We continued up the hill.
It was not a real hill, the kind made by God, time and the rumpling of tectonic plates. It was the outer rim of the man-made basin dug to hold Hannawa’s garbage. The slope was smooth and even, like the wall of an ancient earthen fort. We were on top in only a minute.
The landfill stretched out to our left-a prairie-like expanse of tall grass sprinkled with scraggly shrubs and trees. I’m no judge of space, but I bet it covered twenty or thirty acres. We turned to the right, toward a line of shaggy pines. As we walked, Andrew told me how the landfill had been constructed. “Landfills are like big bathtubs,” he said. “The first thing engineers look for is a good hydrogeologic setting, a nice mass of unfractured bedrock that won’t leak into the groundwater. They dig out a big bowl and put in a bottom liner, sometimes clay, sometimes high-density polyethylene, sometimes both. This site unfortunately has just clay.”
As Andrew described the landfill, his entire demeanor changed, his voice and his eyes and the way he held his head. Maybe he was a goofy boy with blue hair on the outside, but inside resided a smart, serious, self-assured man. I could see why Gordon chose him over all those other candidates. “You really know your stuff,” I said.
The boy in him blushed. The man in him quickly recovered. “As the garbage is dumped, it’s covered with layers of clay, sand and gravel, and finally a layer of topsoil and grass-not just for aesthetic reasons, but to keep rainwater out. But of course water does get in, and picks up contaminates as it filters down. They call that contaminated water leachate. It’s collected at the bottom of the basin in pipes and pumped out.”
“It’s hard to believe there’s sixteen years of garbage bubbling away down there,” I said. “It all looks so tidy on top. So peaceful.”
My naivete made him smile. “Despite all the science, and all the care, all landfills fail to some degree. This one included. Liners crack. Pipes clog. Roots and animals drill holes through the cover soil. People get lazy. Budgets get cut. Too much water washes in. Too much leachate leaks into the surrounding environment.”
“Garbage in, garbage out?” I quipped.
“True enough,” he said. “But then where would we archaeologists be without garbage?”
We reached the shaggy pines. And Gordon’s dig site.
Just below the rim of the landfill was a dome-shaped mound, maybe 500 feet across. “That’s the old Wooster Pike dump? I don’t recognize it a bit.”
“That’s it,” Andrew said. “The old dump road you remember came along right where we’re standing now. When the city built the new landfill they left the old junk right where it was. Covered it with dirt and threw a little grass seed around. Then they dug the new landfill basin alongside.”
“They didn’t make any effort to clean up the old dump?”
“Nope. They just covered it over and forgot about it. Which is great for us. There’s a hundred years of wonderful old stuff under there. A real time capsule.”
We headed down the slope and waded into the tall grass atop the mound. It was knee deep, cold and nasty, choked with the rotting stems of last summer’s goldenrod. “Professor Sweet lobbied the city for three years to get permission to dig here,” Andrew said. “He finally got it in 1999. But it was a couple more years before the dig actually started.”
My foot hit something. I started to tumble. Andrew caught me. “Careful, Mrs. Sprowls. There’s a stake every ten feet.”
“Booby traps for nosy old women?”
“Grid posts for nosy archaeology students,” he said. He dropped to his knees and pulled the grass away from the offending stake. It was about a foot high. Square. Marked with faded black letters and numbers that made no sense to me.
“What’s that gibberish?” I asked.
“Coordinates. Archaeology is very precise. Where something is found is just as important as what’s found. So before you start digging, you mark off the site in a grid pattern. You establish perpendicular baselines running north to south and east to west. Then along those lines you stake out digging squares. You excavate square by square, carefully recording what you’ve found, in what condition, at what depth, in what environment. Carefully boxing up the stuff you want to keep for later study.”
We continued through the grass, Andrew high-stepping like a moose, me stepping very carefully, like a pink flamingo. “It would take forever to dig up the entire dump, wouldn’t it?”
“Just about,” Andrew said. “Professor Sweet only dug for twelve weeks over the summer-ten or fifteen students working in teams of two, each team hoping to finish one ten-foot block-so, yeah, it would take a while to excavate the entire site.”
We reached the center of the mound and started down the other side. I could see now the twenty squares or so that had already been excavated and then re-covered with dirt. Lumpy and weedy. “It looks like my vegetable garden,” I said.
He offered me a weak smile and continued: “Officially Professor Sweet was studying the eating habits of postwar American families. He called his summer course Digging the Fifties: The Roots and Realities of Conspicuous Consumption. But he’d joke that he was just an old beatnik reliving his wasted youth-at the expense of his students. ‘Your parents’ tuition money, your hard labor and my boyish joy,’ he’d say.”
“Do you think he was really joking-or really telling the truth?” I asked.
“I think he was really doing both,” he said. “Archaeologists, if they can manage it, work in the historic periods that fascinate them the most.”
The wind was picking up. I zipped my jacket as high as it would go and pulled in my neck like a snapping turtle. “You consider the 1950s an historic period, do you?”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “No offense, but, yeah, I do. Treating the recent past like the ancient past is what the field of garbology is all about.” He gave me a primer on the subject: “The guru of the whole movement is Dr. William Rathje of the University of Arizona. He made his bones studying the burial sites of the ancient Mayan Indians. Then in the early seventies he started the Garbage Project. He applied modern archaeological techniques to studying present-day waste in landfills. He studied what households were buying and discarding. What impact modern consumption habits were having on the nation’s health and on the environment.”
I felt a few sprinkles of rain on my face. I dug the plastic rain hat out of my pocket and pulled apart its accordion-like folds. I wrapped it around my head. I can only imagine how ghastly I looked. “Well, it sounds like a lot of fun,” I said.
Andrew was much too young to carry emergency rainwear with him. He let the drops soak his hair. “It’s also a lot of hard work. Tedious work. In order to get to the stuff from the fifties we have to dig down through the garbage from the sixties and seventies. And there was a lot of garbage in those decades.”
“How well I remember.”
My joke went right over his head. “And you can’t just toss the stuff from the sixties and seventies aside,” he said. “It’s got to be sorted through and cataloged just like the fifties’ stuff. The way you draw conclusions about one decade is to compare it to other decades.”
“That makes sense.”
He had more: “And the layers of garbage aren’t predictable. Garbage was dumped and bulldozed. Older stuff pushed up, newer stuff pushed down. So it’s easy to get decades mixed up.”
I tried another joke. “You’re telling me.”
That one sailed as high over his noggin as the first one.
We circled through the excavated squares, as if there was actually something to see. The raindrops were getting fatter. “You think it’s really necessary to burrow into stinky landfills to learn that America is happily eating itself into oblivion?” I asked.
“Perception is an important tool, but it can’t hold a candle to a trowel,” he said. “There’s a big difference between what people consume and what they think they consume.”