Can't Get Dirt
~ This article first appeared in the Leader-Vindicator newspaper. ~
For the better part of a month trucks laden with earth have been passing in front of our farm, turning right to cross our property, and dumping the fill in a neighbor’s rock pit. I realized the pattern quickly and started to take significant interest when I comprehended the volume of material being moved. Good, clean fill is hard to come by, and we can use some behind our barns. I would very much like the opportunity to stabilize the yard and expand my composting operation into the space. Such an addition will enable me to accommodate and transform significantly more organic waste that is otherwise destined for the landfill. The redirection and reuse of refuse is a good thing for our community, I believe.
Hark: The opportunity is right in front of us. Sometimes good things do land in our lap.
Except our lap is simply serving as a bridge. No dirt shall enter the compost yard.
I learned this by making a flurry of phone calls to ensure that the dirt was indeed being dumped simply for the sake of putting it somewhere; there is no other immediate purpose for it, and the neighbor doesn’t mind a bit if we take some.
The guy in charge of the dirt relocation is in agreement that we have a fine spot for dumping. In fact, it requires no more of a logistical adjustment than turning the dump trucks left instead of right. His drivers are capable of the maneuver. They’ve made plenty of left turns throughout their career. Large boasts are likely made regarding who has the best left turn in his repertoire. Alas, such skill will not have the opportunity to flourish, for it is illegal.
An agency of conservation, you see, wants to make certain that things of environmental nature are conserved. So they’ve devised an ingenious plan of paperwork so extensive that it takes hours of someone’s time to fully and completely explain that this material will be placed very specifically right here and nowhere else. Inspectors must inspect to make sure everything is copasetic according to the paperwork. To deviate from the paperwork is to deviate from conservation. And they have this great big government backing them up, ready to punish anyone who does not comply. The guy with his left turn capable drivers isn’t willing to undertake the effort of moving the dumping location from one side of the road to the other. So, in the name of sensible conservation, I watch heavy trucks drive past an opportunity, across our property, and into a waste pit where the paperwork agrees that conservation is taking place with maximum efficacy.
This ridiculous situation exemplifies the destruction of community ties. People within a locale cannot communicate with each other because at every junction there is a bloated third party that must be appeased. I have made grand mistakes by communicating to somebody through somebody else; the message gets screwed up. It’s a stupid thing to do even though it often feels easier. Yet our whole society is founded on just such stupidity. Our systems of order have matured into disengaged referees, building walls where none should exist and dissolving others that help maintain peace.
It is no secret that there is an underlying stress affecting peoples’ moods. Everyone is baffled in one way or another by the grinding tide of “the times”, whatever that means. Politics are in serious upheaval as increasingly extreme attempts are made in a desperate attempt to find relief. Relationships, too, are unstable.
We’re told it’s the hot button issues causing our stress, and if we simply tackle those we’ll be good. On the contrary, division ensues. The truth is we’re all stressed because we can’t talk to each other anymore. We can’t sort out the nitty-gritty and arrive at personal agreements because at every step of the process we’re not talking to a person about a specific situation, we’re screaming at a third party that can only enforce systemized sweeping reform that isn’t fit for most of the people it’s reforming.
I have to remind myself constantly that frustrating and foolish bureaucracy existed through George Bush and Barak Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden (it goes back farther than that but frankly I can’t remember it). Despite radically different viewpoints, none of these administrations did a single thing to empower the population’s ability to work things out amongst themselves. It would’ve been just as illegal for the dump truck to turn left in 2018 as it is today. That takes most of the shine off election month enthusiasm for me.
The ability to make a decision, good or bad, represents absolute power. Every time we make something legal or illegal we lose some of that power. Every time we make something legal or illegal we lose the ability, in one way or another, to ask a guy with a dump truck to help fill in behind the barn. Sometimes I think the only people who recognize this power are the politicians themselves, so they put on their snazzy suits and garner the majority’s support to make a few more rules that, this time, will definitely make a difference for you and me.