OT re. Walt:
Getting the dirt at the dump
Fodder for columnist: Sad stories and scandals are waiting to be discovered at the Yellowknife landfill
David Staples
Edmonton Journal
Broken marriages. Corporate inefficiency. Sexual escapades. Government bungling.
All of these usually hush-hush matters can be easily found out at the garbage dump. The doings of a city, an entire society, come to light there.
This is the belief of Walt Humphries, 51, a Yellowknife, N.W.T., prospector and artist who writes the most unusual newspaper column in North America. The weekly column in The Yellowknifer is aptly called Tales from the Dump. It's all about the doings at the northern capital's nuisance grounds.
The dump is the place to get the scoop on what's going on, Humphries says.
"You're the first person in town to know a lot of stuff because it shows up at the dump first. You know what people are moving in town. You know what businesses are folding.
"You can work almost anything into a dump story because almost everything ends up at the dump. Sometimes I think I'm going to run out of things to write about and then I go to the dump and there's something that just inspires me."
There's stuff at the dump, he says, both to salvage and write about, as the disposable society pushes full steam ahead. "Nobody seems to repair anything anymore. I've seen lights thrown out at the dump, when all you had to do was change the light bulb in them."
Humphries is in a unique position, it seems, to answer an age-old question: Which is more wasteful, big government or big multi-national corporations?
"It's everybody," he says. "It's people. It's government. It's business. It's epidemic."
Visiting the dump is a way of life in the North, Humphries says. While many big city dumps are closed to human scavengers, materials are so rare and expensive in the North that people like Humphries have long been allowed to go into the Yellowknife dump in search of useful goods. To help the salvagers, the dump has a recycling area, where truckloads of junk and trash that might be of use to someone are first deposited, before being plowed into the permanent landfill.
Humphries' journalism work came about in the mid-'90s after he started calling in tips to the newspaper. For instance, there was the time the Northwest Territories government threw away hundreds of perfectly good and valuable maps. After the story ran in the paper, everyone from pilots to prospectors came to the dump to grab up the maps.
Waste in the North is particularly bad, Humphries says, because it costs so much to ship stuff out of Yellowknife. When a family leaves the North, rather than pay the enormously expensive cost of moving things, they'll often just throw them away. "Some days you go to the dump and it just literally looks like someone emptied a house and just threw all the stuff in the dump: pots and pans, clothes, paintings on the wall."
Things that don't sell at a yard sale end up at the dump. Same with things not sold when a business fails, and with food and materials not used by exploration companies. Government ministries chuck out filing cabinets, computers. After a fire at a store, rather than sort out what's damaged or undamaged, Humphries says a store owner will sometimes toss it all for insurance purposes.
He doesn't usually name names or hammer a particular individual or business in his column. He says if one person is doing it, a dozen others are doing it as well, so why single anyone out? Still, his column is slowly changing things, pushing both businesses and government to be more careful.
Humphries himself takes some of the stuff he finds to the local women's shelter. He also delights in tracking down items that might be adored by people far away. He's come upon obscure old-fashioned board games and radio tubes, then found homes for them over the Internet.
Recently he got a parka from the dump. He always finds topsoil. He's got a few antiques. He's found X-rated videos, sex toys and nude pictures of ex-girlfriends.
In Humphries' dream dump, a store would open to sell off used clothing and furniture. Cans and bottles would be recycled. Soil would be salvaged, lawn clippings turned into compost. Paper and wood would either be recycled or burned as fuel. "We cut down forests to make products, ship them all the way to Yellowknife, and then we bury them in a hole in the ground. It just seems ludicrous."
One of the strangest, but most predictable things he's seen at the dump comes after a couple breaks up. "If it's the man that leaves, then the woman packs up his golf clubs and tools and all his stuff and takes it to the dump. And if it's the woman that splits, then all of a sudden all her clothes and all her stuff is out at the dump."
But the saddest stories in the world are told at the dump, too.
"I've found photo albums where you see a couple, you see them getting married, and you see the kids, and you see the kids up to age five or six, and then the album ends up at the dump. You think, 'Someday, someone somewhere is going to really want to have those photographs.' And they're lost."
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