Tales of Amagansett Part 2:  Garbage and “Away”

 “Throw it away”. We’ve heard the term all our lives. Ever wonder how far away “away” is? I can tell you with firsthand eye-witness knowledge: in Amagansett in 1975/76, “away” was about 8 miles from the A-Frame. I would always try to take Monday off from work to avoid the Sunday night traffic leaving Long Island beaches. Driving to New Jersey on Monday night was only terrible, on Sunday’s, traffic was OUTRAGEOUS. Anyway, Monday was Garbage Day. No that doesn’t mean the garbage bins are out on the curb to be picked up. There was no pick-up in Amagansett, YOU brought your garbage to “the Dump”.

So being the helpful constant guest that I was, I offered to help Fred with the task. We placed seven supermarket bags of assorted trash in the trunk of Fred’s Chevy Vega. No black trash bags, just seven plain paper bags. Since recycling hadn’t been invented yet, that trash consisted mostly of lobster shells, fish heads and beer bottles. We drove toward Montauk about 12 minutes and turned left into the Suffolk County Land Fill area. Think long dirt road leading to a field with parallel dug trenches. We stop and are directed to throw our seven bags into the trench along the right side of the road. Did I mention the seagulls? Hundreds of seagulls enjoyed the food court provided by humans. I wondered why there were ANY seagulls at the beach. There were umbrellas, beach chairs, refrigerators, toilets; the place was obviously a dump! As an aside: the next year we were throwing our bags onto the LEFT side of the road. Good to know there was some intelligence behind the process!!

That is NOT the closest I’ve been to “away”. I’ve made a note to write about my weekend on an island in the Belgrade Lakes section of Maine. (AND THAT, good reader, is how a Blog Post is born!)

In 1992 the definition of AWAY changed for New York City when ocean dumping was made illegal by law. Yes, I said 1992. I live in New Jersey where we were blessed by God with Pennsylvania, a very large mostly empty State to our west. On a quiet summer night you can almost hear the siren song wafting in from the west: “Let me embrace your trash and secret the black bags under my largely desolate areas of wooded nothingness.” Not all States are as lucky. Looking down the garbage strewed road – there’s always Canada.