Waking up to Garbage

December 2005

In August 2001, I started a regular commute from Palo Alto to San Francisco. The economy was in a shambles, traffic was light, and the weather was incredible that fall. Morning after morning, the dawn painted my mirrors in vivid colors on my way northwest on Highway 101. Coming across the rise at Sierra Point and heading onto the causeway that separates the Brisbane lagoon from the bay was like driving into an ever-changing natural light show—displays of light, water and atmospheric conditions so splendid and so variable as to wake up even a sleep-deprived night owl like myself. After a few months of trying to enjoy the spectacle over my shoulder, hurtling along at 75mph, I finally realized that nothing prevented me from pulling off at Candlestick and admiring the view for a few minutes.

December 12, 2001 — 8:30am
Overslept and missed the sunrise.

On the shore, a flock of very large seagulls contemplate the water. Are they bored? Half out of their minds with misery after a very frigid night? Or is this a meditational practice—avian Zen—the foundation of a balanced seagull day?

December 13, 2001 — 7:45am
Caught the sunrise this morning around Redwood City—a blood-red ball, followed by a golden light that suffused the whole sky behind me.

At Candlestick, the birds are on the wing, tilting into the early sunlight so their bodies light up to a blazing white.

December 17, 2001 — 7:10am
Morning shrouded in heavy rain. Day is dawning very darkly, only the slightest hint of daylight penetrating the gloom. Without the weather blanket, it would be almost fully light.

I managed to take a picture of my own flash and the raindrops it illuminates. It seems apt. On a day like this, you feel hemmed in, confined to a small bubble of space, cut off from the landscape and thrown back on your own resources.

December 18, 2001 — 7:20am
On a morning this serene, the whole world seems to open up and breathe easier. It's an effort to remember that I'm basically standing on the garbage dump of a major city. The bay looks so natural—almost pristine.

Only the steady stream of trucks departing from the Sanitary Fill transfer processing station immediately to the west offers a visual indication of the true nature of this place.

As it happens, the Candlestick exit from Highway 101 offers a very interesting perspective on the bay. In the elbow at the end of the ramp, where the shoreline bends off at right angles from the causeway, lies one of the most curious pieces of “land art” I’ve ever seen. There is a set of outsized pimples in pink, yellow, and black, a giant pinkish sperm or spirochete (there’s no telling which), and a humongous snake of purple concrete that is draped at the end of the embankment like larger-than-life toothpaste squeezed from a tube with superhuman force.

Some highly mysterious utilities are built into these embellishments, including something I was later able to identify as a sewage outfall—that is, a pumping station that diverts raw sewage directly into the bay in the event the sewage system is overloaded. As in the case of rain.

Even in the rosy-fingered dawn, the place is oily and scummy. And occasionally distinctly malodorous. Not surprisingly, the two residential apartment buildings tucked up against the hillside are forever advertising vacancies and move-in bonuses. Land’s End Park, on the other side of the toothpaste, lies almost deserted any time of day except at dawn when a few elderly Asians take their morning constitutional there.

December 19, 2001 — 7:45am
Sunrises are obviously all in the clouds, and today's are full of menace and foreboding.

It occurs to me that we had better develop an appreciation for garbage dumps. The entire bay is ringed round with them, and the loveliest views are from their sometimes considerable heights. The towering garbage heaps of Bayfront Park, for instance, give a lovely view of the bay and saltponds to the south and east. And the Byxbee hills give you a great view to the north and east, across Adobe Creek and the marshes.

December 20, 2001 — 7:10am
The morning is covered in a thick blanket of clouds and the bay water is a deep, dark grey, almost black, as if reluctant to give up the night. But I have learned to practice a little patience, and as I sit and wait a while, a little peephole opens in the sky to let the daylight in.

Hundreds of gulls are on the wing in tight formations.

December 21, 2001 — 7:15am
Today is the winter solstice. In fact, this year the solstice takes place at exactly 11:21am PST. It seems I'm going to miss it.

Of course, in the Bay Area, the solstice doesn't have the same significance as in parts of the world where the phrase "dead of winter" resonates with meaning. The impatiens and begonias are still blooming in our garden. Daffodils are coming up. Our lone lemon on its bitty tree is ripening. Fall blends into spring here with hardly any restorative time in between. It is difficult to appreciate the promise of renewal when nature doesn't truly wear itself out.

December 26, 2001 — 7:25am
Scattered clouds orchestrate a spectacular sunrise. First a crimson swath just above the horizon accompanied by a gentle pink glow. Then a huge angry orange lightshow—a postcard hawker's conception of a beautiful dawn. Finally, when the sun crests the horizon, the colors begin the settle into the opalescent early morning that I like best.

It took me a while to realize that not every jaw-dropping natural phenomenon is about beauty. In fact, many a showy sunrise or sunset is visually highly unappealing, even as it is astonishing and worth exclaiming over. The same is true for the height of fall color. Living in a world on fire, flaming orange everywhere, is nice for a moment or two, just about.

December 27, 2001 — 7:25am
Another rosy-fingered dawn. As I watch, a gull is drowning in an oily puddle below the embankment, too weak to keep its head above water for any length of time. I don't see a way to pull it out of the water, and I remind myself that it might not be any better off dying a slower death on dry land, but I can't shake a feeling of having failed a moral test.

Should I have climbed over the railing and fished him out of the muck? Or should I have pushed him under instead? Not knowing how to mitigate suffering doesn't relieve you of the duty to do so.

January 2, 2002—7:15am
Dark and dreary, but clear. Sixteen garbage trucks in 13 minutes. If you resolutely turn your back on the shore, you can forget that there's a large-scale waste disposal operation in full gear behind you. But the trucks are very difficult to ignore for any length of time.

During the holidays, I read in the newspaper, all Americans together are producing something like an extra million tons of garbage a week. How do you even understand how much garbage that is?

By comparison, Palo Alto's city landfill has a daily through-put of about 200 tons of garbage (since the vast majority of local garbage goes to Sunnyvale for processing and then on to a variety of final resting places). Two hundred tons a day is a piddling amount of trash, relatively speaking, but even so it rises absolutely and at an alarming rate.

No matter how radiant the sunrise, the overpowering stench of decay, the shoreline strewn with dead and dying birds, the incessant traffic of the garbage trucks is undeniable. Sometimes, on drearier days, they feel like harbingers of a rising flood of offal, a garbage-ridden future, in which we can no longer escape the by-products of our success. At those moments, it's not hard to understand the apocalyptic urgency of some of the environmental literature.

About those garbage trucks. Early in the morning, they come by at the rate of approximately 15 every 10 minutes, heading northbound onto the 101, on their way back into the city for another load of leavings. I’m not counting the trucks that head south out of the Norcal transfer processing station, since they use the on-ramp on the west side of the highway. Garbage trucks, I can tell you now, come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and they sport a variety of loading mechanisms, depending, presumably, on what it is they pick up.

A little research suggests that there are some 130,000 garbage trucks on the road today, not counting transfer vehicles and dedicated recycling trucks. Since the average truck drives about 25,000 miles a year, the total number of miles driven equals 3,250,000,000. Two other little facts:
      1. Ninety-one percent of the trucks run on diesel. Only 700 vehicles out of the
          total garbage truck fleet now runs on natural gas.
      2. A diesel-fueled truck operates at 3 mpg on average—it's almost all stop-and-go,
          the loading mechanism also needs power, and so does the compactor—which
          means they collectively burn up 1,025,000,000 gallons of diesel fuel, plus a little
          bit of natural gas.

Almost everything to do with garbage turns out to be on a gigantic scale—which stands to reason given its ubiquity.

January 7, 2002—7:20am
Thick fog, endless trucks (17 in 10 minutes). They all bear the same logo that says "People. Service. Environment," but goes with different company names—Sunset Scavengers, Sanitary Fill, Golden Gate, West Coast Recycling.

January 8, 2002—7:20am
The poor weather continues, with only the smallest openings in the cloud cover. Large flocks of gulls are on the wing, flying in tight knots and making sudden twists and turns just above the surface of the bay.

I'm sitting on the concrete structure by the sewage outfall, which is prominently labeled "confined space" front and top, in more than one place. I can hear the machinery inside making sci-fi movie noises.

This place is so mysterious sometimes it feels as if I've landed in an alien world. What are these things for? What were the people thinking who created the land art? Who did it in the first place? And why is it so difficult to find out about?

January 10, 2002—7:35am
A glorious morning until I get to Oyster Point, where the road ducks under a rapidly retreating fog. I walk south along 101 to try to capture the sharply-defined edge of it, but before long I am intercepted by a round man in a tiny truck who kindly lets me know I am in utter violation of the rules of the road: no walking on the highway (or even by the side of it) except in the case of vehicular malfunctions! I'm lucky I don't get a ticket, it appears.

January 15, 7:28amJanuary 17, 7:25amJanuary 28, 7:15am

February 5, 2002—7:03am
The sun rises over the bay day after day, but every morning is a wholly new experience.

Looking out over the salt marshes further south along the bay, it's possible to imagine what the original tidelands may have been like in the early mornings, when the wind is down and the bay is given over to the quiet business of birds.

The San Francisco garbage haulers, always up extremely early, must have seen the sun rise over what was orginally the Brisbane tidelands, and then in 1935 became the Brisbane dump. Stewart Perry's book about the garbage men, Collecting Garbage, describes their thoughtfulness on a wide range of subjects, but the sunrise or the beauty of this corner of the bay is never mentioned.

February 18, 2002—6:54am
Another morning of radiant tranquility. It will be my last sunrise this spring, my luggabed nature standing in the way of a timely arrival. The season of morning fog is fast approaching also, and soon all the days will dawn disconsolate.

In the end, my sunrise stopover at Candlestick became a transforming experience. I began to wonder what I was really looking at. What it might have looked like 200 years ago, before people had a significant impact on the local landscape.

I became more aware of my own connection to the land. Not as a birthright and not in traditional terms that farmers use, of crops and yields, seasons and rhythms, and the ways these shape their lives. But rather in the opposite direction, in terms of my habits and preferences and how they shape the land.

I sat and tried to picture the mountain of garbage daily trucked out of the city. (Fifteen trucks every 10 minutes is 90 truckloads an hour. At a conservative estimate, they do this perhaps for 4 hours every morning, 5 mornings a week. That would be in the neighborhood of 1,800 truckloads a week or 93,600 truckloads a year. It quickly gets beyond the point where you can really imagine how big a pile of garbage that adds up to.) I began to look for more information about the garbage companies and how they are organized, about the destination of our collective garbage and of my own.

I also became a little more aware of what I threw out and how much. I thought a little harder about what I set aside for recycling and tried to find out what happens to my recyclables after I offer them up for pickup. I began to read about the history and politics of garbage and quickly developed a sense that it is easier to have opinions about trash than to understand what it all means.

August 12, 2002

August 20, 2002September 24, 2002October 3, 2002

Most importantly, I began to visit garbage dumps near and far and discovered that they are often wonderfully compelling places. Reports of my sometimes rather quixotic adventures are contained in these pages.

San Francisco Bay Area
About prime Bay Area landfill, garbage dumps old and new, waste and recycling operations, and more:
City Dump: Brisbane
Oyster and Sierra Points: South San Francisco
Study in Contrasts: Seaport Boulevard
Rock on Garbage: Bayfront Park
Salt Ponds: West of the Dumbarton Bridge
Landfill Sandwich: Cooley Landing
Land Art: Byxbee Park
Waystation: Sunnyvale Garbage Dump

Expeditions Further Afield
Reports of my excursions to other places:
Love Letters and Cabbage Leaves: Fresh Kills, NY
Soil Samples: Compton, CA
Old and New: Fort Bragg

Marijke Rijsberman