BFI

I will leave out the details of why we ended up at BFI, which is the landfill located in the east end of Richmond, but we did one rainy January morning. The manager at the city dump told us that even though we were dumping our personal crap, t it sounded like a commerical amount of crap, and who the hell drives around school buses, anyway?, so our last resort was BFI.

We arrived with both buses, and we weigh in, because the way that they charge you is by how much you weigh when you come in and how much weight your vehicle lost when you come out. We have both buses with us, and I'm driving the smaller one and Ward is driving the big bus for probably the third time ever. I get out of the bus to talk to the woman at the weigh station, and she tells me to come inside the small office and asks me if I had ever done this before. I said no, and she tells me to follow the road of the weight ramp until we get to a steep, dirt (in this case mud) hill and follow it up to the top. She informs me that their is no dock for dumping in a dumpster, our crap just goes into the landfill, and then she shoves two sets of hard hats and safety vests into my arms, tells me to put it on and to give one set to Ward and don't take them off while we are up there, and then actually says "good luck" while shaking her head at me as I walk out. So we get moving and as I am leading the way up this mud hill there are huge dump trucks are barrelling down past us. I'm white-knuckled holding the steering wheel, scared to death of slipping, because there is no barrier and its just seriously a mud hill that no one has any business using for driving on and its so steep and just keeps going up and up and up. We finally get to the top and what I see is one of the most unbelievable sights I had ever seen; what seems like a mile of garbage piled a story high, and what mostly likely really was a million seagulls eating this pile of shit which was emanating most horrific smell.

We have to back up as close as we can to this garbage pile to dump, and then I realize that the back of the bus is locked and the only way to open the back to unload is to GET OUT of the bus, and Ward and I are lined up together, poking our heads out of the window cautiously, saying "there is no way I'm getting out of this bus", because its just muddy garbage that you can tell you would sink into immediately. Finally, I went for it, because I knew there was no going back without finishing the job at this point. We unloaded the buses, and slowly made our way down the hill behind Ward and I am sweating, envisioning our new bus going over the edge with Ward in it. The best part about all of it was that when you get done and you sort of feel like you may never wash off the stench and filth of the landfill, you get a bill for almost 300 bucks for the experience.