Coffee grounds and melon rinds, cereal boxes and disposable trays…
In those profligate times every purchased commodity seemed to come inside its own weight of packing material. The average family generated enough waste each year to fill home and garage combined.
Newspapers, magazines, and throwaway advertisements…
Even earlier, during the fight against Germany and Japan, Los Angeles mandated limited recycling to help the war effort. Citizens separated metals for curbside pickup. Bound paper was returned to pulp mills; even cooking grease was saved for munitions. Those few who weren’t glad to help still complied, to avoid stiff fines.
Milk cartons and paper towels… and never-used, slightly dented goods, discarded at the factory…
After the war, people found themselves released from decades of privation into a sudden age of plenty. With the crisis over, recycling seemed irksome. A mayoral candidate ran on a one-issue promise, to revoke the inconvenient law. He won by a landslide.
Peanut hulls, fast-food bags, and takeaway pizza boxes…
The hills dividing L.A. had been formed as the Earth’s Pacific Plate ground alongside the North American Plate. As the two huge, rocky masses pressed and scraped, a coastal range squeezed out at the interface, like toothpaste from a tube. The Santa Monica Mountains and Hollywood Hills were mere offshoots from that steady accumulation, but they helped shape the great city that eventually surrounded them.
Boxes from frozen dinners, boxes from new stereos and computers, boxes from supermarket produce sections, boxes, boxes, boxes…
Between the hills once lay little valleys of oak and meadow, where mule deer grazed and condors soared — ideal out-of-view spots for landfills. The regiments of trucks came and went, day in and day out. Hardly anyone noticed until quite late that all suitable and legal crevices would be topped off within a single generation. By century’s end flat plains stretched between onetime peaks, eerily lit at night by tiki torches burning methane gas — generated underground by the decaying garbage.
Beer and soft-drink cans, ketchup bottles and disposable diapers… engine oil, transmission fluid, and electroplating residue… chipped ceramic knickknacks and worn-out furniture …
Harder times came. New generations arrived with new sensibilities and less carefree attitudes. Pickup fees were enacted and expensive processes found to stanch the flow… to cut the flood of trash in half, then to a tenth, then still more.
And yet that left the question of what was to be done with the plateaus between the hills. Plateaus of waste?
Plastic bottles and plastic bags, plastic spoons and plastic forks…
Some suggested building there to help relieve the stifling overcrowding — though of course there would be the occasional explosion, and a house or two could be expected to disappear into a sudden mire from time to time.
The family pet, sealed in a bag… hospital waste… construction debris …
Some suggested leaving the sites exactly as they were, so future archaeologists could find a wealth of detail from the prodigal middens of TwenCen California. With an even longer view, paleontologists speculated what the deposits might look like in a few million years, after grinding plates compressed them into layers of sedimentary stone.
Tires and cars, broken stereos and obsolete computers, missing rent money and misplaced diamond rings…
It might have been predictable, and yet few saw the answer coming. In a later day of harder times, of short resources and mandatory recycling, it was inevitable that those landfills should draw the eyes of innovators, looking for ways to get rich.
Iron, aluminum, silica… nickel, copper, zinc… methane, ammonia, phosphates… silver, gold, platinum…
Claims were filed, mining plans presented and analyzed. Refining methods were perfected and approved. Excavation began between the ancient hills.
Into a past generation’s waste, their desperate grandchildren dug for treasure.
The garbage rush was on.
• EXOSPHERE
So now Teresa was a hero, and a recent widow. No combination was more appealing to the masses… or to NASA press flacks, whose attentions she welcomed like an invasion of nibbling rodents. Fame was a pile of dumpit she could live without.
Fortunately, operational people had her for several weeks after the Erehwon disaster. Teams of engineers spent from dawn to dusk coaxing every bit of useful description from her memory, until each night she would fall into bed and a deep, exhausted, dreamless slumber. Some outsiders got wind of the intense debriefing and railed for her sake against “gestapo grilling tactics” — until Teresa herself emerged one day to tell all the well-meaning do-gooders to go fuck off.
Not in so many words, of course. Their intentions were fine. Under normal circumstances it would be cruel to scrutinize a recent survivor so. But Teresa wasn’t normal. She was an astronaut. A pilot astronaut. And if some all-knowing physician prescribed for her right now, the slip might say — “Surround her with competent people. Keep her busy, useful. That will do more good than a thousand floral gifts or ten million sympathy-grams.”
Certainly she’d been traumatized. That was why she also cooperated with the NASA psychers, letting them guide her through all the stages of catharsis and healing. She wept. She railed against fate and wept again. Though each step in grieving was accomplished efficiently, that didn’t mean she felt it any less than a normal person. She just felt it all faster. Teresa didn’t have time to be normal.
Finally, the technical types had finished sifting her story to the last detail. Other questioners took over then — center chiefs, agency directors, congressional committees. Masters of policy.
Sitting next to Mark at hearing after hearing, Teresa felt waves of ennui as she listened to the same praise, the same lofty sentiments. Oh, not every public servant was posing. Most were intelligent, hardworking people, after their own fashion. But theirs was a realm as alien to her as the bottom of the sea. She was sworn to protect this system, but that didn’t make sitting through it any easier.
“They talk and talk… but they never ask any of the real questions!” she muttered to Mark, sotto voce.
“Just keep smiling,” he whispered back. “It’s what we’re paid for, now.”
Teresa sighed. Anyone in NASA who refused her turn in the public relations barrel was a slacker who did real harm. But why did your smile-burden multiply whenever you did something particularly well? Was that any way to repay initiative? If there were justice, it’d be Colonel Glenn Spivey and the other peepers forced to sit through this, and she’d get the reward she wanted most.
To get back to work.
To help find out what had killed forty people. Including her husband.
Instead, Spivey was probably in the thick of things, helping design a new station, while she had to endure media attention any Hollywood star would swoon for.
As weeks passed, she began suspecting there was more to this than just an awkward overlap of two cultures. They kept urging her to do chat shows and go on lecture circuits. Or, if either she or Mark wanted to take off on a two-month vacation on St. Croix, that would be all right, too.
Tempted by a chance to graduate from astronaut to superstar, Mark succumbed. But not Teresa. She was adamant. And finally she asserted her right to go home.
A domestic service had come by regularly to water the plants. Still, the Clear Lake condo felt cryptlike when she walked through the front door. She went from window to window, letting in the listless, heavy-sweet smells of Texas springtime. Even traffic noise was preferable to the silence.