Dumps and Dumpsters

The Boxcar Children was first published a century ago, in 1924, two years before the birth of my father. 

---

I was at a nearby Barnes & Noble looking at children’s picture books and came across a book I loved as a child and read many times but, oddly enough, remembered nothing about that is not revealed in the title, The Boxcar Children. I bought it and reread it. I’m not surprised I liked the depiction of the children fending for themselves like Robinson Crusoe. One of the features of the landscape that helps them is the unofficial dump, where they find plates, flat ware, cups, and wheels for a cart. The book is moralistic in a way--though I like how it fosters family solidarity and encourages initiative--but it’s amusing to consider the excesses of moral zeal a modern writer would bring to the dump.

I suppose the current equivalent would be the dumpster. I’ve known three people who used dumpsters to support themselves. One, the grad school father of small children, foraged the dumpster behind a grocery store in Durham NC for fruits and vegetables. Another, an older widow, found most of her clothes in the dumpsters around Chapel Hill. The third, a scrapper and hoarder, found all kinds of treasures in Raleigh dumpsters—some he sold, and some he kept, so that his large storage unit was always crammed full. At times, he’d have 7 or 8 upright vacuum cleaners and 5 or 6 microwaves, dozens of remotes. Why don’t you scrap them, I’d ask, and he’d respond, Some of them work.

In my childhood, dumps were common on roadsides, the favorite haunt of old bedsprings, rusting stoves, and bald tires. Probably every farm had one. I found them unpleasant yet fascinating. Lots of families had burn barrels for anything flammable. I tended ours a few times; mostly I remember the unpleasant smell of the burning garbage. When the barrel was emptied, at the bottom was a mélange of half-burnt items to add to our dump. Once I poked through the dump—I liked to think of it as a midden, since it had been there a long time before we moved in. Cans that had been burned and left in the weather to rust had somehow resolved into leafy, brittle clumps, as if brown oak leaves had turned to metal while resting in the earth. 

This post was inspired by today's post in Poems Ancient and Modern, a substack I highly recommend. 

Posted 11 July 2024.