d taken advantage of them. I could only look smart, so the two of us made a pretty good team keeping people on their toes.

Our supervisor that year was a domineering first year coed who’d done her part perpetuating the stereotype of the "freshman 15." Carl immediately dubbed her "Fat Jen," and we were officially off on the wrong foot. We mocked her openly, unmindful we were perpetuating stereotypes of our own, until she’d snap, making us laugh even harder.

The morning we found the baby, Fat Jen had already had enough. After being locked inside our truck with one of Carl’s "silent but deadlies," she’d taken the keys and walked north, while we took her dignity and headed south. It was a humid morning, already topping 85 degrees as we approached our 10 o’clock state-sanctioned break. As we walked along, I picked up a dirty diaper, and we threw it back and forth every few steps until bagging it. Carl found a pair of women’s sunglasses and asked if I wanted to give them to my (dead) mother on her next birthday. I found an empty fifth of Wild Turkey, and said his alcoholic and abusive father must be passed out nearby. Life was good, a literal walk in the park.

I’m not sure about a few things in life.  I don't know why people willingly smoke, don't know why people can't put down their smartphones in restaurants, and I don’t know why someone would toss a perfectly good Butterball turkey out their car window. Had it been mouthing off, or had it threatened to vote Democratic in the next election? I’m also not sure what made us think that what we did next was a good idea. I am sure of one thing, though—when life gives you a frozen turkey, you take the filthy diaper out of your garbage bag and pretend it’s a baby to make your boss cry.

Tucked down low in the roadside weeds and freed from its plastic wrapping, the little diapered Butterball really did look like a baby. We worked up some fake tears, and the next moments confirmed two of life’s irrevocable truths: if something is said sincerely enough, people will believe anything, and some offenses are really hard to forgive. I also know now what I suspected then–that I should have stopped the joke before the Rangers arrived. Sometimes a joke goes too far and can’t be taken back.

Carl and I weren’t allowed to work together after that, but that didn’t stop us from being a nuisance, or switching crews when the opportunity allowed. The turkey-baby was given a proper burial in the sand of the public beach. Fat Jen even delivered part of the eulogy, displaying a surprising degree of self-depricating humor I hadn’t expected. Soon after, she became "Big Jen," and we traded insults every day. She even set me up with a friend of hers who was way out of my league, then laughed when I tried to get a second date.

By the time "just plain" Jen gave me a mothers day card which said "HA HA HA" inside it at the end of the summer, I knew our friendship had arrived.