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: Moving Violations

Clutch in. Gas. Foot off break. Release clutch, increase pressure on gas pedal. Move forward. Increase speed. Punch the clutch, drop into second gear, wind out the engine. Hit third gear, burst forward, and launch all four wheels off the ground. Temporary weightlessness. Gravity held at bay for a fleeting moment before feeling the leaf springs collapse and the skid plate grind against the tar and chip road. You have just gotten your driver’s license, and life in North Jersey is good.

People say you learn by observing the world around you and studying the examples of your elders, but I didn’t see too many adults drift their cars onto two wheels or redline their engines before launching off the town jump. We learned to drive like the Lord of the Flies kids learned to negotiate–in packs and dangerously–then we buckled those self-destructive habits in and took them everywhere.

For years, at least one kid from every local graduating class was lost in a traffic related fatality. My cousin’s best friend was a kid named Shane whose Volkswagen met a gravel truck as he moved to pass another car.  Two of my classmates were obliterated a few years after graduating. We’d always rallied on our way to school; they just didn’t beat the odds that day. We never assumed it could happen to us, and each fatality was a new surprise. It never occurred to us that a car could be dangerous, or that driving safely was a social responsibility.

So, when we left the Swartswood State Park motor pool with a brand new Dodge pickup, the first model released with the premier Magnum engine, our first stop was the town jump.  We returned the truck with a grapefruit-sized dent between the cab and bed, and my vehicle was immediately downgraded to an S-10 with much less power. The little 4-cylinder still had a bubble light on top, so we switched out our safety orange dome with a spare Ranger red one and amused ourselves for an afternoon pulling people over. We’d drive by laughing, watching as nervous looks turned angry, then giving the finger back and continuing with our spree of moving violations.

It wasn’t just kids that disrespected the motor pool. My first week at Swartswood, a middle-aged crew leader left a truck in neutral with both doors open so she could hear the radio while she worked, only to witness the doors get  ripped off as it rolled away backwards hitting trees. A full time maintenance chief began every morning driving wildly across the main lawn, laying on his horn to prevent the Canada geese from settling in. Rangers used their Crown Vics as rolling nap wagons, and every full timer kept either a beer or a bong which they’d “just found in the park” behind their seats. In that respect, we did learn by seeing.  All state vehicles were rolling playgrounds.

Before claiming the keys to my S-10, I claimed the park speed record in the new Dodge. There were other titles to be earned, too: most donuts without hitting another car, best electrical fire caused by rewiring a stereo, and most winch truck rescues required in a given week.  We played hide-a-dent, pinging a truck somewhere and seeing if the fleet manager would notice. Touching a door handle without gloves was never wise.  A dirty windshield was a sign your wiper blades had been removed, and every windshield had deeply grooved arcs scratched in before we learned to check them.  We were kids with no sense of accountability, and it only really hurt when a personal vehicle ghost rolled downhill from the employee parking lot and destroyed tables in the picnic grove.

Our only motivation was not getting caught, so we maintained safety zones where our antics were forbidden. I kept a 5-mile radius around the home of an old farmer who hated me, so I was surprised when I opened and read a letter from Park Superintendent Big Stan stating I was no longer welcome to return for a fifth year at Swartswood.  I wouldn’t debate most of the unproven accusations—before leaving, I’d hidden a large, leaky bag of goose scat in the park office, and had posted a mean-spirited cartoon “summer recap” on the October section of the lunchroom calendar.  There were literally dozens of valid reasons to not rehire me, but the letter claimed that I’d been witnessed driving recklessly past the old farmer’s home on several occasions, and therefore posed a risk to public safety.  I found out shortly after receiving the letter that Big Stan was a close friend of the old farmer’s, and I’d been outmatched by a couple of seasoned North Jersey cronies. 

Big Stan still works for the state in a high ranking position, but the farmer passed away a few summers ago.  He’d been repairing a gate in one of the fields just two miles from his home, when a pair of kids from the next town collided with his old Jeep Cherokee, killing all three instantly.  I still drive past his place from time to time, but now I drive slowly because I want to, not for fear of repercussions.  I’m no longer a reckless kid found guilty of unproven allegations, but realize that even as a careful adult, I can still receive his sentence at any moment.  

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.