When I was a kid growing up in a trailer park in rural
Western Washington State, some of the best days were when my step-dad made a
dump run. Cedar View Trailer Park didn’t
provide garbage pick-up, so we took our trash to the dump every week or
so. This dump was old-school: no limits,
no guidelines, just back your pick-up truck to the edge - or in my step-dad
Tom's case, his light yellow Eldorado pick-up - and heave-ho. (Yes, I know it seems odd that we'd have a Cadillac Eldorado yet live in a trailer; my step-father had a series of interesting cars acquired through poker games, barter, debts collected; like the amphibious car we took to Westport so he could drive it into the water and watch onlookers gasp as he flipped switches and turned it into a functional boat. The effect was ruined, however, when the amphibious car stalled out and the Coast Guard had to tow my step-dad and his pals back into port. We also had a huge brown boat that we dubbed "the Ark" sitting in our yard for a few years that we joked would come in handy if the rain failed to stop come July.)
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| The way my step-dad *imagined* his Westport debut with the "Amphicar." |
What I liked about dump runs with my step-dad was that Tommy
was a born scrounger, one of those guys who could make something out of
anything, or sell it to someone who could.
When I got older, I wondered if Tom, from Minnesota, was Anishinabe or
Lakota. But my sister Annette DeLeonard
told me once that she’d heard Tom was a Traveler, a gypsy. He was very dark, as dark as my real dad,
with similar dimples and wavy black hair, dark brown eyes - handsome in a slick
way, and charming. He never seemed to
have an actual profession; he drove semi-trucks, towed and repaired trailers,
traded, bought and sold just about anything, and always seemed to have a dozen
"jobs" on the line at once. He
was the kind of guy who drove vehicles he’d bartered for down our little county
roads with grace and style, a cigarette in one hand and a Coke can full of beer
in the other.
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| Me and Tom: fishing trip. He'd gotten this little tear-drop trailer in trade somewhere. |
Once he had a job towing trailers across the border from
Washington State into Canada; he took my brother Kacey and me with him a few
times (I had my first taste of deep-fried prawns at a little café along the way
and decided this was absolute gourmet food) until our mom figured out that Tom
wasn’t so much transporting trailers as smuggling something IN those trailers,
and Kacey and I were along as innocent distractions for the border patrol. I guess nowadays, you'd call my step-dad a
con artist.
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| Rare photo of Tom, circa 1970? |
Anyways, I loved Tommy.
He was invariably sweet and kind to me, telling me I was “smarter than
the average bear” and bringing home candy or pocket change for me. He wasn’t exactly attentive, but he didn’t
have a mean bone in his body, and he was generous to a fault. On dump runs, while he checked out potential
scrounge-worthy trash, he'd let me rummage through the toys that had been
thrown away to see if anything appealed to me.
I know, right? Letting your 6 or 7 year old paw through a garbage
dump?! A kid's dream. I always found something - a naked doll, a
teddy bear, a chalkboard, a book or encyclopedia, some used watercolor paints
in a cool box.
One day I found a doll about a foot tall, completely made of
purple velvet fabric, with a real horsetail for hair. I learned how to braid hair on that doll, but
that's another story with an ending I don’t want to tell.
I'm thinking fondly of those dump runs with Tom because
today is Father's Day, and as I gave a friend a ride back to her apartment, we
passed a dumpster outside a large apartment complex. There, abandoned on the asphalt, was a
beautiful wooden dresser, and we could see all the drawers for it just flung
into the trash. Well, I had to look,
didn't I? Luckily my friend was just as
curious and gorgeously uninhibited. So
we parked, got out, and looked into the dumpster. UNBELIEVABLE! we said to each other: there's
an entire apartment in there!
We started with the brand new soccerball, for my friend's
grandson. Then we began seeing the really
good stuff: a whole bag of kitchen
cooking utensils, top-quality, even some fancy knives still in their
sheathes. Baking dishes and pots and
pans, glasses miraculously unbroken.
Unopened household cleaners. A
brand-new umbrella. An ironing
board. A hand-pieced quilt, for heaven’s
sake! “I’ll bet he broke his grandma’s
heart when he threw THAT out,” my friend said.
We figured it was a student, tossing out his apartment before leaving
town; or, a property manager stuck with emptying a student’s apartment. Either way, this stuff was primo
scrounge. We couldn’t believe no one had
taken this to Habitat for Humanity, or called the Good Will, or even – as good
manners around these parts dictate – just set it all outside the dumpster for
easy pickings. I mean, computer
speakers? Come ON!
“You know what the best part is?” my friend asked me rhetorically as I balanced
one of the dresser drawers on end so she could step up and lean over into the
bottom of the dumpster. “The best part
is, you think this is fun too. Thank you
so much! My daughter can use ALL of this
stuff!”
It crossed my mind then that perhaps a newly-minted Full
Professor shouldn’t be dumpster diving, at least not in her own university town. It crossed my mind that you can take the girl
out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the
girl. And it crossed my mind that for
five years, while my real father was in San Quentin far away, I had a daddy who
taught me a thing or two about surviving at the bottom of the economic
graph. And not just surviving, but
rising to levels of resourcefulness, creativity, and artistry that allowed me
to become the woman I am now. Yes, I am
a professor of English. And yes, I still
love a good dumpster dive now and then: something there is about perfectly good
household materials tossed out as trash that drives me absolutely fucking nuts.
No, I am no longer that needy kid whose family lived by the “skin
of our teeth,” as my mom used to say, but I know so many people who do – my friend,
her daughter, her grandchildren, all trying to live on incomes that qualify
them for food stamps, TANF, WIC and the food pantry. No, I have no shame about dipping into that
dumpster for that family, for the children who will be so delighted with that
ball, for the mother who will wash those blankets and treasure that hand-made
quilt and be grateful for a lamp in the bedroom.
And yes, though he was only in my life for five years, and
things didn’t end well between Tom and my mother, and even though he died of a
terrible cancer soon afterwards, that travelin’ man left his mark on me. Thanks, Tommy. Thanks for the practical application of
survival skills you taught me. I'll never know if you were Indian or Gypsy or any other ethnic combination. But I do know that you were a kind man who saw opportunity everywhere. I like to think some of that determination rubbed off on me, just a little bit. One man's trash, you used to say, with a grin. One man's trash.
