‘My’ Employees Are Making a Mistake Here; This Heap Is a New Eden : Environment: After a visit to Zeke the Sheik’s compost pile, it’s hard to call it a nuisance. The bureaucrats should learn from him.
The other day I drove by Zeke the Sheik’s 30-foot-high compost pile in Altadena, which briefly caught fire and as a result has been under fire from various of my employees. I say they are my employees because they are County of Los Angeles bureaucrats, and I am a citizen and taxpayer in this county. I wanted to see the nuisance they are attempting to abate in my name and for my good.
Zeke was there, talking to neighbors and a stream of visitors. The neighbors focused on neighborly concerns like saying hello, getting Zeke to haul some of their rubbish away with his truck, or receiving some of the vegetables Zeke grows. Some of the visitors were friends, I might even say co-conspirators. I should note that there has always been a good supply of free-thinkers living up against the San Gabriels, starting with John Brown’s sons, who spent a quiet old age in a canyon after the raid on Harpers Ferry, continuing through Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of among other things a feminist utopia called Herland, and coming into the present with the late Richard Feynman and Jirayr Zorthian, who also lives up a canyon. Zorthian likes to make sculptures out of telephone poles. I went to junior high with his son, Toby. So the local independent characters are numerous, though not all famous. Zeke can count on a body of support.
At any rate, I visited Zeke partly because I’m curious but also because, like Zeke, I have a compost pile. I wanted to see how far I could take mine. You see, I’ve been reading the papers. I’ve been receiving instructions on how to recycle (which I was already doing) from other employees of mine, this time in the Pasadena Waste Reduction office. Recently I’ve been told a lot of things I already believe. That we are running out of landfill space. That we need more forests but instead are cutting down the rain forests to make toilet paper and for ranch land to graze beef for the junk-food chains.
Pasadena’s recycling plan consists of me putting jars, cans, newspapers, motor oil, etc., undifferentiated, into a blue bin, which I then put on the curb. The glass will probably end up in the landfill anyway. There is not as yet much demand for it, in that a large part of the Earth’s mantle is made of silicon, which can be easily turned into glass that is free of the Paul Newman spaghetti sauce I failed to get completely washed out of mine. I used a large quantity of water, which in the next couple of months will probably be rationed.
The city’s new recycling program costs me $1.50 a month. On the long-awaited first day I looked out the front window and saw a middle-aged Latino taking most of the contents of my recycling bin. He zig-zagged down the street from blue bin to blue bin in a 15-year-old station wagon. I said to my wife, “Janet, come look at Pasadena’s recycling program,” realizing with disappointment just as I said it that this was simply a man for whom it made economic sense to go house-to-house, picking up other people’s recycling. He wouldn’t have cost me $1.50 a month.
But to return to Zeke’s spread and my search for a nuisance, there wasn’t one. The property, including the “mountain of dung,” as the (Pasadena) Star-News called it in the headline of a good-natured story, was beautiful. From the top of the heap, looking down, I could see that Zeke’s square two-story wood house sat in a local analog of the rain forest--lush growth everywhere, succulents and cacti, banana trees, palms, fruit trees, taller trees, bushes and shrubs too numerous to name. A ladder was propped against bushes. Someone unseen was pruning a tree. There were pathways and chickens, ducks and geese roaming free. A huge turkey, more than 40 pounds, whose name I have forgotten, but who replaced an even larger one named Butch, according to Zeke, functions partly as watchdog and will chase intruders through the forest.
Zeke has solved his problem with the fires that got the county out there in the first place, but the firefighters are going to come by and pick up some plants that he’s offered them, he says. He has planted the heap with powerful vegetables--collard and mustard greens, onions, leeks and beets. At the top there are roses and azaleas. There are also a couple of crosses, but I think a man should be allowed a few eccentricities. It is clear Zeke is trying to create on his property, and also on a strip of land apparently owned by a nearby cemetery, a new Eden, something whole and alive and so energetic it is capable, if not watched, of bursting into flames or at least smoldering. As I was leaving he offered to give me some compost to energize my pile. Others have come in recent days to haul away a bushel or a truckload in the face of imminent threats that Zeke’s heap will be forcibly leveled.
Meanwhile, my employees, not too worried about the 55-gallon drums of toxic waste routinely dumped by the side of the roads of our county, have declared Zeke’s heap an unlawful landfill. My other employees have neglected to include leaves and lawn clippings in their recycling plan, despite the fact that they can be composted in any back yard, or commercially, and make up something like one-third of what the trash collectors pick up. Soon we will be paying them to keep the man out of our blue recycling bin. I find more irony in this than I can easily stand.
