It had all started with the first sign; bold black letters against an American flag that said, "You Don't Dump in God's Country." From there they sprung up all over the county. NO BFI. Not In My Backyard. BFI Go Home. Clean Up Your Own Damn Mess. It was a populist uprising against an East Coast waste management company called Browning-Ferris Industries that had won approval from the county commissioners to build a landfill in Greenwood Country for places like Baltimore and New York City to dispose of their trash.
Rumors swirled that the board had been bought off. There were recall elections being planned and one couldn't enter a grocery store, restaurant or barber shop without hearing an impassioned conversation taking place. There were concerns about water pollution, wear and tear on the roads from giant trucks constantly transporting trash, and especially at the horror of being downwind from the trash of millions of New Yorkers, in a place where the winds tended to howl.
But to us, the young, the whole thing was a joke. It was humorous to see the old folks fighting and yelling at one another. We laughed at the dilapidated homemade signs. We drove down gravel roads, finishing off cheap beers and tossing the cans from the windows of our pickup trucks. The person who had just littered would become the target of our mock anger. "Hey man, what are you doing? You don't dump in God's country."
God's country.
That killed us.
We looked around for miles and saw the same thing in every direction - flat yellow fields decorated with spindly trees, fat stupid cows and weather-beaten houses. Cars stood around in various front yards as if they had washed up in a flood. The air often smelled of dying oil wells intermingling with pig shit. The football team lost every game.
And who was BFI anyway? For those of us who dreamed of getting out, the idea of all of the East Coast's trash being brought here seemed almost exotic. Maybe something would rub off on us by breathing in the stink of their disposed culture.
We laughed at our own culture, teasing the Native American kid by telling him the community wanted to kick his mom out of town.
"What the hell are you talking about?" he'd ask.
"Haven't you seen the signs in the yards, man? No BFI? Don't you know what that means? No Big Fat Indians."
If I'd had an ounce of the sophistication I thought my community lacked, I would have understood how amazing it all was. Within months the commissioners who had voted for the project had been removed from office, recalled and replaced. BFI was told to go to Hell. It was a giant environmental victory. The kind of thing that Matt Damon might make a movie about. The 5th poorest county in the state of Kansas had defeated a giant East Coast corporation by coming together as a community, by standing up to corruption and saying no to pollution.
I'm out on the East Coast now and I have no idea where my trash goes. If I want to see a glimpse of nature these days I have to fight traffic for two hours. Every time I see a fat cow standing in a field it's a little miracle.
I still can't help but laugh sometimes when I think of that defiant little sign that started it all. God's Country. But maybe you don't see it that way unless you deserve to.
Dec 29, 2013
Dec 20, 2013
One Hundred Feet in The Sky
It is 1998. Glenn and I sit atop the water tower overlooking the town we live in, Hamilton, Kansas. It’s a small town with a two-lane highway that splits it right in half. The joke is that if you are driving down the highway looking for Hamilton, don’t blink or you’ll miss it. From up here, about 100 feet in the sky, you can see the top of the only grocery store in town. You can see the gas station, the post office, the bar, the restaurant and the small white-washed, brick high school Glenn and I graduated from one week ago. You can see the square yellow fields that surround the town like crooked quilts, and the cows, Lego cows from up here, grazing the pastures. There are not too many trees around but where you do see them, they grow in long twisting lines that follow the paths of the small, clear streams and heavy green rivers that flow through the land. If you think about it hard enough, you can smell the wet mud on the banks. You can smell fish.
What does it sound like? It’s quiet. You can hear dizzy little birds chirping, and the buzz of something – mosquitoes, flies, gnats. There’s always something that needs to be swatted away. Also, someone, somewhere, is using a weed eater – it’s pitch distinctively higher than a lawn mower. Someone is working on a car – someone is always working on a car. It starts. It dies. It starts. It dies. It almost starts. A wrench clinks onto a cement driveway. Most of the driveways here are gravel. Maybe it’s not a wrench. Maybe it’s dominoes clicking around on the table at the gas station where the old men sit around in overalls and play. There’s a basketball somewhere too, pounding on the ground. Or maybe it’s a hammer. A dog barks now and then. And there is always a semi, echoing down the highway. It is hot.
Our legs dangle over the empty city park. The grass is lush but might as well be iron spikes from this height. Glenn spits and watches it break apart toward the ground like cluster bombs. He says, “I shit you not David, I’d be surprised if we live to see another Christmas.”
Glenn has been talking like this for about three Christmas’s now. “Davey boy,” he says, “if you wanna survive when all the shit goes down, you best find me. We got guns buried in the hills outside town.”
I say nothing as a giant breeze of hot air rumbles through the trees and threatens to take the baseball hat off my head.
Glenn looks out over the town and says, “They probably won’t even waste bullets on your sorry asses. Probably just knock you over the skull with the butts of their rifles or stab you sons-a-bitches in the heart.”
“You’re an idiot,” I say to him, readjusting my University of Kansas hat I picked up on a campus visit, bending the bill to keep out the sun.
“We’ll see who the idiot is when you’re dead or they make you a slave,” he says.
Glenn is referring to the New World Order. It has something to do with gun control; the army at some point is going to swoop in, bust our doors down and take all our rifles and shotguns away. Black tanks will storm the cities and black helicopters will invade the sky – Glenn has already seen the helicopters floating above, scoping us out. The U.N. is involved. Bill Clinton is in on it. The media too. It is the end of the world as we know it. Millions will die; the survivors will become slaves to the One World Government takeover.
“The shit will go down, I promise you,” he says.
“And it makes sense for them to come to Hamilton first,” I say, looking over at Glenn and patting his flat-top haircut. “Cut the head off the beast. Start with the brains of the operation.”
Most people are completely oblivious according to Glenn. You can find some chatter about it on the Internet but you have to know where to look. A couple talk-radio guys bring it up now and then. Glenn’s family for the most part know about it. His grandfather is the one who told him about it in the first place. His cousin Jake knows but has his doubts it’s going to happen quite as soon as Glenn thinks. This is the debate that rages on for those in the know. Will it happen sooner? Or later?
Glenn wants me to know. He thinks I’m worth saving, I guess. He’s shown me the proof. We have looked through pages of a magazine called Soldier of Fortune. We have flipped past pictures of the things for sale – laser scopes for your automatic rifle, infrared night goggles, armor piercing ammunition – to the back pages where the letters are. Most of the letters are apocalyptic rants and tips for protecting yourself from the N.W.O. Once when I asked Glenn what the N.W.O. was, he replied, “New World Order, dipshit.”
Glenn is huge. Like six feet, four inches, huge. Two-hundred-and-fifty-pounds, huge. He looks like one of those professional wrestlers who wear the one-piece spandex suits because they’re too fat and hairy to go shirtless. The ones they seemingly pull off of the street in order to lose to the big name star. There is always black spit dried in the corner of his lips, his t-shirts and on the hairs of his chin from the heaping wads of tobacco he shoves in his mouth. The t-shirts he wears always have pictures of animals on them – deer, bears, elk – and usually mountains in the background. There is always the name of some Western state – Colorado, Montana, Wyoming – emblazoned underneath the pastoral scene. Places Glenn has never seen. When he’s not talking about the N.W.O., he can be found cleaning his guns, poaching deer from the inside of his pickup, or driving aimlessly around town talking to truckers on his CB radio. His handle on the CB is “Big Dick Daddy.”
I have many good times with Glenn. We’ve known each other since kindergarten. My first-grade teacher put us in the same reading group because, as she said to me in private, I could help him. Once, when our class was really into trading baseball cards, one of my classmates duped Glenn into giving up a valuable Willie Mays card his grandfather had given him for some no-name Cardinal’s pitcher. It was one of those hologram cards and Glenn believed that a card that displayed technology was far better than an old and faded one. His mom complained to our teacher and we were banned from trading cards from there on out. Glenn never got the Willie Mays back though.
What we did most together was play basketball. He was actually quite good but mainly because he had always towered over the rest of us. He could miss three shots in a row but still get the rebound every time until it finally went in. He loved playing basketball.
Over the years though, Glenn has changed. He has gone from the likable kid who was bigger than everyone, behind academically, and easy to boss around, to an oafish and unkempt and sort of belligerently intimidating person.
The truth is, Glenn is my cousin. Second cousin. And while I don’t relate to him on any level, it’s impossible not to feel responsible for him in some way; feel like him in some way. And not just because we are related but because we are both lower-middle class, because our fathers do manual labor for a living, because we live no more than four blocks from each other, because I was duped out of a pretty good baseball card once too. When we are at a party together and he spits on himself or fires his rifle in the sky when an airplane flies over, I cringe because I know in someway that I am the same thing as him.
“What are you going to do with yourself now that school’s over Glenn?” I asked looking down at grass the below.
“I’m gonna get prepared for the fight,” he says.
“What about a job?”
Glenn gets quiet and spits. Most of it lands on his t-shirt, right on the bear’s face. “What do you think I’m going to do? Pump gas or flip fuckin' burgers. What the Hell else is there to do around here?”
A green pickup drives by on the road next to the park. Glenn makes a gun with his thumb and finger. Aims. Fires.
“Not that getting a job matters anyway. Not when there’s a war coming.”
What does it sound like? It’s quiet. You can hear dizzy little birds chirping, and the buzz of something – mosquitoes, flies, gnats. There’s always something that needs to be swatted away. Also, someone, somewhere, is using a weed eater – it’s pitch distinctively higher than a lawn mower. Someone is working on a car – someone is always working on a car. It starts. It dies. It starts. It dies. It almost starts. A wrench clinks onto a cement driveway. Most of the driveways here are gravel. Maybe it’s not a wrench. Maybe it’s dominoes clicking around on the table at the gas station where the old men sit around in overalls and play. There’s a basketball somewhere too, pounding on the ground. Or maybe it’s a hammer. A dog barks now and then. And there is always a semi, echoing down the highway. It is hot.
Our legs dangle over the empty city park. The grass is lush but might as well be iron spikes from this height. Glenn spits and watches it break apart toward the ground like cluster bombs. He says, “I shit you not David, I’d be surprised if we live to see another Christmas.”
Glenn has been talking like this for about three Christmas’s now. “Davey boy,” he says, “if you wanna survive when all the shit goes down, you best find me. We got guns buried in the hills outside town.”
I say nothing as a giant breeze of hot air rumbles through the trees and threatens to take the baseball hat off my head.
Glenn looks out over the town and says, “They probably won’t even waste bullets on your sorry asses. Probably just knock you over the skull with the butts of their rifles or stab you sons-a-bitches in the heart.”
“You’re an idiot,” I say to him, readjusting my University of Kansas hat I picked up on a campus visit, bending the bill to keep out the sun.
“We’ll see who the idiot is when you’re dead or they make you a slave,” he says.
Glenn is referring to the New World Order. It has something to do with gun control; the army at some point is going to swoop in, bust our doors down and take all our rifles and shotguns away. Black tanks will storm the cities and black helicopters will invade the sky – Glenn has already seen the helicopters floating above, scoping us out. The U.N. is involved. Bill Clinton is in on it. The media too. It is the end of the world as we know it. Millions will die; the survivors will become slaves to the One World Government takeover.
“The shit will go down, I promise you,” he says.
“And it makes sense for them to come to Hamilton first,” I say, looking over at Glenn and patting his flat-top haircut. “Cut the head off the beast. Start with the brains of the operation.”
Most people are completely oblivious according to Glenn. You can find some chatter about it on the Internet but you have to know where to look. A couple talk-radio guys bring it up now and then. Glenn’s family for the most part know about it. His grandfather is the one who told him about it in the first place. His cousin Jake knows but has his doubts it’s going to happen quite as soon as Glenn thinks. This is the debate that rages on for those in the know. Will it happen sooner? Or later?
Glenn wants me to know. He thinks I’m worth saving, I guess. He’s shown me the proof. We have looked through pages of a magazine called Soldier of Fortune. We have flipped past pictures of the things for sale – laser scopes for your automatic rifle, infrared night goggles, armor piercing ammunition – to the back pages where the letters are. Most of the letters are apocalyptic rants and tips for protecting yourself from the N.W.O. Once when I asked Glenn what the N.W.O. was, he replied, “New World Order, dipshit.”
Glenn is huge. Like six feet, four inches, huge. Two-hundred-and-fifty-pounds, huge. He looks like one of those professional wrestlers who wear the one-piece spandex suits because they’re too fat and hairy to go shirtless. The ones they seemingly pull off of the street in order to lose to the big name star. There is always black spit dried in the corner of his lips, his t-shirts and on the hairs of his chin from the heaping wads of tobacco he shoves in his mouth. The t-shirts he wears always have pictures of animals on them – deer, bears, elk – and usually mountains in the background. There is always the name of some Western state – Colorado, Montana, Wyoming – emblazoned underneath the pastoral scene. Places Glenn has never seen. When he’s not talking about the N.W.O., he can be found cleaning his guns, poaching deer from the inside of his pickup, or driving aimlessly around town talking to truckers on his CB radio. His handle on the CB is “Big Dick Daddy.”
I have many good times with Glenn. We’ve known each other since kindergarten. My first-grade teacher put us in the same reading group because, as she said to me in private, I could help him. Once, when our class was really into trading baseball cards, one of my classmates duped Glenn into giving up a valuable Willie Mays card his grandfather had given him for some no-name Cardinal’s pitcher. It was one of those hologram cards and Glenn believed that a card that displayed technology was far better than an old and faded one. His mom complained to our teacher and we were banned from trading cards from there on out. Glenn never got the Willie Mays back though.
What we did most together was play basketball. He was actually quite good but mainly because he had always towered over the rest of us. He could miss three shots in a row but still get the rebound every time until it finally went in. He loved playing basketball.
Over the years though, Glenn has changed. He has gone from the likable kid who was bigger than everyone, behind academically, and easy to boss around, to an oafish and unkempt and sort of belligerently intimidating person.
The truth is, Glenn is my cousin. Second cousin. And while I don’t relate to him on any level, it’s impossible not to feel responsible for him in some way; feel like him in some way. And not just because we are related but because we are both lower-middle class, because our fathers do manual labor for a living, because we live no more than four blocks from each other, because I was duped out of a pretty good baseball card once too. When we are at a party together and he spits on himself or fires his rifle in the sky when an airplane flies over, I cringe because I know in someway that I am the same thing as him.
“What are you going to do with yourself now that school’s over Glenn?” I asked looking down at grass the below.
“I’m gonna get prepared for the fight,” he says.
“What about a job?”
Glenn gets quiet and spits. Most of it lands on his t-shirt, right on the bear’s face. “What do you think I’m going to do? Pump gas or flip fuckin' burgers. What the Hell else is there to do around here?”
A green pickup drives by on the road next to the park. Glenn makes a gun with his thumb and finger. Aims. Fires.
“Not that getting a job matters anyway. Not when there’s a war coming.”
Dec 15, 2013
As True as I Remember
I spent the first eighteen years of my life trying to make sense of the world in a place that was cut off from it. Though I am a product of the eighties, the popular culture of that decade went virtually unnoticed in that impoverished corner of southeast Kansas. I spent much of my youth with my head pressed against a radio speaker trying to hear the words and songs on a station out of Kansas City that faded in and out like the beacon of a lighthouse in a storm. A city that I along with most now regard as a perfectly nice Midwestern town, not particularly special; at the time was a transmission from another planet. I watched movies set in New York, San Francisco, Paris, London, and thought, are those places real? And, how would I ever get there? Then, one day, I got there.
Now when I try to describe where I come from, people look at me like the alien I felt I was back then. Sometimes I feel as though I have travelled in a time machine from a land without cable television, where we chained up our dogs outside, burned our trash in big metal cans in the backyard, hid away from monstrous storms, learned to drive on gravel roads and thought Kansas City was exotic. For the first eighteen years of my life I looked out at nothing but bare pasture dotted with cattle and skinny trees. From where I sit now in my Washington, DC apartment where I've lived for several years, I can see the Washington Monument standing over the rooftops of row houses. As David Bryne once asked, "How did I get here?"
From the Nation's Capital I look back on growing up in a town as idyllic as Mayberry, where we played under the streetlights without fear, caught fish and lightening bugs and got drunk under and on the glow of the stars. A place I also watched come apart at the seams when methamphetamine introduced itself - a place with no sustainable economy, no resources, an undercurrent of religious fundamentalism along with failing schools; a dying place where far too many died young. I will try to make sense of it here. Some of it may have faded from memory or become confused with dreams, but I will do my best to tell it as true as I remember.
Now when I try to describe where I come from, people look at me like the alien I felt I was back then. Sometimes I feel as though I have travelled in a time machine from a land without cable television, where we chained up our dogs outside, burned our trash in big metal cans in the backyard, hid away from monstrous storms, learned to drive on gravel roads and thought Kansas City was exotic. For the first eighteen years of my life I looked out at nothing but bare pasture dotted with cattle and skinny trees. From where I sit now in my Washington, DC apartment where I've lived for several years, I can see the Washington Monument standing over the rooftops of row houses. As David Bryne once asked, "How did I get here?"
From the Nation's Capital I look back on growing up in a town as idyllic as Mayberry, where we played under the streetlights without fear, caught fish and lightening bugs and got drunk under and on the glow of the stars. A place I also watched come apart at the seams when methamphetamine introduced itself - a place with no sustainable economy, no resources, an undercurrent of religious fundamentalism along with failing schools; a dying place where far too many died young. I will try to make sense of it here. Some of it may have faded from memory or become confused with dreams, but I will do my best to tell it as true as I remember.
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