Garbage Toil and Trouble
David Rowland, Silent Crow Arts Production Coordinator
After following the TerraCycle crew around for a few days, I had a developed a healthy respect for their work ethic. Most people outside of film/television production gasp in horror after you cancel plans due to working one 16-hour day (let alone several in a row), but the team down in Trenton is used to all that and more. I began to take perverse pleasure while watching them squirm when Tom would give out random tasks that had nothing to do with their job descriptions. The look of annoyance, fear, and resignation in their eyes always elicited a chuckle from me until I realized that his crazy new idea would also make my day 6 hours longer as well.
One day that stands out head and shoulders above the rest is the one when Tom told everyone to get down to the dump and search out garbage that could be made into new products. I was usually side by side with Albe, James, and everyone else as they did their best to complete Tom’s tasks but was miraculously spared the worst of this particular mission. As we drove around the massive landfill, I was initially surprised with how seemingly sanitary everything was. It looked like a field of dirt with some trash sprinkled around. There was definitely an odor, but it was nothing anyone who’s lived in a dorm hasn’t dealt with before.
A lot of my job was to make sure we had permission to shoot everywhere we went, so I stayed in the van to make calls while our crew and the garbage scavengers piled out. Everyone was happy and was thinking that this wouldn’t be too bad after all. Oh, how we were wrong.
About an hour after they left, I get a call from our cameraman asking for me to run down a piece of equipment he had forgotten. I’m convinced to this day that he didn’t need the doodad; he just wanted me to experience the horror for myself. They were digging around the outskirts of the landfill, and I noticed something odd. The faint odor we noticed from afar didn’t get worse on a linear scale. Each step closer made the smell EXPONENTIALLY worse. We’re talking roughly 100% worse for the first step and a thousand million percent worse for the tenth. (I tried plotting it out on my TI-85 calculator later, but it melted in my hands.) The worst part was that it didn’t go away. I read somewhere that you get used to bad smells in around 30 seconds, but this was a miasma of rotten death that would not be ignored.
When I finally made it to the crew, I found them digging through, and covered with, filth. The layer of dirt on top of the garbage was only a fraction of an inch thick, and it had concealed unspeakable horrors. Have you ever seen the movie Akira? It looked like the end scene when that one guy morphs into giant amoeba-like monstrosity and spurts fluids everywhere. I literally threw the equipment at the cameraman, cursed him under my breath, and hurried back to safer territory. As I fled, I saw him laugh heartily, which was a huge mistake because he opened his mouth do it, and I could almost see the stench coat his tongue. I’m willing to bet he spent a good portion of that day’s pay on mouthwash.
On the upside, the usually annoying task of ordering lunch was really easy that day. “Do you want chinese for- BLARGH.
^M
