(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

As a kid I always enjoyed a trip to the landfill.

We would drive down into a giant man-made hole and unload our cast-offs.  I always imagined that the Grand Canyon must look something like the big pit at the landfill- only bigger.  Giant yellow earth-moving machines crawled about, covering up trash and carving out niches for more.

It was always muddy, sometimes dusty and always smelly.  Sometimes you could see ooze and slime seeping out of the hillsides and ground.  Often plumes of smoke and tongues of flames leapt from even deeper pits in the earth.  I remember thinking with youthful fascination that hell must be a lot like the landfill.

Maybe I lived a sheltered life, but I really loved a good trip to the landfill.  Perhaps even more exciting than the descent into the pit, more thrilling than the smell and more fascinating that the bulldozers was the chance to see what other people threw away.  The same morbid curiosity that forces us to look at traffic accidents made me cast furtive glances at other people’s garbage.

Non-working appliances, out-of-date clothing, broken toys and ruined tools became a bit more fascinating in the strange atmosphere of the landfill.  Bottles and cans gave me a glimpse of other peoples’ dietary habits.  Did someone actually eat the sardines?  Look at all those bottles.  Somebody must have had a heck of a party.

I took a business trip to Boone County Landfill last weekend and found that the landfill’s just not what it used to be.

There were no black clouds of smoke and leaping flames.  Recycling has left garbage devoid of cans and bottles.  I saw very little slime.  There is a separate drop-off site for appliances and tires.  I assume they’ll be shipped of for recycling too.  The odors were less intense and diverse than those I remember.

Still, the pit looked about the same as the one I remember and big yellow earth-movers still shook the ground as they buried my junk under tons of Boone County clay.  It was enough to shake loose my childhood landfill memories.  I told my wife how nifty it had been down at the landfill, but she just didn’t seem t understand.

“You’ve been talking about that landfill all day,” Mary said.  “You must have really liked it down there.  It sounds disgusting to me.”

“Hey,” I told her,” It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there,”