COVID AND THE LANDFILL DAY LABORERS

You may have watched some documentary or other about people who survive by scavenging food, metals or other materials from Third World garbage dumps. It’s an easy target for filmmakers: one location and plenty of sadly compelling visuals and characters.

Last week, I had an open day at my regular job. So I worked at the 300 acre Edgeboro Landfill, which rises 15 stories above the rivers and flatlands at its East Brunswick, NJ base. I spent seven-plus hours picking up pieces of plastic, styrofoam, insulation and other dross, which would otherwise be windblown into surrounding areas, and stuffing it into black, 30 gallon Hefty bags. Fundamentally, the work resembled one of those Earth Day volunteer walks, where suburban people go to urban neighborhoods and, along with residents, pick up litter left by other residents. Though my work took more time, and I got paid for it.

A landfill smells way worse than does a city street. The odor comes from mercaptans; gases emitted from a decomposing landfill brew. No other setting I know has that foul scent. The closest thing is rotting onions, except that landfill emissions are more concentrated. And unlike bad onions, you can’t toss a landfill in your trash and carry it to the curb.

I had been at several—closed—landfills before, back when I worked as environmental attorney. On those occasions, I and the other lawyers, politicians, engineering consultants and TV correspondents who accompanied me also wore business suits. We white collar workers were paid pretty well; far more—especially adjusted for inflation—than the recently devalued $120/day that they now pay Edgeboro day laborers. Unlike the landfill Untouchables, Team White Collar only stayed for an hour of photo ops and posturing before heading back to our climate-controlled offices.

I learned about this recent, lower status environmental protection job opportunity from my Mexican immigrant friend, Carlos, whom I know from other wage work I do. Carlos and his compañeros work at the landfill on a drop-in basis. These guys normally work as landscapers or in construction, but those lines of work are now seasonally slow. And/or maybe the recent immigration wave has, as in The Grapes of Wrath, overcrowded the labor pool in which they sink or swim.

I’ve had some unpleasant jobs. I’ve mopped floors and cleaned toilets. I’ve worked on an assembly line. I’ve been a truck driver.

I was also a roofer, before they had nail guns. Lugging eighty pounds of shingles on your shoulders up long ladders, and then banging nails in 100-plus in-the-direct-sun-all-day degrees five, nine-hour, days/week cumulatively wears you down. And don’t let your mind wander. Looking down from the tops of multi-story houses I would sometimes think, “If I survive that fall, someone will end up feeding me and brushing my teeth for the rest of my life.”

Two teen summers, I had even been a garbageman. So I had relevant work experience. But my new employer didn’t even ask my name.

Instead, after arriving with Carlos at the sheet metal-clad landfill office on a chilly morning, the Ecuadorian forewoman wordlessly handed me a Day-Glo vest to slip over my hooded sweatshirt. Training, later administered by my co-workers on-site, took about fifteen seconds: Don’t put anything too wet or muddy into the Hefty bags. The union guys who toss the bags into their truck won’t lift anything over thirty pounds. It’s in their contract.

After donning our vests, eight of us piled into the cab of a beat-up navy blue pickup truck designed for a maximum of six. Central Americans are used to human overlap. Down there, 70-plus people—mostly adults—routinely cram into buses designed for 45 American schoolkids, and stay that way for two or three hours. On one Nicaraguan bus, I heard an inexperienced Canadian exclaim to his friend, “I only have one foot on the floor and someone’s standing on it.”

That’s not unusual.

As our overstuffed truck crawled on the rutted dirt road that wound around the landfill’s base, several converging, winding rivers and the adjacent river-edge meadows came into view. It was actually pretty, especially in the early light beneath a blue sky. One of the mega-tarps covering one part of the landfill slope was a striated, pastel green. From a distance, it looked like some graceful, grassland prairie hills I had seen in the Dakotas. Closer up, it looked like vinyl.

Like the hillside’s beauty, the meadow’s appeal was also superficial. The reeds were Phragmites Australis, an increasingly common, invasive plant that reveals, and thrives in, damaged wetlands. It’s compromised wildlife habitat: lots of muskrats and many fewer, and less interesting, types of birds than in the salt marsh it displaced.

I doubt anyone inside the truck cab, except me, was thinking about lack of avian diversity. No one mentioned it.

None of the sardined crew wore a mask. Several guys sneezed. Others, including me, coughed. We were all in this together.

Stay six feet apart!

Right.

Many North Americans would have had panic attacks during this cross-cultural, micro-spreader event, even if they, themselves, had been masked, “vaxxed” and “boosted.” I haven’t understood why people who thought those measures worked nevertheless felt at risk around others who didn’t share their belief. I’ve also never understood how people thought they could wall themselves off from other people such that a virus would just frustratedly wither and die.

Most Mexicans I know are uninjected. The only exceptions I know were some warehouse workers whose employers required vaxx cards, even though they don’t require green cards. Mexicans have heard word-of-mouth adverse event stories. They intuitively sense that they don’t need no stinking shots. And if they don’t care about stuff like medical insurance or driver’s licenses, they sure won’t obey government injection mandates. Officially, they’re not even here.

After riding for about ten minutes, the truck stopped and we disembarked. We climbed, on foot, multiple additional stories to near the Landfill’s summit. On the crisp, clear morning, the faux-mountaintop view was spectacular in a Central New Jersey sort of way. There are very few hills on this coastal plain. The Landfill is the highest point within twenty miles in at least three directions, and maybe in all four.

Beyond the reeds and rivers, you could see clusters of houses and the low-rise skylines of several towns, highlighted by church steeples. Several small, scattered boats carried pairs of anglers in the rivers below. Given that the rivers adjoin a major landfill, I suspect that the fishermen throw back what they catch. I would.

Near the mega-dump’s very unsightly, active peak surface, about fifty yards laterally from us, there were many thousands of seagulls, pecking at various bird neo-edibles. Intermittently, some invisible landfill employee—or more likely, a timer—would detonate M-80s near the mega-flock’s location or shoot whistling bottle rockets into the roosting scavengers’ midst.

In reaction, the birds would relocate en masse. As the multitudinous, fleeing flock whited out the sky, commensurately copious birdshit audibly rained down on the nearby, two-hundred-yards-long black impervious landfill cover on the manmade slope that began ten yards to our east. Each carpet-bombing run sounded like a summer storm rolling in. Good thing we wore hats or had the hoods up on our sweatshirts. As the gulls passed directly overhead, I looked down. No one had to tell me. Not even the first time.

The area on which we worked looked post-Apocalyptic. Scanning the horizon slightly above our location, one saw nothing but a vast, thoroughly scarred wasteland of dark dirt chunks spread thinly, by bulldozers, over such generic, incompletely-buried trash as tennis balls, particle board shelves, Mylar birthday balloons and rusty bed springs. I saw several Covid masks. I’m sure millions more were buried in the sub-strata. I suppose the countless, inaccurate, spent test kits and vaxx syringes have been disposed separately as medical waste. It all has to go somewhere.

But mostly, aside from the occasional dismembered body—OK, not really—we picked up plastic shopping bags and food wrappers. It was ironic to see logo-ed sleeves for home deliveries of the New York Times, an environmentalists’ bastion, and The Wall Street Journal, the Daily Diary of the American Dream. There we were, high atop decades of putrescent Metro Area trash, definitely not Living the Dream.

They say that today’s landfills will be tomorrow’s archaeological sites that will tell our descendants about their predecessors’ civilization. Much of the plastic I harvested had once contained distinctly unhealthy, lipogenic foods: Oreos, Wonder Bread, M & Ms, pasta, sacks of rice and sugar, and juice and soda bottles. It reminded me that 78% of those who were hospitalized or died with Covid were overweight or obese. This number might approach 95% of ostensible Coronavirus deaths of those under 70. Instead of Joe Biden and others falsely, repeatedly asserting that the past two years have been a “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated,” future landfill archaeologists should more accurately conclude that it was a “Pandemic of the Old, Overweight and Obese.”

Though the history books will likely be as dishonest about the Scamdemic as the contemporary media has been.

At noon, the crew’s forewoman transported us—this time in a van—to the City of New Brunswick, about three miles from the dump. There, New Brunswick’s Elijah’s Promise/Ozanam shelter distributes free lunches to city residents, whether homeless or not. I waited for the line to clear and then approached the outdoor window where the boxed sandwiches were handed out. A ski-jacketed, bulky middle-aged woman stood inside at the window counter behind large, thick, floppy vertical strips of semi-clear plastic suspended from the top of the window frame. I guess these strips were supposed to block submicroscopic viruses.

The woman paused, and then reached toward me through the strips, handing me a standard blue paper mask while she peremptorily, sarcastically said “Thank you.”

Presumably she meant, “Thanks for nothing. You should have been wearing a mask, even though you’re outdoors. So here’s one for you, to shame you for your recklessness and remind you that you’re endangering me, even though I’m behind this barrier, wearing a mask and vaxxed to the nines. Why do you selfishly insist on breathing like a normal human being?”

Many people just won’t let the orchestrated fear and mask myth go. Even outdoors and even after two years, you can’t fully escape the Corona theater/superstition. The crew piled back into the van, where we ate from our laps during the return trip.

The muchachos were that endearing Mexican combination of calm, gentle and sincere. Amable. Tranquilo. They sometimes mockingly sang along to the sad songs—eye, eye Eye!— and did a few dance steps—baile! baile!— to the cumbia, bachata or salsa that quietly blared from their Smartphones. They smiled broadly when I danced along. They sometimes made jokes, most of which were lost on me because I still don’t get all of the cultural references or slang. I probably never will.

But they made several derisive jokes about Covid, and then laughed. I understood those.

I know, by listening to their stories, that they’ve seen plenty of hardship, first-hand. I can guess about the rest of the challenges; and in so doing, know I’ve left stuff out.

Some of the problems are self-induced. A bundled-up man named Jose, in his mid-thirties, told me he had been making $10,000/week, cash, off the books, with his masonry business. I asked him twice to repeat the number to make sure I understood him or to allow him to admit he was exaggerating. He stuck to his story.

He said the money went to his head; literally, because he became a full-on, full-time, versatile addict. He lost a nice house, his wife left him and took along their two young children. He ended up homeless in New Brunswick for several years. He’d been stabbed—he showed me his wounds—and had pistols pulled on him there, by rival drug dealers. He proudly said he had stopped using and was trying to put his family back together. He told me that, after several years of absence, his son ran and jumped into his arms and said, “Daddy, why didn’t I see you for so long? Every day, we waited for you to come home!”

Then he showed me a phone video of his seven-year old daughter, and told me he’d missed out on most of her life, the “learning to walk and talk.” I don’t cry around Mexicans. Because they don’t cry around me.

Mexicans exhibit a different perspective about death than do North Americans. Steven Jenkinson, the author of Die Wise, was a counselor to the terminally ill. He observes that other cultures accept death better than do most Americans. He recounts a conversation with a Mexican man in Mexico who said, “The problem with Americans is that you wake up every day expecting to live.”

Most Central Americans I know have about a sixth grade education. And they’re not all saints. But during the past two years, they have exhibited discernment, mental toughness and a grip on reality that most North Americans have lacked.

Central Americans know that if people live to old age, they’ll still die. They know that much younger people often do. They’ve had plenty to fear, especially in the old country, without being frightened by a virus that 99.98% of the people they knew survived. The Central Americans I know did not succumb to the contrived madness.

They had rent to pay and they couldn’t work from laptops, in sweatpants, while sipping coffee at the dining room table. Other peoples’ lawns needed to be cut. There were cars to wipe down at the car wash. There were roofs to re-shingle; the Mexicans do most of that now. When restaurants reopened, there was food to cook and there were dishes to wash.

There was also garbage to gather. And somebody had to do it.