The Dump

As we wait at the gate, an angel stands off to our right – welcoming us. She is flanked by two frogs. A light beckons us forward past a tin man and a cowboy as we enter. We are stopped and asked one question before being told which direction to go.

This isn’t St. Peter, these aren’t the pearly gates, and this is not an account of an acid trip. We’re at the dump. Thankfully, we aren’t banned from this place – yet.

The frogs are ceramic and came from the home of the cashier. The angel appears to be cement. She’s missing her hands but who needs those when you have wings? The other two figures are fashioned out of tin cans. Everything but the frogs came from the trash.

Together, they are an unlikely accent to the nondescript building with the drive-on scale in front. Here, incoming customers weigh their vehicles with their trash before discarding it then pay for the difference on their way out.

We make the pilgrimage when our truck’s bed reaches overflowing and if it’s winter – when we can get her down the driveway. Neither of us like to drive Bridgette through the snow but my husband takes garbage duty seriously.

Like a commercial farmer, he’ll scour The Farmer’s Almanac, monitor the weather reports and eyeball the shrinking drifts until he’s satisfied with the amount of bare ground peeking through. Then it’s time.

I woke up this morning to the announcement that this is garbage day. I put my boots on while my husband stomps the trash flat then help him secure the load with a spider net. During the drive, I make sure the wind doesn’t cause us a yard sale going 55mph.

Once at the dump and after having been told where to go, I spot while my husband backs the truck up to the pit.

The pit is a long, rectangular cement trench where people discard their broken tables, bulging garbage bags, plastic plants, shoes, clothes, small appliances, and paintings. If you can walk out of the front doors of Walmart with it – you can find it here.

While the old farmer’s dump we discovered on our hillside was comprised of made-to-last objects mixed with later-era disposable items, the artifacts lying in this enclosure are all throwaway. Human behavior, however, remains constant. We once saw the remains of a huge rear projection TV with the words “This is for your boyfriend!” spray painted across the shattered face.

While my husband hefts the bags into the chasm, I see bald eagles hovering over a hill of old tires. Their presence here, as with the angel,  seems incongruent with the air of brokenness and waste.

There are drop-off spots for used oil and scrap metal. Recycling is downtown. I wonder to myself, where does all of this stuff go, then we’re done and back in the truck.

Feeling like new, we roll up to the cashier’s window, now going out rather than in. We pay as the Tin Man and The Cowboy smile blankly at us and we pull out.

As we round a corner, I look into the rear-view mirror and swear I see the angel wave goodbye. Then I remember that she doesn’t have any hands.

Modern Day Horse Care

It’s a hot July afternoon and my husband and I have just dropped our truck Bridgette off for another “makeover” at our local mechanic.

As we walk up the street past a State Patrol vehicle waiting for maintenance, a stream of expletives erupts from the rear wall of the shop. We turn and look back at the edifice, then at each other appreciatively.

Not every mechanic has this kind of passion.

As we speculate about the nature of the injury, another volley punches a hole through the distant sounds of traffic coming from the main thoroughfare. We glance around and are thankful we’re back a couple of blocks.

This must be a doozy. Strangely, we find the barrage reassuring.

While a lot of people buy a new vehicle when faced with larger car repairs, we fix what we already have rather than buy a whole new can of worms from the lot down the street.

We figure about a third of our beloved 1986 Ford F-250 (Bridgette), and the Durango (The Mountain Goat), is still original. At least we know what’s under their hoods and who did the work.

Bridgette’s “curb” appeal is increasing with her years but it comes at a price. Think of Aunt Alice needing a hip replacement. You wouldn’t spare a dime although her personality hasn’t aged as well. The comparison assures me I’m going to hell as I feel I may have offended the truck.

We’ll be expecting “the call” after Bridgette is inspected but thinking of automobiles as indispensable modern day horses eases the impact. The usual presence of law enforcement vehicles outside the shop also helps; they appear to have a government contract for maintenance.

We climb into the Durango and head out, knowing Bridgette is in good hands. Besides, we think; if it’s good enough for the State Patrol, it’s good enough for her.

Chasing Bridgette

Bridgette is my husband’s other woman.

I’m not even jealous because she’s a part of our family. She’s heavier than me but stronger and she’s willing to take the garbage out. Unfortunately she’s been sitting in one spot for over a year now.

You might say she’s lazy but Bridgette is our 1986 Ford F-250 pickup truck and my husband is very sentimental about her. She might need a new engine. We’ll see.

My husband acquired her in a moving-out deal and she pulled us and our trailer from our old to our new home and throughout our three-month journey in-between in 2017. Bridgette The Truck

To me she has a personality – she reminds me of a horse.

That summer, she threw a shoe (got a flat), leaving us to camp on the side of the road for three days while the tire store put seven hundred dollars into matching replacements and a rim . She lost her brights right after we pulled onto the freeway in torrential rain on our final journey over the mountains and across the state to our new home. I had to drive the whole night with the low-beams on.

Her driver’s side window wouldn’t roll up that night and we had to pull out the door panel in order to manually push the glass up so I wouldn’t freeze for the drive.

We were told by her owner that she had a hole in her front gas tank and to not fill it up too much or it would leak. Her defrost was broken, and her four-wheel drive mechanism busted the first winter we lived here leaving us to walk and/or push her through the slightest of slippery conditions.

But we love her. Especially my husband.

That’s why we’re contemplating putting so much cash into replacing the engine.  We had the other repairs done last year before catastrophe hit and we limped her home for the wait.

Our driveway recently dried up enough for someone to come and get her so we called the repair shop a couple of days ago and made arrangements for an inspection. This morning we called the tow company.

When he arrived, I told the driver I was writing about it so he took the time to describe how a vehicle is secured as he hooked her up. He backed up and slid brackets under the tires before hoisting the rear end up then wrapped two chains around both axels to keep the truck from “jumping” out on the bumps.

Bridgette has a manual four-wheel drive lock so he disengaged it from the drive train so as not to drag her to town. He wrapped the driver’s seatbelt around the steering wheel at the top and locked it into place to keep the wheels facing forward. He stuck red lights onto Bridgette’s hood that complimented her running lights quite nicely.

The driver asked us if they were expected in town, we said “yes”, and off he went with our beloved beast.

Then we called and found out the shop was closed. What if there was no place to park the truck? What about the keys?

We freaked out and jumped into our car and sped after Bridgette.

Down the hill we went and sure enough, we could see the white speck that is Bridgette about a mile ahead of us on the straightaway towards town. Trying not to speed, we caught up to her at a railroad crossing a couple of blocks away from her destination.

The driver was positioning Bridgette in a vacant spot behind the shop by the time we’d parked and I hurried over to explain but there was a key drop-box and it really wasn’t a big deal after all. I thanked him for putting up with my incessant talking and picture taking and we left her to wait for her turn on the lift.

What we do depends on the estimated grand total – repair or not?

I’m willing to have another woman around as long as she sleeps outside.

Bridgette The Truck

We saw her in town yesterday; tucked in among the other vehicles being serviced at the auto mechanic. Only her tail end sticking out, we could tell she was feeling fine with her nose in the oats while they fixed her innards. I swear she has a personality and that she was standing up especially tall;  her bed crammed and bulging with a huge load of stinking garbage.

My husband and I were on our way to the dump with a half year’s trash when she started acting up. We had to turn around immediately and get her back home. My husband made an appointment with a shop right away but rather than empty the carefully compacted and piled-high garbage, he decided to take her in just as she was.

It was summertime and she sat at the shop for two weeks with that garbage baking away in one-hundred degree weather, waiting for her turn. They had her on the cancellation list so she waited at the curb across the street but then they moved her closer to the shop. Every time my husband would see her in town, he would cringe and mutter something about how “I couldn’t help it, I was on my way to the dump when she got sick”. I just point and laugh.

She’s supposed to be ready today. I’m popping the popcorn and grabbing my soda. I’ll be  hunched in a dark corner of our car, eyes darting back and forth, watching the doings as my husband picks her up. I want to know the obvious; how bad was the stench and are they going to give him grief about it? Will we ever be able to get the smell out?

Bridgette is a 1986 Ford F-250 pickup with a 460 engine and some Edelbrock under the hood. She is my husband’s other woman. He says she is sexy. I sometimes slip up and call her Gertrude or Gidget or whatever comes to mind but I always apologize to her immediately. She’s a good girl and has done us well. I don’t want to be on her bad side.

My husband acquired her as part of a deal where we helped a guy move out of his house. The man no longer had room for her and was in a pinch so Bridgette was offered as part of payment for the job.

She was covered in green moss and her back was full of refuse when we first saw her.  My husband took soap and a toothbrush to her lines and hosed out her backside. A friend of ours gave her a once over with a tuneup and took her for a nice blast down the street, burning rubber. Man that engine is tough! I’m a chick and I even think she’s bad-ass.

She has also been indispensable.

She steadfastly delivered us and our trailer over the mountains from our temporary summer home near Snoqualmie Pass over the nights of September 17th and 18th, 2017 and they were memorable.

The moment we decided it was time to hit the road, it started raining. We packed her and the trailer up in a deluge. It was evening when we finally hit I-90 and headed up the fairly steep grade toward the pass. Then her headlights suddenly began to flicker on and off and panic ensued.

We had to pull over on the side of a major interstate. Thank God traffic was light. We popped the hood and messed around with the various wires, looking for something obvious that may have come lose. We found a wire coming out of the battery and tightened it and got the wagon train moving again. Everything was fine until I turned on the brights. That was the problem; the brights wouldn’t stay on.

We stopped at the pass for gas and messed around with the wires some more without any luck . I had to role up my driver’s side window which meant breaking into the door panel of the truck and manually pushing the window up. The decision was made to drive the rest of the trip over the night with only the low beams. I was driving and I couldn’t see much past the short strip of light so our trip turned from about a 7 hour to an 11 hour voyage because I had to drive slowly.

I was so relieved when I saw the first rays of morning light coming from the east. We were almost to Colville at that point and tired and grouchy. We just had to find our home as we had only been there once. Long story short; we couldn’t find our place on Google maps but our son found it. We were almost there…going up a long hill when we realized a previous washout had dead ended the road.

My nerves were frayed beyond frayed at that point and I had to back up the rig on a hill into a dirt area on an incline, pray that the tires would hold going forward again (thank GOD they did), and we turned around and chugged back down the hill. Luckily we managed to find another way up the hill to our new home.

Bridgette had done it. She was the hero of the day.

I could go into to multitude of stories about Gidget, I mean, Bridgette. She also got a flat tire whilst pulling the rig up a one lane road near a place where we had been camping. It was just my son and I that day and we had to limp her up the hill to a safe spot to pull over. We unhooked the trailer and AAA came and picked her up. The tow truck driver recognized her. Apparently, she already had a reputation in the area.

Seven-hundred dollars later in new rear wheels and an extra rim, she was back but we spent two days in our rig on the side of the road just outside of town. Interesting.

So today we pick her up. Oil changed, engine purring like a kitten and reeking of garbage that has percolated for six months. We’ll probably drive straight to the dump.