Tao of the dumpster

New Internationalist, Oct, 1997 by Dirk Jamison

Mom declared the refrigerator off-limits.

Dad found an old fridge and stashed booty in the garage.

Mom banned trashing at her favourite stores.

Dad sneaked out at night and hid convenience desserts under our pillows.

Mom found licked-clean pudding cartons and forbade us to eat `that'.

Dad picked us up from school, and we hit the trash bins at candy stores and pastry shops on the sly.

`Jackpot' became the code word when my sister found a jumbo pack of Twinkies designed to be carried like a backpack. She ran at top speed with a tube of decorative crepe paper, flailing her arms and sprinting a huge circle back to her Twinkies. The red paper unravelled behind her like a parade streamer.

We made ourselves sick gorging on Twinkies on the drive home, then laid around the house and groaned.

Mom put two and two together, then staged a protest - she wouldn't speak again until the children were garbagefree. She wouldn't do a single chore.

For a week we saw her only twice a day - going straight to her room to read romance novels and stomping out to the car in the morning.

Dad prepared all-trash meals. A sourdough culture thrived in a mason jar above the stove. Dad mixed it into second hand flour and made humongous stacks of pancakes, referred to as gooners, smothered with coconut syrup from behind the health-food store.

`Who wants gooners?'

`Me, me, me!'

Mom packed her bags. She gathered us at the door to explain that Dad was a heartless son-of-a-bitch whom she couldn't stand for another second. But she would come and visit on the weekends and we could stay with her whenever we wanted.

We begged her to stay. We got on our knees and gradually convinced her that life would be pointless without her.

As Mom unpacked, I sobbed with relief. But when she packed her bags again four days later, we barely glanced up from the television.

Now he's building a 15-metre catamaran with an A-frame mast and geriatric rig-roller furled sails that allow a plodding 67-year-old to cruise the coast of Baja in total control. There's one problem. It has taken him ten years to build.

I understand that he `wasted' so much of his life building homes and restaurants for money, and this albatross of a boat, like trash, is obviously for his heart - one last big project. I desperately want it to be OK. I want to be proud of the integrity in such an effort, but when I see those giant hulls rising up out of nowhere, docked in this weedy lot (he calls it a `compound') 100 kilometres from the open sea, I can barely keep myself from screaming: `Sail, you dingy bastard! Do something you really want!'

But hey... maybe I'm missing the point.

Besides, the end - or the beginning - is apparently in sight. Dad claims he is `almost done'. The name of the ship? The Heathen Scavenger.