The Rural Ritual.

Every second Saturday we have a little outing. We load up the garbage and recycling and go to the dump. The dump, or landfill, or recycling depot, is our main point of contact with the neighbours. It's the social equivalent of church in a secular age. There the gas station guy complains about people from Toronto who fill his bins but don't buy gas and the man from up the street who's building a mansion exhibits the packaging from his latest expensive acquisition.

This was setting out on Saturday, before clearing the snow and before this weekend's big storm. There was a couple of inches of snow then, there's eight now and very much drifting.


The heater is not one of the Toyota's strengths. It is possible to get enough heat to defrost the windshield but not soon after moving off. This is a problem with the Beetle too, that only has enough heat to clear the top of the screen after thirty miles or so.

Here comes the plough, a giant truck with a massive, almost tubular, blade. On wider roads they work in tandem, the lead one pushing the snow into the path of the next and the kerbside one dumping the lot into someone's driveway. Given the size of the machine and the noise of the blade on the road it's no wonder they don't notice knocking down the occasional mailbox.

In the woodland glade we heave our junk on to the stack for burial. It's cold out at the dump and so one must dress for the excursion, having to put on a snowmobile suit, coat, balaclava, hat, gloves and boots to move snow or rubbish around might be the worst feature of living in a winter climate. That or having to take it all off because you forgot to pee.

This is the appliances pile. It's all highly categorized though perhaps pointlessly, this must be year's worth of discarded fridges for a place where the coyotes outnumber the people.

These are the recycling bins, we used to have to sort the recyclable stuff but now it all goes in together. It may be that it's shipped to some third world country for collation and then back for recycling, like a Kenyan salad, but the suspicious of us wonder if it doesn't all end up in the same dump in Michigan as Toronto's garbage.

That's the glamorous part of the day. After that we go to the feedmill where the old guy in farmer pants speaks only to me, the man. He talks, of course, about the weather which, conveniently, keeps getting worse. It's hard to imagine a crusty old man in a feedmill commenting on good weather.