City dumps grow and grow with no end in sight. So much gets thrown away that it takes a small fleet of trucks for most communities to haul it away. Almost every item bought in a grocery store results in wrappers, boxes, and cans that end up getting tossed. The attempt to replace some of it with biodegradable packaging sound nice but races along like a slow moving sloth.
Then there are those who happily hoard their junk. I’ve seen cars in both Bismarck and Fargo in which the driver has only enough room to sit behind the wheel. Those cars are literally packed to the ceiling with debris, rags, garbage, rubbish, just pick a name and it’s in there.
A book on my shelf comes to mind: String Too Short To Be Saved by Donald Hall. Hall, a one-time U. S. Poet Laureate also wrote narrative stories like this one. He wrote and lived much of his life in the old New Hampshire farmhouse he inherited from his family. In his book he tells of cleaning the attic of the old house where he found a shoe box on which someone had written “String too short to be saved.” You might’ve guessed, it was filled with short pieces of string.
A friend of Hall’s was a miserly old bachelor named Washington who lived life on his terms. He described his home as a small shack that “had grown smaller inside every year. Layers of things saved grew inward from the walls until Washington could barely move inside it.”
Stories abound about some of these old hermits who leave behind a hoarded stash of money under the mattress and in various other places. Not Washington, though. He left behind a bucket full of thousands of straightened nails. Whenever he saw abandoned boards with nails still in them he pulled the nails and straightened them on his anvil. And the boards? Well, if they had any life left in them, he saved them, too.
Washington had a very independent spirit and the belief that a man’s word should be good. Working some as the community’s handyman and blacksmith, he took on a repair job for the local deacon to repair a wheel for his buggy. Telling the deacon he would charge four dollars for the job, he set about doing the repairs. When this customer came to pick up his buggy he told Washington he would pay only three dollars. Washington then refused to take any money and never went to church again. He concluded, if deacons cheated, churches were corrupt. He’d stay at home and read the Bible by himself.
His embedded principles guided his actions, one of them being to save whatever might come in handy again. His generation was like that. When I grew up we always had a pail filled with rusty bent nails. They worked fine the second time around. Sometimes, if that pail had been left out in the rain we’d have to reach into the rusty-red water to get them out.
The Indians utilized every bit of the buffalo. After searching for what each part served, you might gain an appreciation for their ingenuity. The one thing I did not find them using was the buffalo’s eyeball and that may have been oversight on my part. Bones, flesh, tongue, tendons, blood, and stomach were all used one way or another. They even used the hind legskin for pre-shaped moccasins. The plains tribes probably did not leave behind any garbage as they moved on with their nomadic ways.
It’s an easy step to look at the cultural practices of our own ancestors and the steps they took to set food on the table. A recent posting by a facebook friend told of his finding an old Bohemian cookbook belonging to his mother. Recipes in it yielded such dishes as braised ox-tail, calf brain soup, and fried cow udder.
Settlers busied themselves making products from the raw materials of their butchering process. Head cheese used scraps mostly from a pig’s head such as its tongue, cheeks, snout, ears, and more. I ate it and thought it was okay. Dad and I fought over pickled pig’s feet. Blood sausage was common. They even prepared and ate chicken feet. Mary said her mother prepared it and it was tasty. I’ve never tried fried cow udder but have eaten Rocky Mountain oysters after drinking a few beers.
The Norwegian immigrants brought their love of fish products with them. They learned how to preserve them for the winter months as a dish we call lutefisk. Dried cod is soaked in a mixture of lye and water to soften it for cooking. Lutefisk means “lye fish.” I wonder how many uses for dairy cream Norwegian cooks concocted, but tasty they were. I’m reminded of my Norwegian grandfather who poured liberal dollops of cream into his coffee which he drank from a saucer.
Back to the premise of this article and the garbage we accumulate today. Fargo is not even a large city and growing mountains of refuse are added daily. A fleet of trucks feeds it, heavy equipment works it to smooth it out, and no one has any qualms about throwing it away.
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