Trashing It
When I got my first vacation home back in 1987, it was a newly-built cabin on a three-acre wooded hillside in Hillsdale, New York, on the borderline of being in the Berkshires. The Berkshires (Egremont and such) were more toney and more expensive and this was my first vacation home. I paid cash for it and did a lot of the furnishing and fixing up myself. I had three local brothers who should have been called Daryl, Daryl and Daryl who mowed the lawn and plowed the driveway, but were not inclined to take on any specialized tasks that did not fit precisely into those two categories. They too wanted to be paid in cash and were happy to wait until they next saw me to get paid. My guess is that these guys have still not learned to take Venmo or do anything beyond their limited repertoire. After a bucolic weekend in the country, we had to figure out what to do with the weekend trash which had accumulated. The local dump was open on Saturdays, but specifically not open on Sundays. I bet it had less to do with keeping the Sabath holy than making sure the weekending City folk like us were inconvenienced to the max. This was way before recycling was a thing, so everything was all put into one or two black trash bags and thrown into the back of the car for resolution later. I, like most weekenders, did not really want to take the trash all the way back home, so the question was, were to dump it. My first thought was that all the rest stops along the Taconic Parkway were a possibility. At the first one I found about 50 bags, all of which looked identical to mine, piled alongside the single full trash can. I was apparently not the first weekender to run into this problem. On the one hand it seemed harmless to add my bags to the stack, but on the other hand it seemed on the verge of irresponsible to just pile on and leave it in the hands of the angry Monday road crew.
After that experience, I had a house in the Hamptons, a total of five houses in Utah and then, eventually, a house in San Diego, all of which qualified as weekend homes and all of which had trash that had to be handled. Places like the Hamptons and Park City are geared towards servicing weekenders and it is far less difficult to find people willing to service one’s homeowner needs of any sort, including handling the trash. It was all just about cost and what the market would bear, all very capitalistic. San Diego was also pretty easy, but there we just used the normal trash services used by the full-time population and it was cheap enough and easy enough to work so long as we had someone to put the trash cans out on the curb on Wednesday nights and haul them back in on Thursday afternoon. That’s the same process we use today except that it’s Kim and me that do the hauling. Doing the trash prep and recovery is part of our weekly ritual and it is relatively painless when you live at a house full time.
The house in Ithaca, where I am now in residence was always somewhat different than either a full time residence or a vacation home. Here I do not have a paid staff of people who make it their business to attend to the needs of second home owners. I have my cousin Pete, who is more a friend than a regular caretaker. He has worked for me over the years and has taken care of all the needs of the house including the trash, but now things have changed. To begin with, Pete, like all of us, has gotten older. For the first time ever, this weight-lifting guy who still has a twenty-year-old’s physique, has a bad shoulder that precludes him from taking on heavy-lifting tasks. In addition, the status of the house has changed for the past eight months. He is no longer in charge of the property and thus, really isn’t the go-to guy for handling stuff like the trash.
Ithaca is an interesting town, in and of itself. It has been characterized as the most enlightened community in America because there are two universities here with a student population that exceeds the local population by some significant degree. That makes it a liberal island in a sea of rural Upstate New York red country. You can literally see the changing demographic as you drive into Ithaca from any direction. You go from heavily Republican lawn signage to heavily progressive lawn signage and rarely pass through any moderation on any front. It’s strange because while the mentality of the town is a bit hippie throwback, since its Upstate New York, there is a fiscal conservatism that takes on a patina of frugality that is unmistakable. The best way to describe it is that everyone is very tech-savvy, but they use their tech equipment for a few years longer than their city-mice cousins might. They have all the guilty pleasures available to them in town, but they tend to prefer simple pleasures and walks in the country to NetJets to Nevis. In terms of trash, the town goes right back into Uber-enlightened mode. There is a recycling center that is almost a central part of the community rather than being a peripheral service that gets hidden away.
We have a lot of people staying here this and next week and the trash and recyclables have been accumulating. Add to that the triage activities I have been going through in winnowing down my memorabilia and keeper possessions. In other words, the garage was starting to get over-filled with boxes staged for sending back to San Diego and bags and cans of a mountain of trash in every sort of trash bag available. There are traditional heavy-gauge black ones, heavy-gauge clear ones and an assortment of white tall kitchen bags with plastic handles. The trash was getting close to the out-of-control point when I decided to address it yesterday. Actually, Kim did something that she rarely does, she approached me and asked that I take on the responsibility for managing the trash as she was too preoccupied with cooking for the masses. Kim almost never gives me tasks to do because she knows I take things on without being asked, but the trash was starting to concern her and since there is no clear “put it on the curb on Wednesday night” solution for us here, she needed to be sure it would get handled somehow.
I called Pete and said, simply, “what do I do?” He explained how the Ithaca Recycling Center works and it all sounded way too complicated to learn at this late stage of my Ithaca game. So,, I enlisted the strong arms of son Thomas and we filled the SUV to the brim with bags and boxes of recyclable materials and headed for the Recycling Center. It was a Saturday and the main office were closed so I decided to beard the lion in its den and drove right up to the entry booth behind a pickup truck. That was my first mistake since I was apparently on the scale with the truck, adding to his pay-by-the-pound measurement. I backed off and re-approached after he had left. I chose the “I’m not from around here” defense and threw myself on the mercy of the trash judge. For some reason she was in a good mood and had left her Judge Judy attitude at home for the day, She asked if I had a Recycling Registration and I pleaded ignorance. She said I could buy a temporary permit but that it was going to cost me. She said it was $30 and would only last me for 30 days. I was in shock. If she had said $200 I would not have been surprised and I would have assumed it was for a one-time dump. This is where the local fiscal conservatism came in handy. I quickly forked over the cash and was given several pieces of official-looking paper that went into the glove box.
I was then directed to recycling bin #4 where Thomas and I hefted all the trash that was filling the SUV into the conveniently sunken dumpster. There was a procession of cars waiting to do likewise, so we made quick work of it and left the question marks about whether everything we dumped was, indeed, recyclable for others at the Center to decide. As we drove out I saw all sorts of other stations including one for electronics. You see, there’s this monstrous big-screen rear-projection TV up in the carriage house that needs to be tossed at some stage. I was planning on leaving it for Pete to deal with, but now that I have a thirty-day get-out-of-trash-for-free card, I may just take that on as a personal challenge this coming week. There is something very fulfilling about making trashing it a project.