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The Magic of Garbage Posting Date: Feb 1 2009 9:41AM Allie Fox, the main character in Paul Theroux’s novel The Mosquito Coast said, “Ice is civilization.” I see his point. He thinks fire is too easy, and who can blame him? With sixty seconds of training, anyone could walk into a forest and whip up a little fire using the fuels at hand and a little skillfully applied friction. Anthropologically speaking, fire is a pretty big deal, I know, but compared to ice? Child’s play.
How many of us could wander into the woods and with our bare hands whip up a Slushee? None, that’s how many. It’s impossible. You simply can’t refrigerate by accident. You can’t refrigerate through sheer force of will. You can’t freeze with something you make with a Swiss Army knife. You can’t refrigerate without – according to Mr. Theroux – civilization.
I saw the movie of Mosquito Coast when it came out in 1986 starring Harrison Ford and River Phoenix. The movie also starred … wait for it … keep waiting … Jason Alexander. Yes, George from Seinfeld had a role in the dark dystopian psychologically unraveling Mosquito Coast. I don’t think he could play that role today, but then again, I think today he has enough money not to care.
More shocking still is that Helen Miren – yes, the Helen Miren who played the Queen so convincingly – was Harrison Ford’s wife. Think about that one for a second. Indiana Jones was married to Queen Elizabeth II. You can imagine him wandering around Balmoral or someplace like that and coming across, for example, Macbeth’s solid gold shoes sitting on an end table pulling duty as bookends for six of the original copies of the Magna Carta. I’m pretty sure Indy wouldn’t be able to help himself. He would grab everything up under his leather jacket and he’d run for the door yelling, “Start the plane! Start the plane!”
But back to civilization.
I saw the movie in 1986 and read the book not long after that and this idea of ice being civilization has stuck with me ever since, partly because I have always been attracted to the argument while simultaneously suspecting that there was a better answer out there. Well, now I have it.
Civilization is not ice, it is garbage collection.
Let’s start with the basics. Civilization is, by definition, a communal, organized thing. As The Mosquito Coast proved – if only in a fictional world – one crazed inventor can bring ice to the jungle. He doesn’t need a village or cooperation or coordination. He can just build his wacky ice machine right there on the Equator like a wooden Zamboni and he could just sit there by himself, surrounded by nothing but vines and the leaping spiders of the Amazon and he would just be a crazy dude in the jungle with an ice cube, not a civilization.
On the other hand, garbage collection, by definition, is a coordinated activity in which one person – or in this case two people and a big truck – does work on behalf of other people for the betterment of the entire community. Garbage collection is the very definition of civilization. It is terribly civilized to put one’s junk and goop and slop into a bag and drag it to the end of one’s driveway only to have magic men with fancy trucks come by in the morning and make the bag disappear. It’s pretty much the best invention ever.
Conversely, how do we know when we have left civilization? When we have to drive to the dump to get rid of our kitchen waste. You head to the cottage or some other far-flung place and you invariably find yourself filling the trunk of your Corolla with garbage at the end of the week and driving to a dump where you need a co-pilot to watch for bears as you toss your garbage into a smoldering pile of, well, garbage. Now you may love it or you may hate it, but either way that experience makes you stop and think, “I have left civilization behind.”
Here’s to garbage collection. The only thing – along with language, writing, golf and plasma televisions – that separates us from the beasts.
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