Earlier in the week, I was reading old Times Union articles about the old ANSWERS incinerator / state garbage to steam plant that heated and cooled the Empire Plaza. I also got reading about old articles about the closure of unlined town and city garbage dumps, and what people were saying about burn barrels back in the day long before New York State banned them in rural areas. There was a time not that long ago before curbside recycling and large, lined mostly commercially owned or at least operated landfills. Trash was just trash – something you burned and you buried. It’s still how it’s viewed in many deep rural communities, on farms and ranches and remote homesteads across the country and in wilderness.
The other day, I was walking around the old ruins of the old tannery at Fox Lair. I am sure that it was used as a dumping ground for the Youth Camp and later Police Camp into the sixties when such buildings were burned and pushed into the ground by the conservation department. Waste was burned and what didn’t burn was pushed into the ground. It was a much simpler way to think about waste. Such things are not uncommon even to this day on larger farms and ranches, and rural homesteads, especially out west. For the most part, there isn’t that many chemicals that mitigate far from household and farm trash pits, assuming most of liquids like oils are burned off before being buried. The remote nature means usually pollution is localized and unlikely to impact anybody once it’s pushed underground and covered with dirt and rock – especially if it’s free of organic matter that can rot, collapse inward or produce methane. Deep buried trash pits can be farmed over top or forests can grow back over top, to be long forgotten unless of course someone starts to dig there. Cities are built on trash and debris, often pulverized brick and concrete from previous generations.
Love Canal, where Hooker Chemical buried a variety of industry byproducts from plastics and chemical manufacture, often dominates the discussion about modern waste disposal infrastructure, and the importance of methane collection to avoid air pollution and explosions and liners for leachate collection to avoid water pollution. Certainly a valid concern for large town or city-wide dumping grounds, likewise the importance of pollution control for large incinerators in urban areas, burning a cities’ worth of garbage including old television sets, computers, plastics and household chemicals. Significant amounts of waste material can be kept out of urban landfills and incinerators. But in the remote country, I am not sure if that all matters or is relevant.
I don’t buy the argument that modern trash is more toxic then generations before. A lot of the worse offenders that came on the market generations ago have been phased out, both voluntary and by government regulation. Modern large landfills and incinerators generally do due a good job at minimizing pollution, and the small scale trash burns and pits on farms and ranches might stink or be ugly, but are mostly harmless. The fear of chemicals pouring out of poorly run municipal and commercial dumps is real, though government regulation is controlling them. But the tiny amounts of pollution from the remote homestead should not be compared to that of controlled city emissions, as population density and area to absorb pollutants is much greater.
We live in a rather strange times, where hate dominates our national conservation, with a White Supremist running our country. One who is concerned about the plight of the Jews – at least the White and Conservative Jews – and White South Afrikaaner farmers. But not so concerned about the Muslims, the Hispanics and African Americans. The President who took away honoring Martin Luther King in National Parks in favor of Flag Day, which just also happens to be his own birthday.
Truth is discrimination and cracking down on people who are different then you is bad regardless of how you cut it. Muslims have every much a right to practice their faith, seek refugee status as do any Jew. The US should help those seeking persecution and not be driving out or promoting discrimination against minorities or those who are not in political favor. We should instead be encouraging diversity, sharing ideas and learning the best of every culture to integrate into our own culture.
No one group has a monopoly on good ideas or knows the best ways of doing things. We are a complicated, diverse society, and things that are acceptable and normal in one area might not not acceptable in others. That doesn’t mean their wrong in all areas, but instead we should encourage tolerance, and embrace the creativity and diversity. We shouldn’t look down at people who are different then ourselves.
Besides the fact that it’s nine degrees out and wind is whipping around, tonight is the Public Hearing on condemning part of Albany Pine Bush for the trash transfer station now that landfill is supposed to close in the next few years.
Truth is like so many Mondays, I felt sick before I got out of bed, 🛏️ but getting up, unthawing some frozen strawberries 🍓 and shredding some carrots for pancakes, and putting the bread, sweet potatoes 🥔 and acorn squash in the oven to bake 🍞, I’m feeling better now. Maybe it’s the coffee ☕ that is certain to keep me pissing and shitting all of the time. I kind of loathe sticking around downtown until 7 PM and going to city hall to bitch about the dump that I rarely use because I burn most of my shit. 🔥 But it’s important to fight to save the remaining Albany Pine Bush, 🦋 even if soon enough I’ll be leaving Albany never to look back. It’s just another public hearing, Lynne wrote me crib notes, and if I don’t want to get emotional or say what I really think about garbage hump of consumerism, 🐪 I can just have Chat GPT write me some notes. And it’s a chance to walk laps. 🚶
But somehow I was hoping for an excuse to say I’m sick, 🤒 and need to stay home but the coffee and strawberry pancakes 🥞 got me going and probably soon enough peeing and pooping, 💩 which the crap that doesn’t burn ends up on that garbage heap in landfill. Somehow composting toilets, out houses and humanure seems all the more attractive! But I also find the whole concept of permaculture to be so repulsive, 🍆 maybe because of who I associate it with, usually menonites and overly jacked up hippie types. 👦🏽 It will give me time to walk laps in Plaza where it’s warm, finish up Cathy Friends’ Hit By a Farm, an audiobook I’ve listening to about two lesbians who form a sheep farm in Western Minnesota and learn about the trials and tribulations of farm life between dead sheep and broken fucked up farm equipment. 🐑 It’s a good story, and sometimes I need a diversion from more serious material.
Wednesday Big Red 🛻 gets inspected and tires rotated, probably for the last time I tell myself, but it will be good. I want to get through this winter with Red. I need to pull off the hub caps and install the new windshield wiper but I doubt I’ll get a chance to do this before Wednesday morning, 🛠️ as there is a hearing about a development in the Pine Bush 🌲 on Tuesday to attend also. I will probably take that day off as I time use up before the end of the year and I want to read 📖 and if it’s mild enough do some riding. 🚲
That evening it was bumper-to-bumper traffic on the bridge as cars and trucks hurried home from work or a day of Christmas shopping.
Then, at about 5 p.m., the unthinkable happened.
Charlene Foster, who lived in Kanauga on the edge of the river, in sight of the bridge, told the Gallipolis Daily Tribune that she was preparing dinner in the kitchen of her home when her two sons suddenly screamed, “Mommy! Mommy! The bridge is in the water.” She looked toward the bridge, and “It was just like a snake slithering down into the water. It seemed to go down in slow-motion.”
Ann Davis, who worked in a beverage store near the bridge, was watching the heavy traffic cross the bridge when she heard a large boom. She told the Plain Dealer that it sounded like a sonic boom, and then “the bridge started to crumple and sink like a set of dominoes falling. Cars were being crushed like toys in the girders.”
It took just twenty seconds for the entire bridge to fall into the river.
I don’t remember much from seeing he Wonder Years but I’ve always kind of liked that Joe Cocker song and the power of nostalgia even though it was long before my time on this earth.
There will be a time when I look back with such nostalgia when I was in my early forties much like when I often look back to those days in my thirties and even my twenties. In some ways, I look back in complete horror about how things used to be, but also I do wish such a simpler world still existed. At same time, I dream of the better future, the homestead and land, the freedom away from cities and consumerism and the pollution.
It was a year of pure madness and paranoia of myself and others. A victim of the confusing times we live in, where maleaase and fear dominated all aspects of life as spent many hours reading and listening to Edward Abbey and Hunter S. Thompson as I smoked pot by many a campfire, and rode back and forth to that hideously ugly suburban state office building next to one of many former city garbage dumps. It was really stupid to fear my truck so much, to delay and cut back both my summer vacation and my autumn road trip just because I feared my truck would melt down and fall apart in wilderness.
Eighteen years came and went in my career and in my apartment. The strong economy, my frugal living and investing started to pay off on paper but I still don’t have that off-grid cabin, goats, hogs, or a burn barrel out back though I did spend a lot of time in wilderness and burned up a lot of debris, pallets and wood from the forest. Been since last winter when I recycled any plastic but I dumped most of my food scraps in my parents compost and I’ve been collecting cans all summer. I feared every creak and gone of my now rusty pickup, though it still seems hard to imagine a life after Big Red. I scaled my plans back because I lived in fear, that breakdown in wilderness or somewhere in West Virigina that never happened, though I did enjoy getting back to the North Country and the Adirondacks for the first time in years. Spending that weekend up in Plattsburgh sure was memorable.
Reading and E-books became a bigger and bigger part of my life as I learned to fully exploit the free resources the public library offers. Spent many an evening over at Five Rivers reading and thinking, laying back and watching as it got dark out. Those summer days come and gone much too quickly, replaced with long dark nights spent going to bed early and reading under the heated blanket, trying to stay warm in my diaploated apartment. While moisture issues have meant the paint has always pealed, after 18 years of no paint and minimal maintance, it’s really coming off in big flakes this year. Like usual, the most memorable places I went to where new to me, but I alway was too afraid to try too much change. Didn’t want to get too far out, break something on my big jacked pickup, which continued to serve me reliably all year.
So much of the year was dominated by extreme confusion in my mind, and general indirection. Maybe because there was no obvious answers and much emptiness in world. Maybe it was the lessons learned in 2024, the reinforcement of the fact that there was no easy answers and all the options were bad. With nothing better to do, I just push forwarded, with vague notions of the future, though even on that front I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. Maybe it was best I deleted the Zillow app off my phone. There are a lot of options out there, but the ones I actually like are much too far away. And New York State sucks even if it pays the bills and let’s me save and invest to a better future. And all I got was more wokeness pushed upon me. You don’t like the status quo, or how everything is fucked up? Try going woke.
