“Have You Been Here Since We Switched the Pit?”

Our third trip out to the San Luis Valley regional landfill.

We spent six hours that Sunday cleaning the garage, knocking out old, rickety shelving, and sweeping and rearranging. We took another half-hour loading up the minivan with the demo’d shelving, plus the debris from last autumn’s kitchen remodel. Much of the time was spent hammering back the flesh-hungry fangs of countless nails bristling from the slabs of particle board and molding.

Fortified with surgical face masks and heavy gloves, we left for the landfill as soon as it opened on Monday morning. As always, I took my camera. There’s always something in that stretch of wide, rolling country between Monte Vista and Del Norte, Colorado, that catches my eye. This occasion was no exception.

This is the other side of the highway where we turn for the San Luis Valley Regional Landfill. I’ve often wondered what it’s like to live so far off the road in this picturesque distance.

Looking towards the landfill from the highway, just before the turn.

Looking out the passenger window on the way in, at one of the many delicate matchsticks holding up civilization in this high, windswept valley.

Man’s lines angle over nature’s landscaping.

So many gentle, wind-sculpted slopes held down by wildflowers and grease grass.

Crazy contrails.

Where Indians once hunted, poles and lines carry electricity across the wilderness.

Someone decided those lines would run all the way out there.

Then a bunch of people rolled all the way out in the middle of all this, and started digging postholes, and setting poles, and running wires. Miles and miles of wires.

“Have you been here since we switched the pit?” said the young woman working the counter at the check-in.

“Switched the what?”

It’s something they have to do from time to time, and the directions provided gave me the idea that getting to the new household dump location would be more trouble than it was. The way the route was set up, though, we couldn’t go any other way. We followed the narrow one lane path to a ridge on the far north end of the landfill.

Our lovely, scenic destination. They’ve done a fine job covering the old pit.

Zooming in on that scenery.

The view a little to the right, looking south.

Coming out to the landfill in the morning before the sun’s heat had a chance to warm up the biodegradable matter meant we didn’t need the masks. This proved fortuitous, as unloading the van took longer than I thought it would.

One thing I couldn’t bring myself to hurl with force into the pile of household waste were my two old and battered Bose 301 speakers.

I’d purchased these on New Year’s Eve 1986, along with a JVC amp and dual cassette deck with the insurance money I received upon my mother’s passing that year. This was the first stereo I ever owned. The speakers survived the obsolescence of the amp and deck, and two CD players. By the time I retired them in 2007 beneath the basement stairs of our house in Colorado Springs, they looked pretty much as you see them above. My now-grown children poked their fingers into the tweeter cores as toddlers. Indifferent military movers in Japan and Washington state broke the cases and tweeter covers. 

The speakers still worked, more or less, but they were an aesthetic disaster. I’d had them for 30 years, and in storage doing nothing for the last ten. No thrift store could sell them looking like this. So I set them down, took a last photo, and congratulated myself for letting another few pounds of useless junk go. They look no less forlorn here than they did sitting in my Monte Vista garage for the past year.

Everything we own, and eventually our bodies themselves will end up in a landfill of some description, discarded and forgotten. Cemeteries hold the remains of living bodies, but you’ll find the evidence of those lives as they were once lived in a landfill.

With my personal history thus unloaded, along with many heavy pieces of a kitchen and a garage for which someone else may have once entertained fond memories, we made our way out. Aside from some great distance shots on the county road, there were wildflowers and a gyre of hawks to see along US 160 eastbound to home.

Normally, I’m irritated when I accidentally get the radio antenna in the shot, but I like the way the antenna comes in at almost precisely one-third into the shot to complement the vertical lines of the utility poles in the middle-third.

I like the sense of vast distances conveyed in this shot. Note how the utility poles rapidly diminish in the distance towards that ridge where the cellular phone relay stands.

Looking north to the characteristically jagged Sangre de Cristo Mountains through the haze of wildfires blown in from several western states. After days of this, it finally started to clear away on 11 September, the morning we went to the landfill.

That blue you see cutting through the high, filmy haze is the first we’ve seen of clear sky in a while.

At the turn onto US 160. I took this because here you see two kinds of wildflowers that all but define the San Luis Valley, namely the yellow black-eyed Susans and the purple-petaled piñon asters.

So many hawks sharing one thermal, two miles outside of Monte Vista.

You see the road curve into the wall of trees marking the edge of Monte Vista’s western residential area, and it’s only a mile to home. Two miles past this point, and you’re out the east side of town and in a completely different landscape.