Documenting the Removal Chain

Calvin Trillin once described his wife's belief that "if your child is in a school play and you don't go to every performance, including the special Thursday matinee for the fourth grade, the county will come and take the child." While Alice Trillin's policy covered "pageants, talent shows, revues, recitals, and spring assemblies," its application to sporting events wasn't specified. Still, I think of this whenever I miss a soccer game -- a frequent occurrence last season, when I worked most Saturdays. Andrew, as Coach, was present at every one of Simon's games, thus ensuring that our son would not end up in state custody, but it bugged me all the same. This year I was determined to get my Soccer Mom status reinstated... and yet I've fallen off the wagon two weeks in.

I'm pretty sure missing a rainy soccer game counts double in the Trillin formula -- and missing a rainy soccer game your child's team loses 3-2 in the final two minutes is exponentially worse. Missing said game in order to go see a bunch of hipster geeks explain their arty high-tech exploits in lilting Italian accents has got to be well nigh unforgivable. Nevertheless, that is precisely what Josie and I did this morning.

A group of researchers from MIT's SENSEable City Lab, were at the downtown library presenting their project Trash / Track, which involves soliciting garbage from Seattle's citizenry, tagging it with electronic sensors, having the owners dispose of the refuse as they would normally, tracking each item on its post-useful-life journey, and then displaying the results in real time at the Seattle Public library for a month (through October 11th, I believe). The panel also included representatives from Waste Management, Inc. and Seattle Public Utilities, two of the project's sponsors.

We enjoyed hearing about the technical side of the project: How do you make an electronic tag that won't be destroyed when it's crushed in a garbage truck? Why use cell phone tower triangulation instead of GPS technology? And the idea of revealing the "removal chain" that takes our possessions away when we no longer want them seemed like a crucial environmental lesson. (I was reminded of a camp cook I encountered in my youth who announced, in response to a question about throwing away food scraps in the dining hall, that "AWAY is a place that DOES NOT EXIST!") Kristian Kloeckl of MIT noted that some items -- like paper coffee cups -- have such a brief useful life compared to their production, storage, and disposal journeys, whereas others serve us faithfully for decades before being sent into the waste stream. Our neighbor Linda blushed at this: we both had paper coffee cups in our hands, but she had actually brought a ceramic mug in her purse and then forgotten to hand it to the barista... D'oh!

But my favorite part was the philosophical discussion concerning the "unstable boundary," as Mr. Kloeckl described it, between useful possessions and garbage. "That moment when something becomes trash is determined by us," he said. "It's not something that happens to the item itself all of a sudden." He pointed out that sometimes the arbitrary nature of this decision is recognized by the disposing party. "When you see furniture left out on the street, it's clear that someone has decided that it is garbage. But they also know someone else might come along and reverse that decision, and give that sofa or chair a new life."

I thought of the many, many times that switch has flipped in my head, turning potentially useful items into trash. Sometimes the transition occurs on a fairly predictable schedule: what was on November 1st a highly prized bag of Halloween candy transforms, around Thanksgiving, into an annoying source of sticky fingers, tooth decay, and crumpled-up foil wrappers -- and out it goes. Other times it's more of a split-second moodswing: I'll pick up those uncapped magic markers off the kitchen floor and put the lids back on seventeen times, but then the eighteenth time sends me over the edge and I pitch them all, without even bothering to test which ones have run dry. I've been known to toss a half-broken toy into the garbage, dig it out again with every intention of fixing it, and then dump it again a month later when that delusion finally sours.

With a boundary as unstable as this, it can be mighty dangerous to make the decision to throw something away on someone else's behalf. (Which is why poor Andrew is constantly tripping over three-year-old school dioramas, half-finished papier-mache projects, single badminton rackets, and outgrown children's clothing he feels powerless to dispose of.) I'm still processing a particularly tricky surrogate Trash Or Treasure determination I took part in recently.

The dilemma was brought on by the mysterious arrival of a life-size papier-mache orca whale at the entrance to Orca K-8 on the morning of September 8th. It was an impressive object, no doubt. But it had clearly seen better days.


Nobody at the school seemed to have any idea where this battered creature had come from, but there was general agreement that it should not remain beached at the school's entrance, leaking crumpled up newspapers from the several gashes in its sides. The next day was the first day of school, for Pete's sake. The call went out: can someone come get rid of this thing?

Now, I myself have produced more than my share of enormous papier-mache objects. I still think of them fondly, in most cases (those basketball-sized radishes for the 1998 Farmers Market parade entry were particularly fine), but I also recognize that unless you've got a warehouse, barn, or hangar of your own, giant papier-mache is, like sandcastles and teddy bear pancakes, a temporary art form.

Still, someone made this thing, for some reason (I'd still love to know why). And brought it to Orca (also a mystery, though I suppose it makes a kind of literal sense). Whether this delivery was born of desperation after the orca was forcibly evicted from the garage by an irate spouse, or out of the proud hope that our school would adopt the creature and give it a new life somehow, we may never know. Amid this uncertainty, someone made had to make the call, and they did. (It's too bad we hadn't heard of the Trash / Track people yet -- I have a feeling they would have appreciated the opportunity to tag this particular item.)


While I supported this community decision, I have some small, lingering doubt about the ethics of throwing the orca away (or wherever it is now headed) without even knowing who made it. And so I would like to convey the following message to the person and/or people who worked for days snipping & shaping chicken wire, wadding up newspaper stuffing, cutting out cardboard tail & fins, glopping on layers of wheat-paste-soaked newspaper, and painting the whole thing black and white with unwavering attention to detail:

Please know that we admired your remarkable creation a great deal, and so did all the people who did double takes as we drove through the neighborhood with its head flopping out the back of our pickup. Before we shoved it over the rail into the pit at the South Transfer Station, we paused to send a silent message of thanks for all the pleasure it must have given you and others during its former life, whatever that entailed. We offered up a prayer that its Creator would understand that the time had come to let it go -- and that you might even find some small measure of relief in knowing that it is now on its way back to the Earth.


P.S. Message to the Tigers: I'll be back next week to cheer you on, promise!