Column: A trashy column about Esky’s garbage

Karen Wils photo
Built as a rack for garbage cans, this item has been converted to a comfortable bench at camp.

ESCANABA — This is a trashy column!

There is an interesting history in the garbage of Escanaba.

I like writing about nice nature things. Flowers, deer, dogs and sunrises are nice but garbage cans are necessary.

If it wasn’t for good sanitation, recycling and landfills, the U.P. would not be as pristine and as pretty as it is.

Garbage has certainly evolved just in my lifetime.

We make so much of it nowadays with plastics, packaging, fast foods and beverage containers compared to my grandmothers’ days of glass canning jars, ceramic crocks, flour sack towels, cloth diapers, and home-grown foods.

Even in Mom and Dads’ heyday a family of eight produced less trash that a family of four today.

It was my dad’s job to neatly line our one big kitchen garbage can with old newspapers. This was of course before the days of commercially made garbage bags. Back then most burnable trash went into the woodstove and was recycled into BTUs to heat the house.

Composting was something my kinfolks did too. This fed the garden with nutrients. Leftover food or meat scraps were fed to the dog or cat. All these things helped to keep the garbage to a minimum.

It was common for our great-grandparent who lived out on the farm to have a “dump” area out on the edge of the woods where they pitched broken wagon wheels, rusty cans, horseshoes, and cracked medicine jars.

At one time even a parcel on Escanaba’s Lake Shore Drive was a local dump.

Things improved over the years. By the time I was born Escanaba had an official city dump out on Old State Road. My brothers have fond memories of loading up the pick-up truck and visiting the dump with Dad. The rubbish was simply dumped, burned and slightly buried.

My brothers searched for trashy treasures to take home with them. Good finds were wheels to make go-carts with, scrap metal to build with or burners for Mom’s new-fangled electric stove.

The boys recall the man who run the dump as an interesting long-faced quiet sort of fellow, who carried a gun for killing rats.

I told you this wasn’t one of my pretty columns. No, the dump was not a place I often visited.

When we moved to our new house on Sheridan Road, my Dad built wooden racks to hold our garbage cans. By then I believe we had three trash cans, all very neat, all covered and rinsed out with Pine Sol every once and a while.

In 2007, Escanaba started to use the automated garbage trucks that lift the plastic bins right into the truck. Recycle bins tall and proud came right along about that time too.

My Dad had just made a new garbage can rack shortly before the new trash pick-up system took over. What to do with it now was the question?

It was hauled to camp and has become one of the best resting benches out in the middle of nowhere.

The modern plastic garbage bins now line the fences, gardens and allies of most Escanaba backyards. Sunflowers and cedar hedges often adorn the bins special spots.

Yes, the flowers are nice, and the wildlife and sunsets are picture perfect, but Esky would not look so good if it was for our wonderful sanitation workers.

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Karen (Rose) Wils is a lifelong north Escanaba resident. Her folksy columns appear weekly in Lifestyles.