Food wrappers, aluminum cans, bottles, transmissions, dashboards, tires, clothes, stereo innards, magazines where the wrinkled and soggy super models didn't look so super anymore. And lots of beer cans.

One sunny Saturday morning in early February I was walking along the river near town. A small army of volunteers with a local conservation group were collecting trash. As I strolled, the dozen or so men and women were stomping through wild rose thickets extracting anything that didn't look like it belonged there. It almost seemed there was more of the former than the latter.

Floodwaters had recently receded, leaving a thin film of silt over everything. As the morning warmed, the thawing ground took on the consistency of chocolate pudding. Where the collectors hadn't been, a chaotic crowd of animal tracks geese, ducks, skunks peppered the shoreline. A beaver had been recently gnawing at a maple sapling and had left behind his own litter of woodchips; these the workers ignored.

The effort could have been easily imagined as a grand archeological expedition, the uncovering of some lost civilization. Perhaps another Pompeii, but without the ghastly human shells petrified by Vesuvius' ash. This would have offered some reason for the shear quantity of stuff simply left behind. Instead, the modern-day visitors had carelessly and casually driven away, burdening the land with their waste.

I walked a little further and came upon a volunteer standing to the side while a small forklift slowly carried a discarded chest freezer full of car parts. We looked on silently as if honoring a solemn procession for an unknown soldier. As the forklift continued on, the volunteer saw me and shook his head. "It never ceases to amaze me."

A little while later, the forklift was hauling the front end of a Studebaker out of the brush when I stopped to talk to a volunteer in charge. "I wonder how long that's been here," I commented.

"Since we were last here, I know that," she said. "We didn't have the equipment to haul it out before."

"When was that?"

"Two years ago. We didn't have the tractor, so we could only get the small stuff. Less than a ton total. Seven years ago, we cleaned up a little down river from here. We ended up hauling out about 16 tons of trash. Looks like only a few tons this time."

Only a few tons.

It's always sobering to witness the shear quantity of junk we throw away. Take a look up and down your street on garbage day, and you'll know what I mean. According to US EPA statistics for 2006, Americans discard about three pounds of garbage per person per day (before recycling). A little math says that a typical neighborhood donates about 1000 pounds of trash to the landfill every week. I wasn't able to find out how much money that represents in terms of extraction, manufacturing, and shipping costs (or the garbage man's salary). Whatever it is, I wouldn't mind smacking it down on my kids' college fund. Then there's the oil tied up in the plastics, which comprise 12% of what we toss (OPEC sure has our number). It seems not a small number of trees are lost as wood and paper waste (about 40% of the total). The list goes on. Too bad so much of it ends up strewn across our dwindling natural spaces.

I'm reminded of an idea for a story I once fancied. In it, people of the future, desperately short of resources, took to mining ancient landfills. I never got very far with it; I didn't think I could make it sound believable.

It sometimes seems real life is not so believable, either.

Learn more about this author, Daniel Sisk.
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