Dumps: More or Less the Same Everywhere

We do this weird thing as a species that I don't suspect we think about very often. We all fill up bags of stuff we don't want to look at anymore -- broken stuff, old stuff, old and broken stuff, gross stuff that's been growing at the back of our fridges for long enough that we're ashamed of and awed by its presence -- and we put those bags of stuff by the road, at which point all that stuff magically disappears.

Except no. Those bags of stuff get collected in a stuff-collector (called a dump truck) and then we go and dump it all in a hole in the ground that we try to never think about and to not look at.

And because we dump stuff in the hole in the ground, we call it a dump.

We are, in addition to being a curious one, an endlessly inventive species.

Except, in some places, the ground never thaws enough for you to dig a huge hole into which you can dump your bags of stuff and pretend it's not there. And so a trip to the dump in Pond Inlet is a trip out into a landscape that is made up mostly of gigantic and imposing mountains, a huge and mostly frozen pond of sewage, and different heaps of stuff cordoned off into different areas.

There's the wood dump -- separated because, in a place with no trees and still a few fireplaces, what are you going to burn except pallets and rejected building material? Also by the wood dump: the hazardous waste dump. Driving past that, you come to the sewage pond and the general junk pile (so far as I could tell), along with several haphazard sub-categories of junk.

Those barrels? That's the hazardous materials dump. The general blackness to the very right edge? Well, hang on. Details on that later.

As a sub-category of the domestic garbage area: the school bus dump.

Sad school buses; indifferent mountains.

But, I mean, junk is more or less the same everywhere, except that at the Pond Inlet dump there may be more broken and sad carcasses of snowmobiles who gave their best until the cold got the better of them. Other than that, it's really the same old random stuff that we like to leave by the side of the road and forget about while it gets carted off to somewhere Not Here.

The metal sub-category, loosely sorted (please note: cardboard boxes are not actually metal).

A few loyal deceased snowmobile friends, along with other junk.

Now what are the folk in Pond Inlet to do with their junk, as is cannot be buried in the ground and properly ignored?

Well, friends, remember that first photo, with the distant barrels in the left side of the picture and the dark smear way in the distance in the right? The bit tucked away behind a fence? Scroll back up. Review. Concentrate on that charcoal smudge.

That's the burning area. All the stuff that's broken or not useful or just plain old gross gets put in the burning area and, well, it gets burned. Because there isn't a big hole in the ground and it has to be dealt with properly (instead of, you know, compacting it, shifting it around, scooping it here and there, and mostly pretending we don't know it's there).

And, okay, maybe a trip to the dump doesn't sound very exciting and, really, it's not. Sure, it's neat to see what people throw out, but dumps are more or less the same everywhere. They're places where we put the stuff we don't want or need. Usually we ignore them. Here, the dump is a little more present. Need some wood? Go to the wood dump. Want to look at some pretty mountains? Go to the dump. Need to go photograph the sewage pond (I'm sorry, lagoon) for some engineering professors back in Halifax? Trip to the dump (also, true story; ask Kuukuluk). Want to find a slew of ravens? Head on up to the dump.

And, wow, I have to say that, despite the sad piles of things that have not yet been burned or cannot be burned (see: hazardous waste barrels), the view was pretty spectacular. Even the junk fence -- meant to keep burning junk away from other junk, to clearly differentiate between certain sub-categories of stuff -- is kind of beautiful, trailing out across the landscape toward distant mountains.

And I have to say this to commend the Arctic-style dump: because it is cold (-30C!), because junk gets burned, it does not smell like the dump I remember travelling to with my father for unknown reason (home renovation? one of a million projects on the go? exciting diversion for a 5-to-7-year-old Rebekah?), which had that peculiar sickly-sweet-rotten-banana-peel smell that I will forever associate with dumps. The hole in the ground back home where we stick junk is not a pleasant place to visit (even if I did find a Polly Pocket that I insisted on bringing home and making said father clean; sorry, Dad). And while the dump here is, you know, next to a (admittedly, mostly frozen) sewage lagoon and is kind of sad in that particular way that broken and disused and discarded things are sad, it's also still and silent and distant, the town entirely out of sight. It's dwarfed by those same mountains, by the scope of the landscape that surrounds it. It's like visiting an archaeological site. Like being the only people in the world, surrounded by an empty, ash-covered field, stacked barrels, and the corpses of old school buses. Like looking at this tiny and funny thing we humans do and feeling that, in the end, all that is swallowed up by the scope of things and becomes so utterly insignificant. The tiniest of pockmarks on the face of the world.

All in all, this dump was kind of a fun dump to visit.