Hey, you! Watch your language (at the dump!)
As I unloaded the island’s recent truckload at the mainland transfer station—recyclable containers headed for EcoMaine, asphalt shingle pieces for the demo area, storm-battered totes and buckets and buoys with big holes, the inevitable plastic detritus of items necessary to the fishery--one of the employees approached to offer a hand.
The fellow working around the recycling and trash hoppers that day was friendly and eager to chat. He also wanted to hurry me and my truck out of the way of the inevitable Tuesday morning crush (many transfer stations seem to be closed on Monday). “Try to avoid coming here on Saturdays,” he mentioned. “It’s awful on Saturday. It’s f-this, f-that!” His eyes began to twinkle and he started to grin. Then came the stories about the misbehavior of some of the clientele.
“People are horrible to each other on Saturdays!” He went on to describe a surprising level of raving and vitriol, swearing and insults, as people get in each other’s way unloading their rubbish late on Saturday afternoons, before the facility closes for the weekend.
We’re talking full-on tantrums from the way he described it. Hockey fights, gloves off, with extra theatrics. Little old ladies dropping f-bombs.
Of course, I myself am all sweetness and light at the dump (oops--I mean the transfer station). I’m so polite I ought to get a gold star on my chart. You’ll never hear me losing my temper as I unload. I’m going for Customer of the Year.
When the busybodies and nosy-Parkers sidle up to my U-Haul, as I pitch a seized starter motor and some rusty tools into the metal hopper, and begin their relentless barrage of questions, I do my utmost to keep my big mouth shut. Now, either these people a., have nothing better to do with their morning than to initiate a detailed discussion of corroded bicycles with a total stranger who is provably busy or, b. they think they’re helping to protect civilization by making sure this highly suspicious person in a rented truck isn’t sneaking any nuclear waste or dead animals into their city.
Actually, we have a signed legal agreement to that effect, so nobody need worry. When we first began the Matinicus recycling program in 2004, somebody from the city remarked, as we signed all the boilerplate, that the idea was to prevent anybody bringing nuclear waste or dead animals to their transfer station. So we don’t.
Anyway, when the experts heave alongside to inspect my work, I smile as warmly as I can.
Where I tend to lose my cool is on the other side of the solid waste transaction: on the island, when people bring their mounded-up pickup trucks heavy laden with what appears to be five years’ worth of trash to our little collection station. It is not nice, or particularly helpful, when I blurt out, “Where in hell did all that come from?” Mea culpa.
The other island recycling volunteers must hate to see me coming. They, as a rule, are polite and kind, restrained, adult in the face of any weirdness that arrives by truck, garden cart, or four-wheeler. They do their jobs with grace and dignity, without losing composure. I thrash around, flinging incorrectly sorted items overhand. I swear under my breath (and sometimes audibly) as people stand there glassy-eyed and dumbfounded in front of a row of sorting barrels, staring at some bit of household refuse with no idea what to do with it. (“Dude—don’t just stand there gazing at it! It’s a milk jug, not the Mona Lisa!”) I don’t understand why people haven’t learned how to sort recyclables at machine-gun speed. But they haven’t.
I stomp around and sputter about maggot-infested bags of returnables that have been underneath somebody’s porch since the 4th of July. I utter coarse Anglo-Saxon oaths about razor-sharp pieces of drip-edge that never should have been tossed into a contractor bag with the tin cans. I mumble rudely over plastic paint cans piled into the metal junk area. (Did you know that not all paint cans are made of metal these days?) I cuss like a proverbial drunken sailor when we show up to open the facility and are met with an unexpected gift, like, say, a 500-pound, furniture-encased, pseudo-walnut-veneered cathode ray tube television set from the 1970’s, smelling of Lemon Pledge and weed, dropped off right squarely in the way.
But next time I am tempted to cut loose, while working at the Matinicus recycling center, and swear at some poor well-intentioned dunderhead who doesn’t understand that those shiny plastic faux-foil coffee bags don’t go as “scrap iron,” I should remember my reaction to the rank-mouthed histrionics at the mainland transfer station at 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon: watch your effing language.