The Weekly Screed (#714)

Landfills I have known,
B&E’s I’ve committed
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Whenever I’m up in my old hometown, I get flashbacks driving through a broad stretch of manicured parkland on Monowau Street, where it crosses Council Creek. Gravel piles now occupy one side of the road. On the other side, the only item that catches the eye is a recently built skateboard park.

When I was a kid in Tomah, this part of town was the edge of the wilderness. It was also where the city ran one of its dumps. For a kid in those days, your basic landfill was — all rolled together — a playground, a beach, an amusement park, a treasure trove of discovery and wonder.

Conveniently, the Monowau Street dump, perched on the shores of the creek, was walkable from any kid’s house. Council Creek, of course, held its own fascinations. Parents made the meandering stream virtually irresistible by trying to scare us away from it. The standard adult lie involved giant snapping turtles. As broad as tractor tires with viselike jaws and legs that could propel them at speeds that rivaled gazelles and cheetahs, these monsters would clamp onto the limbs of unwary tots and drag them into the fetid depths. There, often, the pollution in the creek would kill your average kid before he had time to drown.

The pollution started up on the south side of town. That was where the creamery regularly dumped its unwanted whey — a thousand gallons at a time —turning the creekwater white from verge to verge and two miles downstream.

Well, not exactly two miles. Just shy of a mile, the creek reached the dump, whose constant flow of oily seepage mixed into the whey-white water, rendering it the color of well-stirred Nestle’s Quik. As tasty as this looked, the creek’s aroma at this point — an ambience of rotten eggs with a hint of scorched ozone — tended to discourage a taste test. However, having fallen in a few times, I can testify that Council Creek’s prevailing flavor suggested — to paraphrase Thurber — a naïve domestic kerosene without any breeding. But I was amused by its presumption.

I frequented the dump with brother Bill, and cousins Danny, Bobby and Tom. We were rarely the only kids there. In later years, grownups put fences around dumps for the simple reason that kids flock to them, like flies to a cowflop. There’s just so much there to see and do, so many layers of ooze and offal to lift up and see what’s underneath. Might be a diamond bracelet. Or a pissed-off puff adder, or — bonanza! — a dead rat crawling with maggots. “Hey, guys! Looka this!”

Your typical grownup has no eye for a dump’s allure. All he can see is great, gray heaps of sodden detritus — sheetrock, tree trimmings, paint cans, splintered lumber, rags, dirt, dreck and slime. But a kid? A derelict tricycle, for example, always had at least two salvageable wheels. A broken mop or broom, once its head was severed, could serve as a spear, a hiking staff, a whiffleball bat, or a kendo stick (if only we’d known about kendo!). Once I found a multitude of 4x6 manila cards, each covered with meaningless notations. I rescued a thousand or so that hadn’t been smirched and tucked them into a drawer beside my bed, intending to use the back sides for some unspecified clerical purpose. They stayed there, clean and ready, ‘til we moved away from Tomah. I think they ended up in the dump.

Once, we found the dump magically hip-deep in cranberries, unwanted surplus  from one of our area bogs. We immediately launched a cranberry war. Another time, a local bakery left a pile of bread as tall as the Tomah Cash Mercantile building. Yes — bread war. In the dump, a kid could always find a decent three-legged chair, or a couch clean enough for lounging on the front porch, if only we could figure out how to hail it home. Luckily, we didn’t need to haul most treasure very far, because all our dumps adjoined the woods, where you could set up a camp —properly referred to as a “fort.” Your basic fort had cardboard walls. It featured the dump’s finest broken chairs and sunken sofas, and usually a mattress that wasn’t too damp and didn’t smell too bad. Best of all, the erection of a fort prompted the inauguration of a campfire. If there’s anything kids love more than forty-foot tower of garbage, it’s a fire.

One summer, we’d set up a nice fort, with campfire, near the Milwaukee Road frog shops when an actual yard dick saw our smoke and barged right through our gate, scaring the wits out of all of us. In its railyard, the Milwaukee Road stored surplus accessories — weathered wooden bins of thick glass light fixtures and signal arms. And there were rust-coated clamps, spikes and connectors, all molded of high-carbon steel and heavier than a paragraph by Nietzsche. We had accessorized our fort with some of these items. The yard dick didn’t approve. At his urging, we hastily decommissioned the fort, returned the loot and never again darkened the railyard. At least not while he was there.

On the other hand, there was this fort we built in the woods near Tomah’s other dump, way out on the north side. In that fort, Danny and Bobby proudly introduced the concept of a roof, so we could hang around there on a rainy day. Unfortunately, the presence of the roof combined with the absence of ventilation to concentrate the landfill odors that had soaked deep into the tissues of our cardboard walls. Entering the fort tended to make your throat tighten, your gorge rise and your eyes water. I visited once and never returned.

One of the big lessons that a kid learns in the dump is that anything abandoned belongs to him by a sort of eminent domain. The corollary to this law is that, if you can get inside any place that’s left alone, you can have anything you find there. Or, at least, you’re entitled to look around. Operating on this principle, Bill, Danny, Bobby, Tom and I (well, most kids in town, really), added deserted buildings to our entitled turf. We developed a knack for breaking and entering.

For example, there was a sawmill way up near Grandpa Schaller’s that was temptingly empty on weekends. Any barn with an unlocked door, any fence with a slat missing, any house with broken windows and no occupants or furniture inside — these were all fair game. At some time or other, we probed every building at the Monroe County fairgrounds — a veritable wonderland for juvenile burglars.

Our most daring B&E was the old 7-Up bottling plant in downtown Tomah. The only access to the empty building was a small alley-level window barely wider than a kid’s head. Once inside, we had to navigate about thirty feet of lightless crawlspace, over a “floor” covered by a deep layer of black filth that had a springy texture, like compressed lint. You got the sensation of creeping over an immense carpet of dead kittens.

Alas, when we got inside, the building had been stripped mercilessly. We came away with no booty at all. But this is often the archaeologist’s fate.

Do kids still risk these mildly illicit adventures? I fear they don’t, if only because parents are so much more vigilant now. Most moms in Tomah in those days could go kidless for 36 hours or more with no more emotion than a sense of relief. Eventually, like plug nickels and rag-eared tomcats, we all showed up.

Now, kids have quality time and play dates, not to mention martial arts and yoga lessons, skateboard ramps, 3 a.m. ice times, Imax movies, hired clowns, iPhones, pornographic texting and Grand Theft Auto.

But I wonder. If you’re a kid who’s never played sandlot work-up or backyard whiffleball until it’s too dark to see the pitcher, never played touch football under a streetlight so far into the night that the neighbors call the cops, never found soiled treasure beneath 500 pounds of putrifying potatoes, or skinnydipped in a leech-infested swimming hole, never climbed a fence into a forbidden orchard guarded by a mean old man with a rock-salt twelve-gauge, never made a campfire in a deserted sawmill or lifted rocks in a swamp in search of garter snakes and salamanders, never traversed a whole block of your hometown main street by jumping from roof to roof, or crawled through thirty feet of knee-deep grime and rat pellets to break into a condemned factory, well, sweet Jesus! Have you lived at all?

Or did you go straight from infancy to adolescence without ever being a kid?