Knee Deep in trash: Hauling a load Jackson couple helps clear away curbside 'treasure'

Callie and I like to think of ourselves as Word People.

We ponder, we type, we edit. We craft, we polish, we publish.

We like our kind of work, that which is spent in mostly air-conditioned spaces.

This Knee Deep series was Callie's idea, an opportunity to get out, use our muscles and our hands, and then bring our experiences to the public as an expression of our appreciation for the good people who make our world work.

A little after the noon hour on a recent Thursday, I seriously considered throwing my cute and talented wife in the trunk of our car and leaving her in a far-away place knee deep in wet concrete.

Alas, I was too weak to carry out the thought. I was back in the air-conditioned bathroom of our Jackson home, leaning over our toilet, expecting the gurgling action of my innards to come outward. I was hot and cold at the same time. My T-shirt was soaked with sweat, my head was pounding and spinning. I was, in a word, overheated.

Callie, bless her, wasn't much better.

KIT DOYLE ~ kdoyle@semissourian.com Callie Miller bent to pick up paint cans Thursday morning, June 26, 2008, while getting Knee Deep with the Jackson Sanitation Department. Trash collecting was especially difficult because of of Jackson annual Spring Cleaning Pickup when residents may put out as much as possible. They collected things ranging from paint to baby diapers to sofas to rotten food.

It all started some four hours earlier as we started our half shift as Jackson's new Sanitation Duo. We wanted to see how dirty, how difficult it would be to haul trash.

We picked the third week in June to find Jackson at its dirtiest. It was cleanup week, the week all of us Jacksonites mark on our calendars to get rid of all the junk that has collected in our basements and garages. It's a great service. And you don't understand how great of a service it is until you're out on the streets picking up raw diapers and urine-stained carpets and dodging small snakes.

The cleanup week came several weeks later than most years as ice storms and flash floods pushed it back. Those disasters also perhaps created more trash than normal. We carried off lots of carpets, one of which was our own throw rug that was ruined when water crept into our basement during the spring.

Our morning started out by meeting the sanitary foreman, a guy named Brent Reid. It so happens that a few years ago, Brent and I played on the same basketball team in a Cape recreation league. Brent is a tall guy, maybe 6-foot-4. He can shoot the three and bang inside pretty well. I knew he had bad knees, but I didn't know much else about the man, except that his wife Crystal works at city hall. I learned later he has two daughters, a fifth-grader and an eighth-grader.

If there's a tougher cat in public service than this guy, I'd like to shake his hand (after washing, of course). Brent, who has worked for the city "13 or 14 years" has had three knee surgeries, two on one leg, one on the other. He has no cartilage. He missed months of work a while back after one of his knees got a dangerous infection. He showed me the huge scar on one of his knees. Three knee surgeries. No cartilage. And one bone-chilling rehab story. Yet he's out there climbing in and out of a garbage truck.

He told me he's used to pain, wouldn't know what it would be like to live without it.

"In my mind," he said, "I know that I have a job to do, and I have a family."

Brent supplied us with eye gear, an orange vest and gloves, gave us a few warnings about not getting too close to the back of the truck when it was compacting (one guy recently got hit in the mouth with protruding trash and needed 26 stitches) and off we went into our neighborhood.

Brent showed us how to work the levers on the compactor, and though he made it look simple, I never really got the hang of it. With a couple of exceptions, we left the lever pulling up to Brent and we stuck to hoisting junk.

There was a myriad of trash along the curbsides. You name it, we saw it. Mattresses. Tires. Computers. Mirrors. Paint cans. Even the kitchen sink.

We hauled off light things like foam and heavy things like couches.

But perhaps most telling of the entire experience was the variety of ways people set out their trash. Some had little trash at all, making me wonder how a person could live so efficiently. There were others, such as yours truly, who had lots of trash. In our case, it was mostly boxes from baby gear and furniture as well as some old lumber from a remodeling project.

Some stacked their trash neatly. And others showed absolute disrespect for the hard-working men who work for us.

One house we went to had diapers simply laying out all over the place. It's possible that animals got into the bags and scattered them, but I'm not so sure. When I went to grab them, one of them opened revealing a mess I'll leave to your imagination. Brent said it was the most disgusting thing he'd seen on the job. Another property owner left a huge cardboard box full of trash. It was so heavy it couldn't be carried to the truck, so we had to empty it a few items at a time until we could drag it out into the street. Had it rained, we would've been at that one house forever. Brent said he and his guys have to deal with that kind of thing all the time. I feel bad for them.

It's hard work lifting all that stuff into the truck. An hour into the job, Callie and I were already worn out. Lift, toss, lift, toss. It was hot that Thursday morning, climbing into the mid-90s by the time we were finished. At first Callie kept commenting on how the smell kept getting worse and worse.

I didn't know if she was talking about the truck or me. Later on, she didn't care so much about the smell, as how the heat was beginning to affect us.

On Mary Street, Callie uncovered a small garter snake that had found some shelter under the garbage pile. She, of course, freaked, running out into the street (good thing no cars were coming) and waving her hands.

"Snake! It's a snake!" Brent, who later confided he's scared of snakes, picked it up and quickly tossed it aside when it curled back as if to bite him. Later, the ornery foreman picked up a roadkill snake unbeknownst to Callie and scared her to death with it. It was perhaps the highlight of the day.

All told, Brent, Callie and I hauled off about six tons of garbage in about four hours.

At around 11:40 a.m., Brent, being the astute foreman he is, noticed Callie and I were at our end. I was bent over in the shade with my hands on my knees while he was compacting some trash. Callie was warning me she might not be able to do much more. He ended our shift about 20 minutes earlier than we promised. It wasn't the work that got us. It was the heat. Our spoiled bodies rejected this silly Knee Deep concept.

The city hauled away 331 tons of trash that week. They took 70 loads to the transfer station. Most of the workers get paid on the lower end of an $18,000 to $26,000 scale, depending on experience. What a way to make a living.

Callie and I left the job site thankful that we had writing jobs. We left admiring our friend Brent and the full-time and temporary guys who are tougher and grittier than we'll ever be.