Joe Bennett: Humans only species to have created rubbish dumps

Machinery moving solid waste at the Whangārei ReSort Centre recycling station. Photo / File

A DOG'S LIFE

Come with me, early to beat the crowds, Sunday morning round about dawn, what Steinbeck called the hour of the pearl, unfailingly the best of every day, the world renewed by dew and darkness, the hour of delicacy and quiet and it is lovely. We're going to the dump.

The dump, the municipal dump, where we discard what we can't use or what, in our profligacy, we no longer want. The dump may promote itself as an eco-drop or a recycling centre or a materials exchange but at its heart it's a dump.

No other species has dumps. They waste little and what they do discard is seized on by others. The whole shebang is self-balancing, self-sustaining, interdependent. But not us. We use and biff. It is odd that we have evolved in this fashion and it can't last. But in evolutionary time we are striplings.

Still it's dawn and it's hopeful because dawn is always hopeful and we've packed the car with junk that I knew was junk when I stored it years ago but I had to ease myself into throwing it out. Now I am keen to be rid of it, to shed some of the dread weight of possession that encumbers us all, that slows us down like belly fat.

The route takes us past the pound, a dump for dogs. I have set foot in that pound twice, each time just a reconnaissance mission, or so I told myself, and each time I emerged with a dog. How could you not?

First there was Jessie, scamp of scamps, then Blue the obstinate. Each lived with me for a dozen years and taught me lessons every day, lessons that I noted but did not heed, and then they died.

I avert my eyes from the pound gates, from the barbed wire and the blank walls, because otherwise I will be drawn in and have my heart stolen again and I do not want - though of course I do - my heart to be stolen again.

Birds aplenty at a landfill, foraging for scraps of food discarded by humans. Photo / File

It's 7am. Dumping is an all-day business. We pass a man manhandling a fridge from his trailer, a huge double-doored fridge, a fridge that once represented luxury and indulgence, but just a few years later is dump fodder, unsellable. A second-hand fridge is like a second-hand mattress.

A friend had a mastiff called Jed, a 40 kilo beast. He used to let Jed out of the car before he reached the weighbridge at the dump, then whistle him round and have him back on board for the second weighing.

Once his car weighed more on the way out than on the way in, but the good woman in the toll booth just smiled and gave Jed a biscuit.

But look, look there, just this side of the dread pit where all the junk is thrown to be bulldozed into a chute, compressed and trucked just far enough away from town for us not to feel the guilt, just before the pit, I say, pecking at some unidentified piece of organic matter, a brace of peacocks. Here in our place of waste, peacocks. Picking over our detritus.

Aptly we reverse up to the pit to excrete our load. In doing so we carve a swathe through a sea of gulls. Red-billed gulls, black-backed gulls, all parked and folded, facing into the breeze awaiting the day's trash, and all of them sleek, clean and dazzling white, ultra-virgin white, detergent-ad white.

Faultless, they rise before our wheels in brief and screaming protest, then settle back down to attend to our leavings and picking.

We unload, lobbing everything into the great concrete pit. And though the day has barely begun, already the place is thick with dust and flies and the smell of rot and ruin. It's a place you want to be shot of, that you want to wash from your skin as soon as possible, that it would warp your heart to work at.

We're done and away as soon we can, rounding the end of the pit and turning back towards the weighbridge, but braking suddenly because across our path steps a scrap of voltage blue, a pukeko, with the endearing, huge-footed, high-stepping gait of a swamp dweller that some power company once exploited in its advertising all unbeknownst to the bird.

Across the road it steps and heads like the others, in all their various beauty, for what we spendthrifts, who see ourselves as the superior species, have dumped.