Taking Out the Garbage

 

A few weeks ago, the city dropped off the new trash can. Last year, some rats chewed a hole in the bottom of one, set up house, and were eventually relocated to the landfill. Maybe we called about it, or maybe it was just garbage can replacement week, but in any case, now there's this snazzy new receptacle that says I have a Waste Wise Home. I am wise about so few things that this makes me puff up with pride. 

But alas, I am a data junkie and a skeptic, so I have trouble accepting accolades without knowing I've earned them. A quick look on garbage day confirmed that for a block in either direction, there are only two or three of these little trash cans, so maybe I am generating less trash than a typical neighbor. (Rolling the tiny trash can back down to the house, my burgeoning sense of pride made up the difference in volume.)

I don't have reliable figures for how much garbage my neighbors produce, and I don't feel like going down the road with a scale to find out for sure, but the EPA reports that nationally, 4.3 pounds per person per day is the average. We Americans apparently make more trash than actual products. We may be the value-subtracted champions of the world. 

But compared to 30 years ago, we at least recycle more, an average of 34%, say EPA figures. This means that the average person only produces 2.9 pounds of outright garbage every day. More or less what we threw out 30 years ago, as it turns out, so we seem to have increased junk production to keep pace with the recycling fad.

I don't know how big or small a pile 2.9 pounds of garbage is, and estimates in the weight/volume conversion game vary. New Mexico cites a hefty 225 pounds per cubic yard, King County (where Seattle lives) lists 177 pounds per yard, and Honolulu a mere 100 pounds (ah...I remember the lighter garbage of the tropics). My Waste Wise can holds 20 gallons, which is about a tenth of the 202 gallons contained in a cubic yard, so a full load equals somewhere between 10 and 22.5 pounds.

Sounds hefty, but four people live in this house, and garbage pick-up happens bi-weekly, which means the weight of the full can must be divided by 56 to yield pounds/person/day. Run those numbers, and you get somewhere between 0.18 and 0.4 pounds/person/day. This is about 10% of the alleged average output. I have a little bit of a smug grin right now. 

How is it that my family can be an order of magnitude lower than average? A big factor is that we compost almost all of our food waste. Other than occasional fowl bones, it all goes out to the back corner the microbes and possum buffet. 

Another factor is what we remove from the garbage portion of our waste stream. Our recycling bin is about twice the volume of the trash can, and although I have no figures, the percentage that is recycled--by weight or volume--has to be well over 50%. The table below (also from EPA) shows paper, glass, metal, and plastics amounting to 54.5% of total output. Except for a small portion of plastic that is not recyclable, almost all of the weight in these categories gets recycled around here. 

Of the remaining categories, there are a few that never make it into a trash or recycling container. Olympia offers food and yard waste recycling, but I covet my biomass, and either compost it or feed it to the wild-ish area in back under the alders. Wood? I cannot remember there being an occasion for wood to be thrown out; trimmings and windfall stay in the yard (the occasional larger alder ends up as embers under salmon), old furniture ends up being sold or donated, and leftover lumber from projects either gets stashed for future smaller projects, or turned into kindling. Leather, rubber and textiles? Pretty unusual for them to reach the discard pile. 

What's left is mostly plastic. The un-recyclable lids of containers, plastic-coated paper, and packaging. Some of what any modern American brings into their house inevitably ends up as garbage. Lots of packaging has no secondary use. There are things that will never qualify as hand-me-downs. The best way to deal with these is just to avoid bringing them into the house in the first place. Minimal packaging is a criterion when I shop. By growing some of my own food, I eliminate a bit more, and one of the benefits of canning is that those jars can last forever (take it from an archaeologist), and each time I use one that's one less can inthe recycling bin. I really should start making beer again, so I can pull the same trick with bottles...yeah, that's it, making beer is good for the environment. 

So, that's the lowdown on garbage production at this residence. Well below average, but it does not take much effort. At some point in the future, landfills will be mined for the minerals and petroleum-based products they contain, but until then, it would benefit us all to aim low. 

How low? Think personal. By filling the garbage can 26 times, I am producing somewhere between 66 and 146 pounds of trash every year. The EPA's figures indicate most people are pumping out just over a half ton; Americans are getting fatter, but even that is way more than most people weigh. If everyone aimed to produce no more than their weight, we'd see an 80% or more reduction in trash going to landfills, which would benefit is all (except maybe those future garbage miners).

Backroads: Habitat

Mmmm. Shoulder verdure.

Roadless wilderness is a sublime thing...I've been told. Like most of you, I've never been that far from some sort of road. Maybe I have a pretty loose definition (re-arranged lines of 'a'a lava that would kill any car, 'Opihi Road on Moloka'i, Grays Harbor County ruts sporting alder just small enough to barrel through, tire tracks through pastures,...the list goes on), but still, I've rarely been more than a couple of miles from a motor vehicle trail of some kind. Old rail grades, rotten remnants of corduroy, routes traveled once by horses iron or meaty--maybe little more than a scar on the land now, but evidence of prior human traffic nonetheless. Sometimes these routes are harder to walk, much less drive, than the non-road nearby, but the point is that these are not pristine, wild places.

And yet, nature always reclaims them. Weeds sprout (rudely or restoratively so? depends on your perspective, or maybe your human hubris score) into the most heavily traveled roads in the nation. Even if the DOT crews manage to spray them, still the undersides and crevices and shoulders support spores and seeds and all manner of microbial life ready to start the reclamation process again.

Until there is a verdure. I've driven enough places poorly traveled to recognize the progression: forbs climbed by vines pierced by seedlings topped by a relentless future that tunnelizes the road before erasing it entirely. As long as the road is still maintained, the progression stops somewhere along that line, but on the back roads I spend so much time driving, it has begun, and stands poised to pounce. The day after construction, the artery begins to narrow. Some growth happens between tire tracks, but the real action is at the boundaries of this incursion, flanks subject to constant attack as nature abhors the biological vacuum of exposed subsoil or fresh gravel. Grading, mowing, chainsaw work all sweep it open to one degree or another, but in fact all back roads are terminal patients, and the further out they are, the more reliant they are on extensive life support.

Or from another angle, they return to life support. The early succession plants feed critters from mice to moose. Tribes used to burn their trails and other clearings in the forest for exactly this reason, to provide forage. Where can the four-leggeds find something to eat? Not in the dark understory of decades-old trees, but there's plenty along the road shoulder mowed last fall. Eventually, salal and salmonberry establish themselves, setting out a berry buffet. Roads tend to track in weeds, it is true, but this includes blackberry and other species that despite their alien-ness (and maybe egged on by their invasiveness) quickly establish themselves as abundant food source for native animals. On each shoulder lies a line of edge habitat, between the flat barren road and the forest or field or sage beyond is a strip of ecotone, often with resources not available outside it. There may be a ditch in a dry land, a berm raised above swamp, some anomaly that creatures will recognize and exploit.

These back roads, the more remote of which only see the occasional vehicle, have been adopted by some of the wildlife for travel as well. In a park where they know they are protected, you can see deer and elk making use of the open paths, pausing sometimes until cars come to a standstill, but in wilder places the animals generally yield the right of way, bounding off in that moment when they can hear your truck, but before you see them. Bears make heavy use of the roads, much easier traveling than having to haul those big bodies through the woods (not to mention the berry buffet, always a sure lure for the ursine).

I'm not an advocate for more roads. There are too many already, and it bums me out to see the number of newer roads failing to make use of older road beds, adding insult to injury, braiding ever broader impacts. Something about sitting up on a D-9 makes a guy want to cut new ground, not dress up something pioneered long ago. Pressure from environmentalists and the First People mean that a new road now may be less likely to be an ecological disaster than a new one 50 years ago, but they still become scars. Culverts clog and become landslides sometimes, ripping far larger gashes in the landscape. Sadly, some of these are built for a single use, from the wagon roads built by the army and abandoned all in a few 19th Century years to the ones still built for a timber harvest that won't be needed for another 80 years or so (at which time the dozer operator will scoff at the design and rip open a new one).

But it is also a mistake to plan as if this will stop. Or to believe that we humans are so powerful that we've permanently ruined a placed by driving into it. We drive back to our homes, and the plants grow, the animals traipse and browse. Nature cushions the blow, eventually makes the road something only an archaeologist would recognize. She shrugs it off, beginning with the shoulders.

Cooookin in the Rain, I'm Cooking in the Rain

Warning, Objects in the grill-dome reflection appear fatter than they are.

Yeah, the title is stolen from a musical, even though I despise musicals in general. I do make an exception for Clockwork Orange, though.

Cooking out holds an almost completely opposite place in my esteem, as long as I am the cooker-man, and the few times I haven't enjoyed it can be blamed on inexplicably bad meat or unavailability of good wood. 


But not rain.


Which is good, living in Olympia, where fair weather grilling is not possible often enough to sate my hunger for smoky goodness. If I held off every time clouds threatened rain, or drizzle dropped, or outright downpours dampened the day, I'd be a sad shell of a man. If the Oxygen to H2O ratio is high enough to let flames get a hold of the wood, then I'm good to go.


Yeah, wood. I am not a modern American griller, weekend warrior with a thousand dollar gas grill or a humbler briquet bucket. I do not have a "Kiss the Cook" apron or feel the need to dress up in silly summery outfits. I have no fancy gear, and my grill was foraged on Large Trash Pick-up Day (prior to which, I had a little hobo set-up consisting of a few cinderblocks). But I am pretty particular about what I'll cook on.


Gas is an idiotic expense: somewhere far away somebody fracks the earth, refines the stuff, compresses and ships it, and charges me enough to make it grate on my homesteader soul, but not enough to really pay for the environmental damage. Besides: no flavor. 

And briquettes? Long ago when I used them, the lighter-fluid infusion bothered me to begin with, and the occasional appearance of nails and other foreign objects reminded me that yes, I was cooking something I would eat on a lozenge of ground up who-knows-what. I imagined the maker, a "legitimate businessman" (sarcasm implied, whether you want to take that as the mafia euphemism or just an indictment of capitalist worship of cheap raw materials) dumping old lumber covered in lead paint, bits of railroad ties, and all manner of toxic crap into the hopper.


A couple of times, I bought actual charcoal, the slow-burned nuggets of wood, crow-shiny chunks with fire enough left in them to cook. But again, my cheapskate DIY self just cannot abide the expense, even if I had the cash to spare. 


So I scavenge wood. In Hawai`i, I had a secret spot on Puowaina where kiawe (mesquite, more or less, to you gringos and chicanos) was there for the taking, and supplemented it sometimes with mango from the tree I'd trimmed. In Virginia, it was hickory from the back yard thinning. Here, it's alder, again from the back yard. I am on year three of the wood from a single big alder I took down, and now I know why the Indians would use the half-rotten, age-softened wood to smoke fish. The smoke is abundant and flavorful without being too acrid or overpowering. Saying so may mean that I cannot return to the south, but: it's better than hickory.


So out I go to find some windfall twigs and maybe some cedar splints to get the fireball rolling, adding on progressively larger pieces until the real chunks are going. All the while: running out front to pull some garlic and get it clean and diced, back to check the fire, in to flavor the fish and burgers, back out to check the fire and fiddle with it's air supply, in again to grab another beer, back out to spread the coals how I want them. Then bring on the food, and set to grilling. Often as not, I'll be talking with my sister, already fed and 3000 miles away, as the process unfolds. Nice long conversation, and the coals are ready. This is how I measure time; watches are for chumps.


The black dome not only lets me pull this off in the rain, but is an important tool in any weather. Opening and closing the vents below the fire bowl and atop the lid to regulate the air stream, sliding it askew or removing it entirely to let the oxygen river rage. The dome lets me be miserly with the heat, especially important when cooking something big, toward the end of the cycle as the coals are ashing out to nothing, and the food coasts in to done-ness. Beneath the grate, holding it off bottom-dom, are a half-dozen carefully chosen volcanic rocks that have soaked up heat during the conflagration, and radiate it back now. Thanks dad for teaching me the physics, and mahalo Hawaiians for teaching me how to choose rocks that won't explode.


Over the past couple weeks, we've had sunny days that demanded cooking out. Both times, rain has appeared, but was kind enough to let me get the blaze going before cutting loose. Dome on, I watched as the drops hit the black and vaporized instantly with a sizzle I could feel (if not really hear anymore), the lid never appearing wet, as in the photo above (see the little steamer?). As the fire stopped sticking out its tongues, as coals glowed softer, rain made shrinking circles of wet; I suppose I could calibrate evaporation time with temperature, but an intuitive sense is enough. By the time the dome has cooled enough that droplets have time to collect and rivulet down the sides, the food is done. Imprecise and variable according to conditions, but again, that's how I regard time: I want it to speed up and slow down, stripped the standardization that puts it in charge.


Because years from now I may forget, here is the menu as of late:
Burgers from local, organic, pastured beef (first ground beef in years, and it's retty good)
Steaks of local grass fed beef tenderloin (some people claim the leaner meat is harder to cook, and corn-fed fatty stuff is better, but people are lazy and stupid)
Burgers of mushroom, beans, garlic, and probably something else (wich I'd written it down, because the taste, texture, color and mouthfeel are better than any veggie burger I've ever eaten)
Sturgeon on a foil boat laden with olive oil, garlic scallions, and sea salt
New potatoes from the farmers market, same prep as the sturgeon

Even More Complicated Once You Smoke It?

Obama just echoed a sentiment familiar to Washington government workers, about the need to simplify government. His favorite example (for some reason, Barak was not g-droppin' tonight, and curt intellect never plays well to the dullards who sit in both chambers, so he went with the sincere-sounding emphasis of certain words, heavily voiced but soft, vocalingus), his favorite example of what needs to be fixed is that the US Department of Interior regulates salmon in Fresh Water, while the Department of Commerce deals with them in salt water. And then the punchline, "I heard it's even more complicated once you smoke it."

Indeed, as any smoker can tell you.

Now, given that the US courts have also ruled that the treaty tribes get 50% of the salmon. Plenty of tribes here spend a lot of resources on salmon, have hired a lot of the best fisheries scientists. Hmm. So the question arises, if the US gov and the Native people have equal shares, why not let them take the lead? It may not be that complicated.

As any fish smoker can tell you.

Salmon cooked over alder in the thick of a run, or smoked and enjoyed long after the mudflat critters had disappeared the last spawned-out carcass, is simply good. This fall I had some, courtesy of the Nisqually Tribe, and as the guys were cooking them, I was wondering what generation they were to be doing basically the same thing on this river. Not far away is a 5000+ year old site, which would be 200 generations at 25 years per. Could easily be a lot more. I'm going with that recipe.

Alls I'm sayin' is, if people could manage to feed themselves for that long, managing to have enough salmon come back year after year for thousands of years (before 20th century fisheries regularly wiped themselves out), maybe those people should not just be asked to offer an opinion on how the feds want to run fisheries, maybe it should be the other way around for a while.

So Mr. President, I feel your pain, I know how you want to look less governmenty, and I offer you this advice: Seize the salmon by his tail, and toss him to the sovereign Tribal Nations. Simplify government.

Windfall

Alder, scorned upon trash-tree of the Northwest. From irritating thicket to senescence in 50 years, too full of rot to make good wood most of the time, dropping stuff constantly to the dismay and disgust of homeowners. People like the firewood, but that's about it.

There were 7 of these in the yard when I moved in, and a half dozen left now. The other warmed the house and cooked many a meal since I dismantled it nearly a year ago. The buds are red and swollen as little monkey-butts right now, ready to unfurl into something much more beautiful. Sunny and warming quickly right as I write, so we could get leafage this very day.

But standing in the still frosty yard on a clear morning like this, what silhouettes itself against the bluetiful sky are the naughty bits: great dangling catkins ready to explode pollen, cones with their mysteriously beckoning little openings. Strangely enough, most people do not find this arousing in the least, they look up and think, "I'm gonna have to rake all this crap up."

Because yes, after the party is over, the confetti falls away forgotten. The alders are generous, and throw in twigs and branches, slough some lichen and moss. There are people who will bag it up and throw it out, or put it in the green-waste bin for the city to haul away.

But you know I wouldn't do that.

Being shiftless, I've never tracked down figures on how much biomass an alder pumps out on an annual basis. But the spring brings thousands of catkins and cones, spent or wanting to hop into seed-bed, raining residue from the great spawning. Some cultures, closer to the earth by history or just by dint, would recognize this as especially good mulch--leaves can insulate and make soil eventually, but the tree's reproductive organs may bestow fertility, life force. Even if you don't believe in that, there's the biomass, maybe a trace of minerals mined by the tree's roots, worm-fodder. Soil to be.