God's Country

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.