PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : Down in the Dump and Making the Best of It

Most of us know about dumps. They are hidden places where mangy dogs and slimy rats, scavengers and pariahs roam by moonlight. By day, they are picked over by human scavengers and pariahs, crones with carbuncled skin and leering voices. On a list of social desirability, dumps come somewhere between prisons and sewage plants, and calling them “landfills,” or “land reclamation schemes,” does nothing to change the fact that they are dumps, and full of garbage, preferably sitting on our neighbors’ water supply, not our own.

The Azusa dump is in the desert--or would be had man not tinkered with the San Gabriel Valley. It is a fitting site: the scapegoat, laden with man’s sins, is driven out into the desert to perish. Only, there is no perishing; just the threat of poisons leaking into our future, of plastic liners and promises that the hot, fermenting jumble of yesterday’s trash is not tomorrow’s death.

Picture the trucks rattling off the 210 and 605 freeways toward this hapless place. A line forms outside the dump, waiting in the dry, brackish back streets of Azusa. It is a rather jolly line. Truck drivers call out to one another. There is a comradeship in garbage. Timid outsiders in small, disintegrating pick-up trucks arrive bearing leftovers from an old kitchen or garden work. They soon melt into the clubbiness of the day.

What is missing? Sea gulls. Where are the usual wheeling, plummeting hunters dragging chicken bones from beneath old hospital needles? Where is the smell? What is a dump without that festering whiff to curdle the strongest stomach? Where are the women?

This is a man’s place. Some time warp has captured this entrance on Vincent Street: men, big, brawny, little, hacking coughs, sweat-glued hair, in cowboy heels, sneakers, with large hats, young men, old men, enjoying the idea of being with MEN.

It is a postcard from Marlboro country, from life before cholesterol. Somewhere, in the distant spires downtown, six lawyers toil on behalf of the Azusa Land Reclamation. They go to court, they file, they counter: The talk is of aquifers below the 302-acre rock quarry, of 36 million more tons of garbage.

But at the dump, the talk is of the workers’ softball team, of practice, of their planned outing to Magic Mountain, of coffee and doughnuts for the drivers. The dump is home; it is family, a family of men drawn together in the freedom of work they love. Enormous yellow machines, like lumbering dinosaurs, crush and crumble all before them, never slowing, never cringing. “It’s in a man’s genes to do a manly thing like this--it’s a calling,” says Ralph Chavira. “I look on this landfill as one of my kids--it’s an emotional thing,” says Rick Spencer, the manager.

Rick’s grandparents were poor farmers in Kansas. His father brought in oil wells when Rick was a child. Now he teaches positive attitudes in the federal penitentiary in Ft. Leavenworth. “A very amazing man, my father. He believed in a lot of very good hard work.” Rick dropped out of college three times and was working in a chicken slaughterhouse when a notice caught his eye for a highway construction technology course at Ferris State College in Michigan. He found a calling: big machinery, heavy equipment, sludge disposal, chemical “management,” the inexorable might of man.

He hates Los Angeles and pines for the Midwest, which he sums up by its gas stations: “First you pump, then you pay.” But he has found his dominion on the shaking, decomposing garbage of the Azusa landfill. He prides himself on how few men quit working here, on the way they cover the garbage over each night, on the methane gas wells, so precisely calibrated, on the “spotters,” the men who pull up weeds and set bird feeders in the perimeter hedges for the hawks and pheasants.

His hands are clean. It is other men who throw away paint cans and batteries that bleed toxics, who toss out reams of computer paper, who destroy leftover toys and clothes, thousands of dollars’ worth, lest--heaven forbid--the needy get them free. He sees our sins as he sees our cruelty: the transients who tumble out of garbage trucks, scooped up from the dumpsters where they slept, cold and crazed.

Rick recalls his grandfather saying: “People who were alive 200 years ago are all dead today. You have to die comfortable with the way you lived your life.” He likes the neat community of garbage he has built: cleanly swept and watered, acre by acre, buried and forgotten. Occasionally, he drives up into the mountains and looks down: “Nothing you can see forever but lights and cars.” And he hates what he sees.

Back East, a landfill charges $100 a ton to take in garbage. Here, Rick Spencer has had to roll back prices from $22.50 to $19.25--as if the whole of California is ripe for dumping and using and never asking where nor why.

Good American garbage: alive and ticking in 200 years’ time.