Looking Back on 50 Years: Local Dumps, Socks With Holes, and Garbage Patches

When I was a child of seven years, I loved to play with my mom’s sock-darning egg. It was a small, wooden tool, shaped like a little maraca, passed down from my great-grandmother. Why I loved it, I can’t remember, but that simple tool became everything from a laser pistol to a scepter I held over my royal subjects before knighting them.

Those were simpler times. It was 1979, and we were a quiet country family living in rural Wisconsin.

My parents taught us to take care of everything. From our toys and dress shoes to our books and crayons, we treated everything with respect and put it away when we were done using it. What we could repair, we repaired, right down to our red-and-black ringed tube socks.

Treasures and the Dump

We lived in farm country. There was no garbage pickup, and as a family of seven, we generated a fair amount of trash. While our farm was no longer in production, we had a barn and half a dozen support buildings. A section of one building became the garbage room, which was a necessity to keep the raccoons and bears out of the trash.

On Saturdays, my dad would load up the pickup with those five stinking metal containers and drive the mile to the neighborhood dump. As kids, we hated hauling and emptying the trash, but we loved going to the dump.

The smell of rotting food and decaying paper was so putrid it hit you about a quarter of a mile before you reached the landfill. On still, hot days, you could taste the nastiness with each inhale, so face coverings were a must. When it was cool or there was a refreshing breeze, the odor was bearable, and trash day became a treasure hunt. In central Wisconsin, with nearly nine months of winter, there was an abundance of chilly (or downright frozen) days.

Most community dumps back then had two sections. The main area was where you dumped the bulk of your trash. The other, off to one side and sometimes covered by a small lean-to, was a place to leave items you no longer wanted but still held some value.

One outbuilding on our property was an old, granary building. Once used to store hundreds of burlap bags filled with grain, we rarely entered it before my oldest siblings became teenagers. Other than a few farm tools stored in the attic, the granary was empty, so my dad let us build a clubhouse in it. All the furniture and decorations for our hangout came from treasures gleaned from the local dump.

The dump often terrified me. Piles of discarded items occasionally moved like some other-worldly hand was jostling them. I was never sure if it was a snake or a rat big enough to star as an R.O.U.S. in The Princess Bride. Both made my blood run cold. Still, many of my favorite treasures came from the landfill, so I stuffed down my fears and went on safari, mostly with my sister, because we had similar interests and she was fearless.

Repurpose or Give Away

During those early years of my childhood, we never imagined throwing away clothes or furniture. We learned to repurpose almost everything, and what we no longer needed, we passed on to friends and family.

Long before ripped and holey jeans became the fashion, we covered the holes in our favorite denim with colorful patches that fit our personalities. One patch covering a knee on my jeans had a bright red apple with a smiling black worm crawling out of it. My mom let me pick the patch, and to a seven-year-old, it was the funniest thing ever.

In the years before 1979, I remember many nights, our family sitting in the livingroom watching The Love Boat or Fantasy Island while my mother mended the ever-growing pile of clothes in the corner next to her recliner.

Times were tough, and while my dad had a good job working maintenance for the local hospital, we rarely had any cash left after paying the monthly bills. Some months, my parents struggled to feed all of us, especially as my brothers entered their teen years and could devour the entire contents of the refrigerator in one afternoon. Our financial need forced my mom to take a full-time job. As she went from homemaker to a 40-hour-a-week cashier, our home world changed.

The World Shifts

Not long later, one of my socks developed a hole large enough for my big toe to poke through. Whether I was battling pirates across the remains of our fallen barn or trying to knock the best apple off a tree in our orchard, I was an active child, and my clothes got plenty of wear.

One night, I sat cross-legged on my bunk bed, folding my freshly laundered clothes, when I saw the sock with a gaping hole. I knew the drill, so I jumped up and dutifully carried it to my mother.

“Mom,” I said, interrupting her from reading her Good Housekeeping magazine. “This has a hole.”

Working five days a week while trying to keep five kids clothed and fed left her exhausted. She looked at me, then at the pile of clothes next to her chair.

“I don’t have time,” she sighed. “Just throw it away.”

At that moment, I felt a shift in the cosmos as my family joined the throwaway society. My mom never used the sock darn again.

Throwaway Society

Now it’s 2023, and everything is disposable. Last spring, we replaced our heat pump. When we asked how long it would last (we got over 20 years’ use from the last one), the installation tech told us typically 5–10 years.

“Can it be repaired?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” the man answered honestly, wiping the sweat from his brow. “In all honesty, it’s usually cheaper to just replace them.”

Decades after throwing away my first pair of socks, I contemplated the reality of throwaway heat pumps. In the days that followed, I made a mental note of everything I put in the trash. Every paper napkin, food box, or juice bottle tallied in my mind. After a few days, the realization of my carbon footprint made me ill with nausea.

Compared to my neighbors, I know I generate less trash than most of them. Come garbage day, my black dumpster sits idly by the road with the lid closed while my neighbor’s receptacles are overflowing with refuse.

Garbage Patches

I couldn’t get trash out of my mind, so I researched the menace. I’d heard of the garbage island known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but it was little more than a headline that flashed across my phone screen. When I took the time to learn more, the realities caused nightmares.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is estimated to be at least 620,000 square miles, though it could be twice that size. Even at 620,000 square miles, it’s just 7 percent smaller than the state of Alaska. The patch is so vast it’s developing its own ecosystem. Some estimate it’s made up of over 3.6 trillion pieces of trash, or roughly 450 pieces for every man, woman, and child on the planet.

If that doesn’t make your stomach hurt, then nothing will. But it gets worse.

Garbage patches are formed by gyres in the ocean. A gyre is a large system of rotating ocean currents. There are five primary gyres on planet Earth, each spinning either clockwise or counter-clockwise, depending on the hemisphere where it’s located. At the center of each of the five gyres is a garbage patch where the flowing waters push all the debris together.

While the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest, there are four others. I struggled to find accurate statistics on the remaining patches, as the Great Pacific one seems to get all the attention. Some estimate each of the other patches may be hundreds of miles (kilometers) across.

Our shift as a society to convenience and disposable products is catching up with us. While we may think little of tossing a water bottle in the trash, it may float in an ocean garbage patch for the next 450 years. But it’s not just water bottles and fast food containers junking up our world.

Another painful byproduct of our throwaway culture is that it’s now okay to toss away businesses, religions, and even people. While it’s called “cancel culture,” in reality, it’s little more than throwing things away. Is this really the world we want to leave for our children and grandchildren?

I’m not here to be a social commentator and have no interest in becoming a politician, but I can’t help but think it’s time for all of us to take action. Maybe our world would be a better place if we had just continued to mend our socks.

Until next time, keep fighting.