Thundering towards the Confusion Range, I race past Utah’s red rocks and yellow ridges and take a hard left onto a dirt road just off Route 50, kicking up clouds of dust and snaking through canyons of old tires and mountains of twisted rebar and rusted chrome. A handwritten sign says “Dumping Zone” and the ancient man at the checkpoint waves me through without looking up.

I drive along a road of packed garbage, picking my way through a stinky patch of American hell: busted baby carriages, chicken bones, refrigerator doors, blue jeans, fast food bags, home entertainment shrapnel, all of it shimmering beneath the hundred degree desert sun. The smell kicks me in the guts. When I step out of the car to double-over, a bulldozer comes to life.

I wave the driver over. He cuts the engine and tells me the usual landfill story: it’s filling up too fast and now they’re paying inmates from the county jail forty dollars a day to pick up the stray garbage. The landfill gets covered once a week. “But we can’t keep pace anymore,” he says. “I don’t know how to keep up or where we’re going to go. I’m not a city boy — this is my office and it’s getting too crowded.”

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Spirit – Fresh Garbage
from Spirit. Sony, 1968 | buy mp3s
A bit of piano-powered psychedelica from 1968 that says “Look beneath your lid some morning, see those things you didn’t quite consume…” Somehow it works. Greenpeace should take some lessons here.