3-6-18 INCINERATOR

Back in the old days, before recycle bins had a place in every driveway and garage; back in the days when the steel mills belched incessantly up and down the rivers that wind through the Pennsylvania hillsides, we burned our garbage. Our house was situated on the side of a hill, like every other house in Pleasant Hills, PA. Our back yard was layered, not like a wedding cake, more like the underbelly of a waterfall. Falling Water, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright house, was built on a landscape like this. After dinner, if it was your chore that week, you would get to take the paper bag full of dry garbage and trudge on down the levels of steps to the incinerator. Ours was a garbage can sized thick wire burning bin, set in the middle of a dry dirt circle. Ashes formed a ring around the bin. When you stepped on them the scent of old dried up ketchup, burnt glue and tin can labels and waxy buttermilk carton rose up, all pungent and smoky. If I close my eyes and inhale slowly, I can conjure up the smell right now. That scent, on a particularly smoggy day, made you grab a damp dish towel on the way out the kitchen door. You'd fold it into a semi-triangle and position it over your nose like a Spaghetti Western cowboy. The fabric would bulge out and suck in with each breath. You learned to breathe short and shallow on those days. The air literally stung your throat and had to have stressed the lungs. 

The incinerator area of every household has unfolded the story of civilization through centuries of time. When we visit old natural history museums, like Plymouth Plantation, Jamestown and Williamsburg, their Visitor Center movies inevitably tell how archaeologists deciphered the habits and practises of old societies, just by finding their incinerator piles. Layer on layer of history, broken and pieced together after they were dug out of piles of ash and dirt. Broken tea cups; tines of forks, knife blades; a porcelain doll's head, or a dresser pull. Pieces of bowls and mugs, with dregs of drinks crusted in the corners, seeds and bones and other evidence of lifestyle.

I often wonder what they will know of us 200 years from now. Perhaps by then all electronics will have been fried and we will be back to earthbound low-tech basics. They will find these flat metal notebooks that flip open, the glass on one side all shattered and little black buttons with letters and numbers useless and cold. They'll dig into some massive junk pile and find little subway tile shaped pieces with shattered glass as well. Millions of them. They may start using them to insulate the walls of their public buildings. All that we thought we were will have been preserved in those items, but it will all be lost in one massive electronic burst. Who knows what will have become of us humans.

At that point the cloud will have reverted to the floating collection of water against a blue sky.People will plant seeds and grow their food. They will write their stories and store them in books.

For now, we place our words and our money and our history in what we think is the safe place, the "cloud" of information. It could all go up in a puff of smoke, like the leftovers from our kitchen on Tuesday and Saturday nights, when it was our evening to burn back there in the lower level of the backyard of my childhood. Eventually everything we have and everything we are, physically, will end up being incinerated. It's the way of all things on this earth. It's not evil by nature. It may become evil by intent, but it's not inherently evil.

Like all good things: ashes to ashes and dust to dust.