A Weekend Brushoff

I was down in the dump on the Fourth of July--in the dump of the hill town of Julian.

While other Southern Californians celebrated Independence Day in backyards, on the beach, at amusement parks and zoos, I was taken for a ride in a battered Ford pickup, a truck for which the term rattletrap could have been invented.

A friend had invited us for a weekend in the country, a phrase so enticing that Stephen Sondheim wrapped a song around it in “A Little Night Music.” I thought we would be tourists--two city folks enjoying the crisp mountain air of the old San Diego County gold-mining town. I should have remembered that the same Sondheim show featured “Send in the Clowns.”

Our holiday began with outdoor adventure: trimming small branches from manzanita shrubs and clearing brush from the forest floor to make the place safer in fire season. The truck was soon piled five feet high with broken boughs, slabs of bark and trash bags stuffed with leaves and pine needles.

Our trip to the dump, like so much of travel, was educational. I learned to stay calm while riding shotgun in a truck that’s missing a door handle. It also has no window crank. The glass is permanently raised. This is rugged on a hot summer day.

I learned to work in heavy gloves, and to keep my long sleeves buttoned because of scrapes from twigs. I learned to wear protective goggles and to keep my mouth closed.

I learned how to use a pitchfork to send clumps of debris down into a vast, empty bin. I learned to brace myself against the firmer slat side of the rickety truck bed so that I did not fall into the dumpster below.

I learned to read the wind change before flinging each load. I did not always read right.

We made four trips to the dump, my friends and I. By day’s end we were as dusty as the branches we had hauled. The man at the wheel announced that we’d earned a chocolate malted from the soda fountain at the Julian drug store on Main Street. He stopped the truck near Mom’s pie house and out we piled. Our blue jeans were brown by then, our cowboy hats were dingy.

We settled on round stools and ordered thick malts and lots of water. Soda jerks began chattering; machines began whirring. We laughed at the smudged faces in the mirror above the fountain. Our reflections laughed back. We seemed to have tossed out our cares with the trash.

As we paused by the Town Hall porch, we noticed a furtive movement. A couple in shorts and T-shirts were turning away, their camera still swinging on its strap.

They had grappled a snapshot of us--dirt, straw hats and all. They were the tourists. We were the quaint natives.

So much for travel close to home.