There's an unexpected beauty to this pile of junk as a troupe of heavy equipment performs its daily dance. Dump trucks cough up their contents and glide away. Bulldozers swoop in from behind, and piles of lumber, cardboard, plastic and half-eaten food roll off their blades like sets of ocean waves.
There's a lot at our disposal
COLUMN ONE
Society's garbage doesn't just disappear. At the Puente Hills Landfill, a third of Los Angeles County's trash adds to a huge mountain of muck every year.
Mike Speiser drives his bulldozer over mounds of garbage at the landfill.… (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles…)
The noise at the Puente Hills Landfill, one of the nation's largest garbage heaps, is unrelenting. The air is slightly sweet with decay. The ground pulses like an earthquake.
Big Mike wades into the mess.
Mike Speiser is 6 feet 2, 400 pounds and sports a shaved head that resembles a dinosaur egg, with devil's horns dangling from each earlobe. Big Mike's job is to compact the garbage. He is a craftsman, among the best in his trade, and his tool is a 60-ton bulldozer with steel-spiked wheels that looks as intimidating as he does and purees everything it touches.
"It's kind of like laying concrete. You've got to work it to get the proper grade," said Speiser, 45, a genial man who has been squeezing himself into the cab of this machine for nearly 20 years. "For some people, it's like they're born to do it. To have the blade at just the right angle. . . . Piles of trash don't have wheels on it, you know?"
This graveyard of our wants and needs sits hidden in plain sight along a truck-choked stretch of the 60 Freeway in the San Gabriel Valley. Here, the verdant Puente Hills, the result of eons of seismic uplift and erosion, have been reshaped by half a century of consumption and waste. Nearly 4 million tons of junk and muck, one-third of Los Angeles County's trash, is added to this man-made mountain each year.
Beginning before dawn, a parade of trucks bounces up a sinuous roller coaster of a road that's constantly burping from the digestion below. They deposit their loads on the day's "cell" -- an acre that will rise 20 feet in the next few hours before it's entombed beneath a layer of dirt.
Rest in pieces.
We've become programmed to separate our trash into the properly colored bins. But once the garbage man hauls our detritus away, most people don't give much thought to its next stop. We come home from work and -- abracadabra!abracadabra! -- the bins are empty and ready to be filled again.
The week after Christmas is a good time to consider where the stuff goes. These are the days when our bingeing and purging of consumer goods reaches a crescendo and workers at the Puente Hills Landfill are as busy as Santa's elves were last week. Mounds of wrapping paper and packaging. The remnants of holiday hams and untouched fruitcakes. More than 380,000 Christmas trees.
"People drive right by it and fly over it all the time without giving it much thought. It's only when you get on the ground that you fully appreciate the enormity and scope of the place," said Matthew Coolidge, director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a Culver City-based think tank that combines art with conventional research.
"Seen up close, there's a sense of awe, a percussive awakening to the scale of the waste material that most people think just magically goes away," he said.
The center sponsored a tour of Puente Hills last year as part of an exhibit titled "Post Consumed: The Landscape of Waste in Los Angeles." Tickets sold out in minutes.
Participants rode in a white luxury motor coach and got an introduction to solid waste engineering, as well as a lesson in the philosophy and behavioral psychology of garbage.
"We wanted people to reconnect with their things . . . and follow their trajectory to the landfill," Coolidge said. "The world is composed of two equal forces, construction and destruction. That's the full cycle of life. For everything that is created, there's an end."
After lunch, the motor coach lumbered over a ridgeline and finished the tour in Rose Hills Memorial Park & Mortuary.
The cherished and the forgotten buried side by side for eternity.
In the way that layers of sedimentary rock in the Grand Canyon tell the Earth's story, a core sample of the Puente Hills Landfill, 500 feet deep in places, would reveal a post-World War II cultural history of Los Angeles.
Shards of Thighmasters and unused bread makers stacked upon scraps of Members Only jackets and pink Princess telephones. A stratum of compressed eight-track tapes, disco records and avocado-colored dishware. A layer of tie-dyed shirts and shattered black-and-white console televisions resting upon a foundation of steel beer cans, remains of Swanson TV dinners and ashtrays the size of dinner plates.
"Underneath our feet, there's a snapshot of our society at any given point," said Bob Asgian, chief engineer for the landfill, which is run by the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County. "We get everything that you can imagine dumped here -- and some you can't."
Police occasionally visit Puente Hills in search of missing people. Bodies have been found rolled up in a carpet. A skull was discovered in a carry-on flight bag.
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