Originally published Saturday, March 1, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Kirkland civic leaders, real estate agents and most local boosters would rather not discuss it, but the Kirkland dump upwind of downtown is one of the biggest draws in this upscale community.

It draws not only flies, but probably more customers and visitors than any other place east of Lake Washington and north of Bellevue Square.

Someday soon, they hope, the covered-over and re-engineered landfill will be a community ballfield. But no matter what you call it, folks will still come here to dump.

Sooner or later, everyone's gotta dump. More than 26,000 tons of stuff last year, hauled in 900 pickups, station wagons and trailers each day after the recent winter storms, and almost 500 customers on a normal day.

Which is every day of the week. Come rain or shine, they come with the wretched refuse of their shored-up middle class, yearning to be free of whatever it is that's accumulated in their lives and landscapes, their basements and garages.

"And this is good garbage, the stuff you see hauled in here, and Factoria (King County solid waste transfer stations)," said John Wilder, a site operator for the past several years at Kirkland. "Now, down at Algona, that's real garbage!"

Such off-hand remarks aren't so much lifestyle value judgments as they are plain ol' observations based on empirical evidence of a seasoned worker. And if King County can get away with calling all that stuff "solid waste," I can throw off an "empirical" now and then.

Don Reiman, who with friend Emily was unloading a Jeep full of yard waste and what-have-you, hauled it all the way from Coal Creek because he lives in the Kirkland area and comes here occasionally. "Once or twice a month," he said.

"It would take forever to get rid of it in the regular garbage pickup, all this old wood and Sheetrock and yard debris," he said. "Last November I hauled eight truckloads of old roofing in here. And I still have more at home."

Sheetrock is also called drywall, but by the time it gets here, it's usually very-soggy-wall. "In the past few years, I got rid of a lot of stuff by getting divorced," said Reiman. "In a way, it was cheaper. But I don't do that anymore."

Not everybody unloads that much, but some -- not many -- seem to have a load to get off their chests, too, according to scale operator Rachael Clark. "I don't mind the question-and-answer part of the job," she said at her scale window. "In fact, it's easier on everyone if they ask on the way in. It avoids hassles about our not accepting credit cards and that sort of thing.

"But some of 'em get downright indignant or nasty about the rules or the costs, and they say things like how their tax dollars pay my salary and they think that just because I work at the dump, they can treat me like garbage!"

Well, it's not really all that bad here at Houghton-by-the-Lake. After all, scale-operator salary starts at $13.44 per hour. But Clark's shift-companion scale operator, Elaine Harrington, sometimes has to re-remind in-bound customers that they can be fined up to $10 if their loads aren't tied down and secured. "Sometimes they'll say: 'But I only live five blocks from here!' And I'll tell them: 'Well, I live only three blocks from here, and I don't want your mattress in my front yard!'"

To most customers, the transfer station is a considerable convenience. G.M. "Goody" Johannessen, who owns G.M.J. Construction, said he was dumping a load of yard waste as a favor for one of his remodeling customers.

"Mo" Porter, a former P-I pressman-turned-contractor (L&M Restoration, Inc.) felt badly about having to dump the relatively intact panels of a $5,000 redwood gazebo damaged by the storm. "I couldn't find anyone who wanted it and it could be fixed up without too much trouble and I don't have any place to store it, so over the edge it goes!" he said, hoisting another redwood panel into the huge waste trailer parked below.

Occasionally, site operators have to go over the edge and into the collection pit to retrieve checkbooks, wristwatches and car keys inadvertently contributed to the solid waste.

The ropes separating the back end of dumping vehicles from the pit are to prevent dumpers from becoming dumpees, something that happened with regularity in the past. "Someone would grab hold of something in a truck and pull and wham! he'd go over the edge with the stuff!" said site operator Ken Miller.

All that over-the-edge stuff gets hauled to the Cedar Hills landfill, with no exceptions or diversions. "In the old days," remarked Wilder, "an operator might see something 'good' go in and be able to retrieve it. Now, that brings a severe punishment. No more salvaging."

That's what the sign warns on both walls of the covered, open-air dumping area where Joe and Mary Citizen and commercial refuse drivers dump everything from old lawnmowers and bicycles to almost-new, still-in-the-box goodies.

"Some might ask if we want a particular item," Wilder said, "And when we say we can't take anything, they might set it off to the side, hoping someone else will maybe take it. They feel sorta guilty about dumping it."

Site operator Trish Woolery added: "I saw one guy dump a brand new chandelier, still in the box! Another guy dumped a bunch of exercise apparatus, a whole 30-yard container-load, still in boxes."

And Miller quipped: "Some of the furniture you see dumped here would look good in my house! But then, you get stuff like a load of diapers from a nursing home ... used diapers! Uhh, uhhhh!"

Woolery still remembers one of her first weeks on the job, when a dumper cracked open a huge container hauled from some fast-food restaurants. "It was a hot day, and when

that opened and you could smell it and see all the maggots crawling around ... I lost it!" she said, rolling her eyes.

Their shifts of seven straight 10-hour days allow for breaks only when the lines of dumpers thin out, which is infrequent. "I still have half a pizza back in there," Wilder said, nodding toward the trailer office that operators call their home away from home.

But look at it this way: It's a Kirkland home. And they don't have far to go to dump the wastebasket.

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.