Walking on the Moon

1979

If the dozer moves you move.

Don Smith and I were were sitting in the Commission's orange Dodge pickup as the yellow monster bore down on us. But Don was non-chalant, sipping the cup of coffee from the truck at the base of this hill, pickup in gear and engine off. The packers had their tails up and the sounds of hydraulics filled the air as they reversed out their loads. The gulls were everywhere, walking, flying, gawking and screaming. We were at eighty feet and the view to the east was to the Empire State beyond the Palisades ridge. Below us was a broad expanse of marsh, the Sawmill Creek Wildlife Management Area.

Of course, these landfills, high off the marsh, were not landfills, they were ... airfills.

Cup your hands and reach into the sand like a clamshell. Close the gap and make a mound of it by dribbling it though a hole in your palms. As grains tumble off grains, a pyramid forms. Start with a hundred of acres in an odd trapezoid and pile on garbage layer by layer. A pyramid forms. And so during 70s and 80s, the landfill owners, trapped by new state-imposed boundaries, had no choice but to go up. And go up they did.

And with each layer a little more publicity. At one point a landfill in Kearny, rising faster and faster as the top grew smaller and smaller, was at 130 feet and but yards from thousands of cars ripping by on the New Jersey Turnpike. The Garden State had become known as the Garbage State.

Unless you use a garbage compactor at home, what you put out for collection curbside is mostly air. When they put that air in a truck and compress it and then let it out on a landfill it is mostly air. Even when your run a 20 ton Cat over it, it is still mostly air.

Don and I were sitting in a truck on a mound of air, and as that dozer came at us, pushing its load, we were moving.

Moving up and down.