Garbio ~ stories of Chicago, Its Garbage and the Dutchmen Who Picked it up by Larry VanderLeest

Author:Larry VanderLeest [VanderLeest, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Chapbook Press
Published: 2010-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

With a sickening dull thud, the truck met the brick wall above the door and the 1940s construction began giving way. Horrific sounds followed. In seconds, my rig was engulfed with brick, wood, and dust. The doorway header came down on the roof of the cab; the windshield shot out in small pieces and both doors of the truck crumpled. Moments ago the passenger seat held my lunch box and water bottle; now there lay a one ton steel beam. If I had had a passenger that load, he would have been history. If I had driven two feet to my right, I would have been crushed in my own cab.

The dust was still settling as Dick and a few others cautiously approached. I think they expected a critically wounded, possibly dead driver. Instead, they saw an embarrassed young man looking back. I uttered a feeble “Sorry about that!” Unable to open either door, I squirmed out where the windshield had been and onto the hood of the truck.

Here was the wreck of the year. The cab was beyond repair. The doorway to the garage was in complete shambles. Going in or out this end of the station was impossible. The disruption to the company couldn’t be greater. I had just ruined one truck and the entrance to the garage and was mortified.

The men asked if I was OK. I nodded sheepishly. Someone asked what I had been doing, digging around the pile like that for so long.

I told them of the odor I had smelled, my being convinced there had to be a rotting body in that load, and that was why I was looking. I mumbled something about being out of my normal routine and maybe that’s why I drove the truck through the wall.

Dick, who had been around for many years and thought he had seen it all, said that the odor I smelled was probably dead rats rotting in the box, that it happens all the time in the heat of the summer. Just dead rats.

By this time, George Monsma, the foreman of City Disposal, had arrived on the scene. He wryly commented to me now that I understood the full stupidity of what I had just done, perhaps I should just go home for the day. Shake it off and come back tomorrow. Why my boss didn’t throw me in the pit with the dead rats, drywall, and conduit, and send me off to the landfill as part of the day’s refuse has puzzled me to this day.

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