Sunday, November 29, 2020

Service Missions

Dave hunches over his wheel at the dump.
Dave Wood told me he would like to go on a service mission for the church – go somewhere in the U.S.A. 

He and I were talking about this in the context of if the world were in a different place, what would be our dream ideas. 

He knows that Moiya should stay close to the help she can get in the Canadian Medical system. 

 I asked him if he had ever thought that what he does every day is exactly that – every day some service somewhere, but in a self-directed way.

“I know that,” he said with that smile of recognition that comes when someone knows that all artifice is gone in a conversation, and that two people are saying simple sentences that should be long paragraphs, even essays.

This talk was going on as we drove together in his pick-up truck. “I have to pay $1,200 for insurance on this vehicle,” he said, “because I use this truck for work, and because it rides higher on the road than other vehicles, and because ….” He went on to list several the reasons for a high price on insurance for a vehicle that only cost him $750.

In the back of the truck we were riding in were three separate dump runs. The first one, Dave had mentioned to me as we had been planning our day together. If we are going to use the truck to pick up a Black-Friday-priced TV for Bonnie in Salmon Arm, “Let’s do a dump run before we get there.” Just double the use of the vehicle on one run to town. He was thinking about the carpet from Richard’s lot – a huge pile of rotting carpet, torn out of the original cabin years ago, and just left to deteriorate beside the shed.

“That has been there 30 years – time for it to go. Whomever took the carpet out of the cabin has even forgotten they even did the job.”
We reached the place where we were to dump off metal.
David told me to stay in the truck.
Too much muck out here, he said,
his own feet sliding from place to place.

Moiya, Dave, and I and made the transfer of the carpet to the bed of his truck (with the use of a Stanley Carpet Cutting Retractable Knife). The carpet could be pulled apart in deteriorating chunks, but long strings of carpet thread kept the pieces together and as we would pull them, chunks were messy and the parts didn’t separate easily. Pulling the pieces apart we were left with something akin to unravelling long balls of wool that had no end, yet that kept the huge chunks together.

On the lot was also the plough that attaches to the truck, a plough that has cleared the roads for many years. Now the truck has been upgraded and there was a discussion as to where the plough should go: to the business that takes metal or to the dump which has begun to receive metal for free after years of having people pay to dump the metal there.

, Dave and I couldn’t get that plough into the truck. Moiya called David Pilling and asked him if he could come down and give us added muscle. He was there in about two minutes. “David Pilling is always so willing to help,” remarked Moiya. Hands up to David for he not only provided the manpower, but he scrambled into the truck bending his body over and around the garbage and ther plough parts, contortions that I can never remember making with my body.

The sun blinds us as we leave the dump.
“One thing is certain: we are not going to pay to have someone take this metal,” announced David Wood as we rode along in the truck. I would have been happy to take out my cheque book, just over the marvel of having it gone off the lot.

Dave and I did a double drive through at the dump: round one - weigh the truck, dump the garbage and pay for that load; round two- circle back through the dump on a different road; dump the metal plough, so no charge and leave the dump.

Prisa Lighting is the place to take used light bulbs. There aren’t many places in town where these can be dropped off and certainly not at  dump. Inside Prisa Lighening the boxes are carefully labelled as to where to put each kind of bulb. But the cardboard that you carry the lightbulbs in, to get them bulbs to the store, those can’t be recycled there. They have to go somewhere else.

As Dave Wood said, “A dump run, to three different spots, and still we need to go an another dump run.” That is true. Next time cardboard, plastic and broken glass. Three cheers for hearts that believe in recycling.

Arta

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like a fun day. Recycling is a science, especially in BC.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Re -- recycling is a business. Just off the top of my head it goes like this:
    1. food scraps to the compost
    2. paper to one bin
    3. plastic and glass to another bin
    4. true garbage to the black bag
    5. light bulbs back to the lighting shop
    6. pop cans and beer bottles to be returned for money
    7. broken glass to another place

    Exhauting, just to get it out of one's house and into the garage in all of its different compartments.

    Yes. Recycling, a science.

    ReplyDelete

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