Memory Hole

Thriving in suburbia relies so much on forgetting.

This time it's the plastic wrapper from one of those grocery store bricks of cheese. I'm throwing it out--a gesture so commonplace that it's almost thoughtless, even from people who try to be thoughtful, who compost their kitchen waste and separate their plastic and glass and newspapers for recycling. Sure, these habits have made a noticeable difference in the amount of garbage we generate. But living as a part of modern culture means that even if you're somewhat environmentally conscious, you're still producing a steady and inevitable dribble of trash.

So here it is, a piece of single-use food-grade colored plastic wrap crumpled in my hand. And I'm thinking about it, if only for a moment or two on my way to the white waste bin in the corner of the kitchen, and then I've dropped it through the flip lid and it's gone and I don't have to think about it anymore. It's simply gone from thought. Once the bin fills up in the next dew days, attention again must be paid for a bit--but only to a bland white bag that, conveyed outside to a larger bin (which in turn is conveyed once a week to the curb and into an even larger bin on wheels), is once again removed from thought.

The forgetting of the trash we make--or the allowance of forgetting--seems essential to the suburban ideal. We're allowed to separate our garbage from ourselves, for a small fee. If we start thinking about this process, the whole mirage is called into question--where this stuff comes from, where it's going, what it's purpose is, what it's impact must be, the sheer massive waste of it all. I'm reminded of those cornucopic photos displaying the weekly food consumption for a typical modern family, the bags of Doritos and Oreos, the magnums of soda dominating the perfunctory plates of apples and tomatoes and broccoli. On the back side of this, what would a year's worth of trash look like for one family?

I once lived with a guy who produced so much trash that I was convinced for a while that he was doing it with pride or on purpose, looking to see how fast a garbage can might be filled with Taco Bell bags and styrofoam containers.

I've considered this project: Collecting my not-easily-degradable waste for a year, organizing it in neat piles in the basement, squatting for a photo between hills of cardboard and plastic packaging and containers and cheaply made products fulfilling their fates of planned obsolescence. Surrounded by stacks of uselessness, by single-function creations now past their sole reason for being.

Two thousand years ago, a glass jar might be a treasure, a sign of wealth, used only for celebrated occasion and the honored guest. Now it's just something that holds something else, once. Then it's pretty much garbage. Now that gas is $4+ a gallon, fuel costs are on everyone's radar, but the conversation doesn't go much further than the bummer it all is on one's wallet. Peak energy writers like Richard Heinberg show a much darker picture of what lies ahead: a whole civilization built on cheap oil--to make stuff like one-use glass jars (which are certainly on the innocuous end of the industrial detritus spectrum)--quickly downshifting with much grinding of gears and whiplash.

Arguably, what I'm labeling as the "forgetting" central to this kind of consumption and trash-producing might just be called simple ignorance, or apathy, or laziness. People don't know, don't care, and can't be bothered. I think it's more, though. I get to stop worrying when I turn away from the garbage can. I can practice the indulgence of making myself simply forget. In this sense I'm both puppetmaster and puppet, my own manipulator, trained by the culture that it's okay to toss garbage sans thought, and in fact that thinking too much about the notion is weird, or impolite, or un-American, or dangerous. To forget about trash is to swim with the mainstream, to be stroked by normalcy, to live in the bubble. In such a common and culturally sanctioned activity we get to ignore consequence, ramification, guilt. This runs counter to so much common morality--the kind of maxims we purportedly grow up learning--that it's shocking to consider.

Derrick Jensen says that living in this culture requires that we all be a little insane, some more so than others. This might seem extreme, but there it is right in front of me, when I toss something else out. It's there one second, gone the next.

It's magical thinking. Or crazy thinking. Or stupid thinking.

Or suburban thinking.

Stop Walking

Going for a walk in suburbia can lead to some weird existential dilemmas.

Like most neighborhoods in this area, ours is a "development." Twenty years ago, a house-building outfit purchased a previously undisturbed parcel of land and raised 67 houses. There is one exit provided for cars and pedestrians. Although there are now shopping areas fairly close by, our development is typical in that the houses in it didn't arise organically or incrementally as a by-product of the gradual growth of a town, so much as being called into existence as a potential commodity.

The house-builders did not create sidewalks in this subdivision. Because we are outside of town boundaries, no ordinance required this extra expense, so it didn't happen. It's not a huge problem if one wants to walk within the development. The few winding roads don't have much traffic and offer a pleasant enough 20-minute route, down and back.

Trying to walk beyond the development, however, is another story. Sidewalks appear on the road that runs in front of our exit, but they are prone to end as quickly as they begin.

Encountering the end of a sidewalk is a profoundly odd feeling. A recognized place for walkers is such a mundane concept that we forget the assumptions on which the thing is based: that walking has value, that there are perhaps things worth seeing at a slower pace, that fresh air and public interaction has its benefits. This is a fairly modern outlook. Being a "pedestrian" (with its roots in the Latin ped, for "foot") was historically not a favored status. Those who walked could obviously neither afford horse nor carriage; they were part of the hoi polloi, the common masses, mean and without note. This sense survives in the adjectival meaning of the word in such uses as "pedestrian prose." Meanwhile, the aristocratic class could safely stroll along their own manor garden pathways as a matter of cultured choice.

With the rise of a middle class, democratic in gesture if not in actuality, the notion of a public walkway and its uses may have been rehabilitated. It's difficult to imagine small town life in pre-1970s America without the iconic idea of a public knit together by strolling neighbors, customers, and families...at least within the town's boundaries. Walking travelers, despite the Johnny Appleseed and Huck Finn mythologies, were still not likely to be trusted.

The domination of current car culture, however, and its massive extension into how communities are organized in the form of modern suburbs, has returned many communities to a pedestrian-suspicious stance. This is not helped when there simply aren't places to walk. Or if those places suddenly end.

The end of a sidewalk is an abrupt insight into the agreements we take for granted in living together. Some things (we might agree) are a general "good"--fire stations, sewage treatment plants, libraries, sidewalks. They're worth a small cost from everyone for the sake of the public welfare. In these respects we might find value in some socialistic notions. We are not islands unto ourselves (or at least we aren't in the culture we live in now). Libertarians and conservatives speak of the "tragedy of the commons," but this strikes me as an oversimplification. We might just as easily point to examples of common resources not exploited or ruined by selfish interests, having merit both tangible and intangible.

The end of the sidewalk reveals that the sense of community and public good that "sidewalkness" is based upon is, in this case, a sham. A sidewalk that goes nowhere, that simply ends, loses its function. It becomes revealed as a cynical gesture, something required for one's property (or one's "development") to a certain point but no further. The real meaning, of course, is that this kind of "sidewalk" is not really made for people to actually walk on. Where would they go? Stopping, reversing one's path, stopping, reversing again...the whole thing becomes a travesty, an unintentionally incisive critique of modern living. The floating sidewalk is the victory of form of substance, which is itself an axiom of suburban life. In deconstructionist terms, the "signifier" has overshadowed the "signified."

I'd like to say that the lack of sidewalks hasn't kept me from taking nice long walks, but I'd be lying. It's uncomfortable, awkward, and dangerous to walk the shoulders of these local roads.

This is a shame--there's a lane not far from our house that offers a three-mile route to a local lake. We walked it once, and it was quiet and pleasant. Except when cars appeared around bends at 35 mph and forced us into the mud and weeds.

A sidewalk won't make the traffic go away. But it would probably bring a few more people out on that road to show that it's a place for people as well.

Woodworking

The insect above looks like a bumblebee, but it's not. It's a carpenter bee. I've had some interesting, recurring experiences with these creatures in the last few years.

When we moved in, our realtor pointed out a number of "bee holes" high up under the eaves, in the flat panels that run beneath the gutters. This was the first I'd heard of bees making holes. They just needed to be filled in, said our realtor. No big deal.

Well.

I borrowed the neighbor's extension ladder and filled the holes I saw with wood putty, followed by a coat of paint. But carpenter bees are persistent. They either bored through the filler, or more often, just started digging a new hole nearby. Apparently they don't like painted surfaces, but if they find a small bit of bare wood, they're all over it. The female does all of the work, chewing at the wood like an insect beaver. The noise is even audible--a light "nik" every five or ten seconds, followed by a shaving of wood fluttering down. The don't consume the wood like termites, simply excavate it for a home.

I started to recognize other signs of infestation. A drift of sawdust (chewdust?) on the porch is the most obvious. Once the holes are more established another typical sign is a broad V-shaped spray of ejecta extending downward from the hole on the side of the house. This is exactly what it seems: bee shit, tossed overboard. The stuff calcifies and is a bitch to get off.

Once a bee has bored an entrance, she turns 90 degrees and burrows along the length of the board a few feet, and then lays eggs. As I came to discover, some bees reuse and extend these nests every year.

Meanwhile, the males hover nearby, doing little more than look aggressive. They're very inquisitive--they'll sometimes attempt to mate with hummingbirds and will chase a tossed pebble--but they're basically harmless.

All of this I learned gradually as the bees morphed from curiosity into nuisance. Once you notice one bee hole, more seem to appear. And the persistence of these creatures was pushing the boundaries of my ecological sensibility.

My goal was not to eradicate them. Carpenter bees are great pollinators, and God knows that pollinator species have been hit hard in recent years by pollution, hive disorder, and habitat destruction. We have a garden and a lot of flowering bushes, and I want these kinds of insects around.

But I don't need them damaging my house at the same time. The damage they actually do is fairly superficial, but still.

Filling their holes alone didn't help much, especially with the more established nests; they'd bore in further along and rejoin the network. I tried dousing the area with insecticide to deter them, to no avail.

For several problem areas, I ended up killing every bee that returned. One nest in particular--right above our kitchen bay window--was particularly stubborn. Up on the ladder, I could hear a cluster of bees in the wood, buzzing with annoyance as I probed their entrance hole with compressed air and a thin metal spoke. When they'd had enough and began trundling out, I speared them one after another. There were eight of them dying on the ground before it was all over. I sealed the hole, painted over it, and not surprisingly, I've had no issues in this spot since.

I'm an environmental idealist when it comes to such matters of suburban living, up to a point. Then I become a pragmatist.

Each spring about this time, the bees get frisky again, hovering around the gutters, searching out new homes. I've found several telltale drifts and successfully sealed holes before they've gotten too deep, without further loss of life. If I catch them early enough, it seems, I can persuade the females to chew elsewhere. But just like me, if they get to a certain point, there's just too much energy invested, and there's no turning back.

Me and the Weeds

Like most other things about suburban life, my lawn is a subtle conflict zone.

Part of me would be happy with a meadow for a lawn, but social expectations--and regulations, since we are a part of a homeowners association--demand that we maintain an artificial monoculture of short, approved grass in the zone between house and street. And of course I don't want my property value to suffer, so there's that.

So we mow regularly and try to practice some organic recycling principles by leaving the clippings to decompose. That's not a big deal.

The weeds are the real issue.

I tend to admire weeds, in the abstract. These organisms look at a blank lawn of pampered, rarefied grass and see an opportunity. Jared Diamond points out that monoculture cropland and suburban lawn environments are essentially kept in a state of constant trauma: such a wide swath of single-species plants is only possible in nature after some cataclysm (a flood, a fire) has wiped the land clear, and then only for a short time before other species move in. Only with constant human input do crops and lawns maintain their quite unnatural existence.

Weeds are survivors. Evolution has made them superbly adapted to the opportunity a lawn presents. They send out roots and runners overnight, grow absurdly fast, seed gratuitously. It's easy to marvel at them.

Still, I can't just let them take over the lawn. I don't live on a farm; I can't have a meadow behind the mailbox. I live in a suburb.

During our first spring here I tried a fully manual approach, pulling weeds as I saw them. I could easily spend an hour on a Saturday afternoon yanking henbit and crabgrass and worts and so on. Most of the time I might even make some noticeable progress. But a few days later, after an evening's rain, the yard would be back to a weed nursery. Leave any strand of root, and they'd be sprouting again overnight. They grow in thick mats, spreading over the surface, roots loosely clinging enough to suck up moisture and pump energy into leaf-making. Looking closer as I yanked handfuls, I noticed tinier plants down low, the next generation waiting they're turn. My weed-pulling began to take on a futile tone, like trying to clear seashells from a stretch of beach.

To some extent the problem dies down in the summer; the grass grows quickly and seems to compete with if not completely crowd out most weeds.

I began thinking about my strategy for the following spring. Pulling alone seemed ridiculous and a little too pious, like I was trying to embody some noble-but-bogus path of virtue: the nonconformist in the herd, the subversive suburbanite. But on the flip side I didn't want to go the "professional" route and either douse the lawn regularly with weed-killer/grass-feed (an unholy combination, it seems) or farm out the job to a suburban lawn outfit charging up to $400 a year to magically eradicate and banish weeds. And they do, too. Some of my neighbors have lawns that look like shaggy Astroturf, Disneyish and a little too garish, like they're trying to convince passers-by of health and vitality. These lawns also bear signs every few months warning pets and small children to keep away due to fresh applications.

That's the last thing I want, to succumb to the easy pay-your-cares-away approach. I'll take the partial over the complete sell out. What are the unintended and longterm consequences of such chemical treatments, both in energy costs of production and environmental impact? It's just not talked about in the conventional suburban existence. We see a small link of the chain that amounts to a pleasant convenience--a weed-free lawn--and are allowed to ignore the vast network of cause-and-effects, the befores and afters.

So, "no" on the ChemLawn approach. I decided to go with a three-prong strategy. I spread a single bag of weed-and-feed ("feed" has interesting connotations as a grass fertilizer), sprayed noticeable weed sproutings with a Round-Up type herbicide, and pulled whatever survived.

At this point, in May of Spring #2, there's been little difference from the au natural approach. There have been weeds aplenty this year, maybe even more than in the past. The poison did kill them in some cases, but it also seemed to create a tougher class of weed, a grizzled 'Nam vet of a plant: battle tested, scarred, yet clinging resiliently to life and propagation. You'll get my stalk when you pry my cold dead roots from the ground....

Last week, we had a ChemLawn rep knock on our door. He'd been "in the neighborhood," dousing other lawns, and couldn't help but notice the uneven look of ours (even when relatively weed-free, our grass doesn't have the roided-out color or rubbery look of some in the community...it just looks nondescript). He felt compelled to climb our steps and offer his services. As we chatted he mentioned that our house was beautiful and it would be a shame to mar this beauty "with an ugly lawn," which his "product" could cure. I told him I'd consider his services and then I threw the flyer he left with us into the trash.

My common weeds are, of course, just the precursor species in a sequence that, if left alone, would eventually produce a forest where a lawn had been. After a few years they'd in turn be crowded out by larger flowering grasses, then brambles and scrub trees, which would themselves succumb beneath the shade of oaks and pines. This lawn, just like all of them in suburbia, exists in a perpetual stasis, a weird pseudo-natal zone propped up by enormous energies in the form of systematized fuel and chemistry, and in my case, some small but regular physical exertion.

In the end, the weeds will win. I'm sort of on their side.

Some general thoughts...

To start out:

1. As I live, work, and recreate in a suburban environment, I often find myself questioning the assumptions of my community. Usually I'll notice some artifact or accident of modern life apparently intended to make life better that instead seems to do the opposite.

2. I don't claim that any of these observations are unique, and when I'm aware of borrowing or building on another's ideas, I hope to acknowledge the reference. Not long ago I read The Geography of Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler, which confirmed much of what I already felt. Others whose work will no doubt be referenced include Derrick Jensen, Bill McKibbon, and Jared Diamond.

3. Offering a critique, I realize both my active and passive role in the propagation of our throwaway, disconnected culture. I'm not forced to live in this place, or to live a certain way. I live here because of convenience and economic usefulness, comfort and security. I probably don't have the courage or the commitment to resist the lure of conventional expectation and the ease and indulgence it promises. I still flow mostly with the mainstream.