Several years ago on a place we leased we
were visited by aliens in spacesuits who arrived in otherworldly
vehicles and spoke an indecipherable language. No, I’m not some UFO nut
who was abducted by martians, these guys were remediaters, which are far
spookier. I know, I’d never heard of them before either. They were
there because somehow they’d discovered that there was an old
underground fuel tank on the premises. This came as a complete surprise
to my landlord.
The remediaters brought in all sorts of
heavy equipment to dig out the tank and to remediate the soil that had
been “contaminated.” Once out of the ground they discovered that the
tank was full of fuel which to you and me might suggest that the tank
didn’t leak. To the remediaters it meant practically all the soil in the
township had to be removed and cleansed. In other words, they had to
clean the clean soil that had NOT been contaminated.
While they were at it the remediaters
discovered a dump on the ranch, which to the sanitation engineers in
environmental services is like finding a fresh cow pie in the living
room. They were so upset all they could see were dollar signs!
These days Americans produce three and a
half pounds of trash daily that is filling up our landfills but ranchers
in the PS period (pre-styrofoam), had other ways of dealing with the
politically incorrect trash. Newspapers, magazines, and catalogs were
“recycled” in the outhouse while rougher recyclables went up in smoke in
the burn barrel on foggy days. There was no such thing as disposable
diapers or food waste like brussel sprouts, liver and lima beans, which
were fed to the hog. Everything else went to the dump.
Our dump contained things like decaying
corral boards, a wringer washer, green appliances, irrigation pipe
twisted up like pretzels, concrete chunks, an old chicken coop, bed
springs, tires, buckets with holes in them and parts of an airplane that
landed far short of the nonexistent runway. We also found many valuable
antiques like chicken feeders and waterers that you see in antique
shops for sixty bucks apiece. There was also an old calf table that two
ropers had probably headed and heeled and drug to the dump in disgrace. I
sold it to a bad-roping neighbor for a quick $100. Cows had pretty much
sorted through the decaying trash and destroyed a lot of the “good
stuff” but we did find a big rusty roll of valuable barb wire that’s now
safe in our house rising in value faster than my IRA. Hey, some folks
have annuities, I have twenty yards of Glidden’s flat line four point
(1876).
No comments:
Post a Comment