Rubbish

Rubbish - it is an enormous issue world wide.  I was just waking up to the issue when I originally wrote the main bits of this in 2001.  Remember,.. don't take anything I say as gospel, it is all just my view at the time.. and I was pretty, probably still am, quite naive as to the ways of the world.  There are so many layers to life. 

 

Garbage

        Hartley Bay is the first place I have ever been that had no roads.  There is no need for streets or avenues as there are no cars or trucks to drive on them!  Besides, to make a road you need solid earth, and the whole village is built on muskeg. The only way you can access Hartley Bay is by floatplane or boat and while the boats are big, they carry no vehicles other than ATV’s or quads. However, the fact that there are no roads doesn’t stop the locals from including the term in conversation.  I heard about the road to the lake almost the same day I arrived in Hartley Bay and was provided with directions such as ‘The Simons live across the road from Bell’ The local people had me pondering the fact that maybe there was a street somewhere that I just hadn’t been observant enough to discover.  But I was soon confident that this is not the case. 

        When the people of Hartley Bay speak of a road, they are actually talking about the boardwalks that join the town like the veins and arteries of the body.  These wooden structures curve and meander about the village, hovering above the muskeg in a variety of conditions, styles and sizes.  The boardwalks are almost always clear of any sort of debris, snow or ice.  However, down on the ground, lurking beside and underneath them, throughout the community, is always, the garbage.

        After spending so much time the previous year driving around Mexico, I almost felt as though I had returned to a third world country.  There is a different connection to the world; you are surrounded by the elements and while I was there, I could feel the spirit of the earth; it became part of my life, part of my being.  People and the way they interact with one another as well as the world, made me feel I was back in the south of Mexico, but here, there was money.

          This was not a third world country.  People in Hartley Bay had comfortable homes with modern appliances.  Most of the families owned boats and big toys like ATVs.  Health care was excellent, with a local clinic and a helicopter pad to fly out the more serious cases. Yet, people tragically treated their trash like my family had in the Kootenay’s in the 50ís and 60ís.  They threw it into the ocean, the river, or onto the side of the road.  Garbage flew out of the windows of boats, and even people’s homes.

            The First Nations People here don’t feel the ownership of things in the same way as I do.  One day one of my students was thrashing away on a branch that had stretched out over the boardwalk at my front door.  After listening to her wrestling with it for a while I went out to investigate. “Quit beating on my branches” I hollered and she stopped to look at me with amazement on her face.

            “They’re not your branches,” she stated resolutely, and I thought for a minute that she was referring to my interim position here in the community.  I was a guest and not really part of the village.  Even though I was in Canada, I was a foreigner.

        “They’re God’s!” she continued, expressing the sentiments of many of the people I was to meet. This was the first time I had run into this sentiment, but it was not to be my last.  The people of Hartley Bay, at least the common people, believe that the individual owns nothing: they use, they borrow, they enjoy, and they share!         

        This approach to things was also expressed in the life of people in Oman, as well as the community dwellers of Areyonga in Australia.  Nothing actually belongs to anyone.  We are all just visitors on this planet, how can we own anything? 

        This is reflected in the way things are treated, natural and man made. There is a sense that books, homes, and even the villages, are temporary.  I had believed First Nations People had great respect for nature, which in a way they do, but this does not mean they are careful with her!

        When I first arrived here I noticed that in general yards were unkempt and homes poorly maintained. They reminded me of the house I grew up next to, the rental property where people, usually on welfare, were just passing through and made no real attempt to change their surroundings, as they had no sense of ownership. 

        Housing in Hartley Bay, for the large part, is actually arranged similar to the welfare system.  I discovered that if someone needs a house, his or her name is put on a list.  When their name hits the top of the list and they are seen as the most is need of a house, they get one.  Hard work does not necessarily get anyone ahead.  It does not matter how hard one works, or how much of a contribution one makes to the community.  Decisions appear to be made on need or on whom you know; nepotism is alive and well. This is not how I was raised and the concept was new and hard for me to assimilate into my own construct of how the world works.  But it is certainly not new to the world.  It is a system that can work, but it does have its down side.

        The garbage; pieces of wood and other material used in construction, household goods, chocolate bar wrappings, are all strewn about everywhere.  Even the grounds I considered mine, around the teacherage where I lived, were littered with scrap material.  As the area off the boardwalks is muskeg, picking up anything that has fallen or blown off is, I discovered, not so easy as you may think.

        When I first arrived in Hartley Bay, the large wooden bin by my front door was full to overflowing as my home had been cleaned and painted in preparation for my arrival after the last teacher.  There were cleaning supplies, paint tins and other bits of garbage that had spilled out and on to the walk.  As this was to be my home for the next ten months, I decided to spend one sunny afternoon cleaning up the area in the front and behind my small home, where some of the crap had been blown or pushed into the muskeg.  I put on the gumboots, which I had purchased in Prince Rupert to wear on the boat, and jumped the three or so feet down off the walk and onto the lush green foliage.  Suddenly, I was sinking.  I was shocked as the earth opened up and began to swallow me; ever so slowly. The heavy clay enveloped my legs as I struggled and began to envision the headlines in the Rupert Paper about a teacher swallowed alive by the muskeg in a remote village on the B.C. coast. The ground was alive, I would never to be discovered; an unsolved mystery?!

       When I finally stopped sinking, I forgot about the garbage I was trying to clean up, and focused on escaping from the muskeg!  Using any of the trash within reach, once my enemy now my friend, to gain a more solid foothold, I was able to inch my way closer to the boardwalk from where I had jumped.  I was finally close enough that, using an old metal bucket, I could heave myself back to the safety of the solid wooden walkway.  I had escaped!

        However, on the far side of my house, I had noticed an area where the skirting had been ripped away and I could look down from the walkway see actual bags of household garbage.  Someone had placed the big black bags here!  Sometimes at night, real or imagined, I was sure I could smell the ammonia from old diapers wafting through the floorboards into my bedroom. 

         At first I believed it was my mattress and asked the school for a new one, spending the interim time in the spare room.  When a fishing boat arrived with my new bed, I placed the old mattress outside.  Before I had figured out how I was going to dispose of it, the mattress disappeared.  I imagine it showed up in someone’s home where a mattress was needed.

        While it seemed a bit better, the smell was still there; wafting through my room on warm windless nights.  I still hold these bags responsible, but learned to live with it.  A combination of fear of the muskeg and the fear of what else I may have found underneath the house, kept the bags safety tucked away for the entire time I was in the village.

        Hartley Bay did have a garbage-man, although he never did make it near my place for any sort of garbage collection, never mind fiddling around underneath my house.  He was a gnarly white guy named Doug.

         Doug was not native to the area, but had married a First Nation’s woman and been welcomed into the community.  He had a little John Deere four-wheel drive tractor with a trailer and was hired, although I never did figure out by whom, to pick up garbage from the large bins around town, or so was my understanding, and deliver them to a large land fill site created at the time of his arrival.  My large wooden box, right at my front door, full when I arrived and to which I had religiously added to week after week with coffee grounds and onion peels, just became more ominous by the day.  I soon became nervously suspicious that Doug was not going to pick up my garbage.

           By October I was really beginning to wonder what I had done that kept the garbage man away!  I had called the band office a number of times, and finally flagged Doug down and mentioned that I had moved in and my garbage was piling up.  By this time, the crows and ravens, with the help of the rain, had made the big, open topped wooden box into a soup of potato peelings, cardboard and tins.  It was

now, that things were totally out of control, that Doug informed me that he had received my messages; however, his garbage truck did not fit on the road past my place.  As well, he said, my bin wasn’t really a regular garbage bin as it had no bottom and so there was no way for him to lift it and get the material out of the bottom.  Made sense.  However, it would have been nice if I had known this when I moved in!

        Doug suggested that I take my garbage to another bin in the community and he would gladly dispose of anything from there.  The suggestion sounded simple enough, but the rest of the year turned out to be a garbage disposal quest!  Chris had joined our teaching staff by now and was living next door to me and facing the same problem.

          Chris Brauer was hired to teach grades ten to twelve, as Therese had found the grade nines enough of a challenge by themselves. I was thrilled to have someone next door, someone to share the day-to-day trials, especially this garbage business. 

          It was not only which garbage bin to use, but when!  The nearest bins were owned, apparently, by Health Canada and were not for teachers’ garbage disposal.  The cantankerous head nurse, not willing to confront us on the garbage issue face to face, had left a humongous note on the large bin, For Nursing Station Garbage Only!, after we used it the first time.

            Delivering the large bags of coffee grinds and leftovers to school was not a good idea as it meant placing the rubbish at the front door, using up a section of the only play area our kids had until the janitor was able to dispose of it.  In the meantime the bags were fair game for kids, ravens and crows to tear apart and explore, which not only made a mess, but allowed others to inspect the items.

           There was a bin by the Community Hall that was apparently not well sealed and often when I walked by I heard the rustling of rats or birds or dogs from the inside.  This old rotten container served   a great number of households already and was usually overflowing with ripped open bags spilling out their contents to cover the entire main intersection of the community! So, besides scaring me, it was just not a good location. 

        A container to the north of town, by Therese’s house was seldom picked up.  I spoke to Doug about this one and he said not to use it.  It had no bottom either.  He didn’t like to pick up garbage there.

        Thank God for Doug however!  I don’t want to imagine how it was prior to his arrival!  With no landfill site, there was no place to take the garbage.  On a walk behind the generator later in the year, I found a beautiful forested area on the waters edge, one of the few areas a person could actually walk on solid ground.  This was one of the locations that garbage, in years prior to Doug, had been thrown.  There was scrap metal and other skeletal remains littering that whole area. 

        Another popular disposal site, which was to reveal itself on my short walks, was a small creek running through town.  As metal and plastic pieces poked up from among the dense growth on either side, it spoke of past use and possibly even continued use, as a town-dump.  The paper spoke of current disposals and suggested that I was not alone in my garbage disposal dilemma.

          It was sad to think the river and the ocean were dumpsites both in the past as well as the present.  However, underwater video taken by a local biologist showed the devastating effect the garbage was having on the fish and other underwater life.  Fish, dead and alive, hung up in old netting, surrounded by discarded boat batteries, large pieces of glass, tires and other unrecognizable huge amounts of garbage littered areas where we don’t usually look.

        I still haven't really come to grasp the why of the garbage problem.  It wouldn't have been a problem before the white man came, but that was a while ago and so many white traditions, like video games and hamburgers, have been embraced.  Is it to do with passing responsibility over to God rather than taking it on ourselves? Is it the amount of packaging we use?  Do people just not care?  I don't know!   

            Garbage is a problem everywhere, but it is a very visible problem in far too many places.  I saw it in Mexico.  I saw it in Oman; but we were lucky to have enough people looking for work that there always seemed to be somebody willing to clean up after us for a few dollars.  I saw it in Alice Springs.  Even though the economy is largely tourist based, they don't recycle much there; beer cans and pop bottles litter the dry river beds as there is no place to collect your nickel or dime, even if they used that type of currency. It is not cultural, this garbage problem, but it is certainly a problem.   Again, I saw my role in this community as an important one.  I watched the principal of the school throw his McDonald's wrappers out the window of Qeenie as we traveled down the Grenville Channel.  The thinking is that the ocean is large, as so can take it.    It didn't occur to him to consider the behavior he was modeling.  I told him what I thought about it but he didn't listen, he wasn't my greatest fan anyway.  While the school should have been the best place to spread the word, it was not going to be the right place in Hartley Bay.

        But is providing education on an environmental concern like garbage really the responsibility of outsiders?  While I don't think we can force change, we do have a responsibility to educate by example, after all, it wasn't a problem until we arrived!   I cleaned up around my own bin and was sure to talk to the children about the importance of proper disposal whenever a teachable moment arose. 

         My own problem was never really settled, but when Health Canada bought some really nice containers part way through my stay, I felt strongly that the head nurse shouldn’t hog this entire garbage storage place for herself.  So, often under the cover of darkness, Chris and I would sneak out and unload our big black bags of garbage into containers that were easily accessible to both Doug and ourselves.