FREE DUMP DAY

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After I retired from the mill in 2002, I sold my mobile home in Port Hadlock and headed to Port Angeles. Free college tuition was offered as an incentive to take early retirement. I was being called a displaced timber worker and funds were available to those older folks wanting to start over. This was fine with me. The working environment at the mill was changing at a fast pace as were the faces of those reporting for work.   I missed the old days and besides that, I had new twin grandchildren waiting for me. 

I rented this cute little blue house for $600 a month.  It was just down the road from my daughter and son-in-law’s place which made babysitting handy when I wasn’t busy attending classes and doing homework.  I was going to be a medical assistant. Unfortunately, so was everybody else in town!  I enjoyed those classes, though, and I learned stuff.  I liked my house okay but I discovered it was on a street that seemed to have more than its share of traffic.  On weekends, the house across the street was a magnet for all those people who had closed up the bars. The cops arrived on a regular basis and I was over-the-moon happy when I left that neighborhood and bought a mobile home in Sequim at Green Acres, a quiet spot for old people.  I’m back in Port Angeles now but I still miss that old neighborhood sometimes.

I’m not too far from my old blue house and I thought of it yesterday when my grandson and his dad were taking advantage of the annual “Free Dump Day” held on or around Earth Day.  The blue house was on the road to the airport, the fairgrounds, a cemetery, and the dump. Lots of traffic.  My son-in-law takes advantage of this event every year – even though it means sitting in a long line for an extended period of time. He had two loads this year, as did my grandson, so they knew how their day was going to be spent.

It always puzzled me when I’d see these long lines of pickup trucks waiting to dump their trash for free. I’m too impatient to sit in a line for an hour or two just to dump trash. Why didn’t they just go to the dump when they had a load, and not wait around for one day of the year when they could do it for free?  Surely, it couldn’t be THAT expensive! 

But I guess I don’t go to the dump much because I’ve heard it is darn expensive.  That probably accounts for the old couches and chairs I sometimes see discarded on the dirt road behind my house.  I just figured the people were litterbugs – or as I called them – stupid pigs!  But maybe I need to call them poor folks who are lazy litterbugs.  I should probably try to be a little more tolerant but I think way too many people are littering these days.  I’m reminded of that when I see those filled bags sitting along the highway where volunteers have gone out to pick up trash on their own time.  They deserve more credit than they’re getting.

I think my Grandpa Gene was a garbage man in Port Townsend for a period of time in the early 1950s. When I first moved to Port Angeles and was looking for work, I saw an ad for office help at the trash disposal center. I couldn’t believe the competition I had. One guy even had PhD behind his name. Garbage pickup wasn’t the big industry it is these days. Back then we all had a burn barrel we could use at our leisure; plastic wasn’t quite as plentiful as it is now; there weren’t any disposable diapers; pop and beer bottles were turned in for cash; boy scouts had paper drives for all the newspapers and magazines we wanted to unload; and if you wanted to, you could drive out to the dump yourself and throw stuff over the cliff to the beach below.

Which reminds me of another website you might find interesting. Look at the videos at pnwbeachcoming.com.  Tim Blair of Port Orchard narrates and they’re fascinating.  Especially now that my body doesn’t want to participate in long beach walks like she used to in the hunt for beach glass.