I can imagine the
scene. The boss is away in town, his
young son is momentarily in charge of the workshop perched on the side of the
hill. He and the equally boyish workers
combine in an unusual spasm of communal
hilarity. It takes four of them to hoist
the massive tractor tyre, nearly five feet across, upright, and to roll it slowly through the double doors at the back
of the building. For a moment it teeters
on the edge of the concrete ledge; they give it a last concerted heave, and it
bounces down a short slope, across the grassy terrace, and disappears over the
bank. The boys whoop as they listen to
it crashing down and down through the forest, smashing yellowwoods and draesena
palms, sending robins and louries startling into the air, setting even the
baboons on the next ridge barking in alarm.
Then silence.
The lads high-five triumphantly
and turn back inside the oily booming barn that houses Ocean View Motors, to
decide what to do with the rest of the tractor.
Most likely, once they’ve stripped it of useful parts, they’ll shove the
wreck into the bush somewhere, too, as with other carcasses of worn-out Holdens
and Morrises and Mercs.
I imagine this all
happened the same day as I was born, a thousand miles to the north. It’s at least possible, since the lid of the
dustbin I inherited from the workshop and still use today is stamped with the
year of my birth.
And the tyre is
still there, a hundred yards down the hill from my flatlet attached to that
same, now empty, workshop.
“The abandoned car body rotting quietly in the landscape is alive with
the activity of corrosion, it’s become a habitat, it looks perfectly at home,
it’s both organic and machinic. The
shifting and contingent meanings for waste, the innumerable ways in which it
can be produced, reveal it as not essentially bad but as subject to
relations. What is rubbish in one
context is perfectly useful in another ... disenchantment stories deny the
complexity of waste...”
That’s from Gay
Hawkins’s provocative book, The Ethics of
Waste. One of our Master’s students
is also working on a literary angle to waste, focusing on American novelist Don
DeLillo’s gargantuan, sprawling, bewitching work, Underworld. This teeming,
Dickensian novel is largely populated by characters who work in the USA’s
massive waste-disposal industry: a landfill designer at Fresh Kills, New York;
a painter turning discarded B-52 bombers in the Arizona desert into artworks; a
restaurant owner dumping excess food.
Nuclear waste seethes in secretive silos; a freighter loaded with toxic sludge wanders the world, rebuffed by every port. All this, in DeLillo’s depiction, constitutes
the underworld of our modern, shiny, capitalist enterprise, our adoration of
machinery and bling – junk everywhere, threatening to overwhelm us.
One of DeLillo’s
waste-disposal characters is Nick Shay, who deals with, amongst other stuff,
radioactive waste. Of burying nuclear waste
in a Mesozoic salt-bed in Texas he says:
We were waste handlers, waste traders, cosmologists of waste. ... It
was a religious conviction that these deposits of rock salt would not leak
radiation. Waste is a religious
thing. We entomb contaminated waste with
a sense of reverence and dread. It is necessary
to respect what we discard.
No respectful religious
fervour amongst my imaginary tractor-tyre boys, I warrant. But DeLillo seems to be saying that if we don’t
learn to re-value our waste, we will likely be buried by it. Many creative people turn waste into art
these days And of course the poor have
always valued and re-valued waste. Most
of ‘my’ car-wrecks have been hacked up and carried away on donkey-carts to be
sold on into the Far East’s scrap industry.
But – along with the
bits of rubber door-linings, the broken glass, the twisted shards of chromium
fenders left behind – that tyre is still there.
With its robust metal hub, it probably weighs half a ton. One would have to carve a whole road through
the forest with a front-end loader, uproot a hundred trees, to get it out
again. It is destined, in short, to remain
there forever.
With Hawkins and
DeLillo in my mind, I look at it again.
I sit and just watch the sun-dapples shift across it as the day rotates
above the thirty-foot treetops. It may
not look “perfectly at home”, in Hawkins’ phrase, but it has certainly become a
habitat. Half a dozen different species
of plant have taken root inside its hub, each with its differently-shaped
leaves. Some have the tiniest mauve
flowers, around which flit a couple of interested butterflies, nondescript brown
until sunlight sparks a royal purple sheen off their forewings. Tiny reddish ants, translucent in sun, are
journeying purposefully back and forth along the stem of a creeper with
trifoliate leaves that hugs the tyre’s edge.
On rhoicissus leaves nestled against its side, caterpillars are designing
new Le Mans racing circuits with their jaws.
And in the two-inch wide chasms of the tyre’s treads, miniscule spiders
have engineered their webs and snares; one has already wrapped in silk some
unidentifiable prey, probably an embalmed larder for its eggs.
Brown-and-white
droppings mark the tyre as a staging-post for certain birds. And it’s a handy perch for a fastidious cat.
And there are still
more subtle inhabitants. Multiple
species of mould breed in the slushy leaf-litter, vital fungi that will serve to
transport fluid from earth to roots. Even
on the orange paint of the hub, algae have established tiny unexplored continents
of green. Little rosettes of blue-grey
lichen fleck the rubber surfaces. And
some kind of moss has found congenial the miniature pits in the rubber, frosting
almost the complete tyre with a patina of luxurious green. Were it not for the unnatural symmetries of
the treads, the thing would look almost like it belonged.
Another odd thought
occurs. Unlike other loose tyres I’ve
found in the forest, this one’s still locked to its hub, and so cannot harbour
rainwater, breeding-ground for mosquitoes and sundry other creatures. Perhaps it’s still full of air. Perhaps that air is as old as I am:
fossilised breath. Stashed in the hub are
some old bottles, green beer-dumpies – and also a small pharmaceutical
phial. It’s slightly distorted, as if it
had been blown by hand; there’s a smudge of russet residue of the original contents in the bottom; and its screwtop is still solidly sealed. Maybe it, too, contains air from the year of
my birth. What would happen if I opened
these decades-old vessels, and gulped their contents? Release into the world some lethal toxin we
are not ready to fight? Or might I
regain the youthfulness of my own first breaths?
The tyre’s
foreignness still bulks ineradicably in my mind. There is no embossed writing on it to
identify its maker, but it could be, say, Massey-Ferguson, or Dunlop. I wonder, then, about the origins of its
components: steel from Pittsburgh for the hub; rubber from Brazil; chrome oxide
in the yellow paint mined in the Congo; lead from Canada. My forest has been internationalised – but is
also re-wilding and re-valuing the invader.
Nothing will be quite the same as it was before, but the natural processes
also move on, enveloping it, just being themselves.
We can no longer be complacent about the effects of the
waste we daily generate. I am suspicious
of the retort that “Nature will eventually take care of it” – that’s an ethical
cop-out. But in this case? Nothing to be done, really. I call the cat, and we head for home.
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