Getting rid of stuff

Whether we are talking about Now or way back Then, we all need to get rid of things from time to time. And, just as getting rid of things can be a problem now, it was sometimes a problem way back then. I'm not sure that we are making any progress in finding means of getting rid of things today. We have landfills, which let us put things out of sight, but they don't necessarily really get rid of things -- they mostly just bury stuff. In earlier times, more of the things we were getting rid of were biodegradable, meaning that when they were buried in the soil they decomposed and "went back" into the soil. Back then, on the farm, we often had pigs which functioned as our garbage disposers. Today, after years of progress, we may have a garbage grinder in the sink which pulverizes the table scraps and sends them down the drain where, eventually, they plug the drains and pose us plumbing problems.

In the older days, rather than landfills, we might have the city dump. It was known as the dump because that's what people did there, dumped their discards. A dump would likely be a messy, malodorous, unhealthy place. Today we would likely call it an environmental hazard. I don't know of much good to say about dumps. They weren't good in their day, and today, if we tried to handle our modern waste that way, we would have a hugely worse mess.

The invention of plastics for wrapping things, is, as I see it, a massive addition to our problems of getting rid of stuff. Interestingly, though, the plastics are often advertised as ways to make our messes neater, and even more out-of-sight. For instance, we not only have plastic garbage bags to contain the messes that we get rid of, we have heavy-duty garbage bags, almost guaranteed not to break and spill. In the land-fill, the archaeologists 500 years from now may be digging those garbage bags out of the ground and studying them to learn about us 21st century people by examining what we threw away.

In the old days, a farm might have its own dump, its own junk pile. I have seen places that have old truck graveyards, and old farm machinery graveyards. The farmer never really got rid of stuff, he just stashed it out of the way, possibly intending someday to fix it up again, or perhaps just to let the old things slowly rust away. Sometimes, in the days gone by, people would use discards and junk to try to fill in gaping gullies. Erosion from rainwater drainage can be a headache in any age. Gullies were handy available places to dump things, and the rationale often included the thought of stopping or slowing the erosion. Sometimes filling in the gully with junk and refuse seemed to help; sometimes it made things worse, and often the "fillings" got washed away and spread all over the place.

Both in the old days and today we have sometimes had people who dump things in unauthorized places, creating serious eyesores, and piling their messes on someone else for them to clean up. I suppose their thinking is that if it is out of my sight and out of my vehicle, it is no longer my problem. Actually, I have always really appreciated people who have a conscience about such things, and who see the dumping of their discards on someone else as a shame and a disgrace to themselves and a slam against their own self-respect. Sometimes roadside ditches became places for such callous dumping, and one might see anything from old tires to old water heaters dumped there by the anonymous gifters.

Recently, amazingly, we had an episode of such dumping, of all places, on the southeast corner of the Pea Ridge Cemetery. We expect better of our community, expecting that most people will respect our grounds dedicated to remembering and honoring our deceased loved ones, so it was thoroughly amazing to discover about eight truckloads of limbs, saplings and cornstalks dumped near the fence lines in the cemetery's lower southeast corner. Evidently someone had been clearing brush and trimming trees, and needed a place to get rid of their cuttings. We are not sure if it was just seen as a clever way of getting rid of stuff, or if it was intended as an act of insult and disparagement. Our puzzlement was even more heightened when we noted that Pea Ridge's city brush pile on Greer Street was open and ready for business during that week. That would have been a much more convenient place for the dumping crew to stash their cuttings, so why dump on the cemetery? By the time we got going on our cleanup, the city's brush pile was closed, so we had to resort to farm ditches and an old dry pond as places to discard the discards. If our surprise gifters were just people who get a perverse pleasure out of causing people trouble and extra work, then they succeeded in causing us trouble and extra work. May their laughter soon turn hollow, and may their supposed cleverness soon turn to embarrassment.

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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.