south end recycling
I live in a third world sort of place, kind of the Tijuana of Camano Island. Given that Camano is the Tijuana of Whidbey, it probably tells you all you need to know. My neighbors have discovered that when they want to rid themselves of a ratty sofa or an obsolete tube TV the size of a Volkswagen, they just drag the item out to the road, stick a FREE sign on it and next day, as if leprechauns had organized into teams, the goods disappear.
In other words we’re just passing our commodities hand to hand, neighbor to neighbor. Saves that trip to the dump if you don’t own a pickup and, let’s face it, saves the humiliation of trying to sell obvious crap on E-Bay or Craigslist that now self-respecting, fully functional adult would bid on. I’m all for this, by the way. South End Recycling: just plain old fashioned good stewardship, you ask me.
So when my next door neighbor hauled his 1970’s butt-ugly hide-a-bed and his busted microwave oven onto the shoulder, I figured the hazard to early morning, pre-caffeinated commuter traffic was offset by this Carbon Credit Swapping tactic. Sure enough, before any accidents ensued, the aforementioned items disappeared. All well and good…. The dead refrigerator on the porch, though, sat a week, the result of my neighbor’s laziness and poor signage. Nevertheless, one day it too vanished.
I was amazed and astounded. Until my bike ride around the Head the same day …. where the reefer was discovered unceremoniously dumped on a backroad in the nettles, not so noticeable to vehicular traffic, but a white billboard to me on a bicycle. To say I was pissed would be a gross understatement. I wanted to pound on my trashy neighbor’s door and UNLOAD not just my anger but the refrigerator too. But … I thought, unlikely as it might be, maybe this was someone else’s midnight discard. Plenty of folks who would rather haul stuff into the woods than pay a dump charge ….
It nagged me, though, it really did, that my boy next door would trash up my paradise. So finally I took some paint and wrote his address on the fridge door after hoisting the appliance upright where it loomed white and apparitional out of the gloom of the nettle forest. No great harm if I was wrong. Bullseye if I was right. The Skeeter Gambit.
The sheriff’s deputies noticed it the very next day, trained professionals that they are, and they stopped by my pal’s house and inquired if perhaps he’d reported a Missing Frigidaire. He had a cockamamie story, but next day when I checked at the dump, oh yeah, a refrigerator with an address on it was standing over in the appliance section.
If there’s a moral here, damned if I know what it is. But I’ll say this: before you toss your old stoves and iceboxes into some woods you think is remote, just leave it on the shoulder of the South End with a FREE sign on it. Apparently we can always use another appliance out on the front porch. Save you a lot of embarrassment with the Island County Sheriff.
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