I grew up in a town too small to have a major grocery store, though it did have a nice IGA up on the bluff. The selection was expensive and limited mostly to spartan brand goods, so like most people we would drive around the bay to the slightly larger city on that side and go to the much larger and more modern Giant-Way.
The Giant Way wasn’t quite to the city. It was in this odd little business hamlet of sorts, just beyond the state park, but before the Bay View Association, which is just on the outskirts of the city proper. This little buisness hamlet wasn’t a quaint or cozy one. It was a 4 lane highway with a Burger King, Hardees, Mcdonalds, and Pizza Hut on one side, and on the bay side the large Giant Way grocer- a small outdoor plaza of other buisnesses, including a Rite Aid and a Jo-Ann Fabrics on either side. The secretary of state had its office in a smaller building between that and the Taco Bell. Your basic, outer-city limits, vehicles-only urban sprawl type area.
Immediately to the north of this was the state park- a thick wooded area in the crook of the bay with towering dunes, and a bike path that was converted from an old rail line that hugged the water and split right down the middle between Urban Sprawl-ville and the rustic State Park.
It was from that bike, or rail path, that I deviated one day just into the forest, and discovered something interesting.
A dump. Like a city dump, but a very OLD city dump. Completely overgrown and hidden by the forest. The trash I found felt like it was from the 50s mostly. Old license plates I found confirmed it with a ‘52, though I found older ones than that. Old white ceramic lotion containers. Old glass perfume bottles, still with their corks inside. Pieces of colorful plates. Bottles, more bottles. Glass jars in green and vibrant blue. Clear jars with lids screwed tight and some black liquid mystery eco system somehow inside.
I’d visit often, just rumaging around. On more aggressive ventures, I’d come with a shovel, and tunnel into the layers. There must be mountains of it in there, I dug several feet once and kept finding fresh treasure the whole way.
It fascinated me how dated it was. Like this little time capsule of an entire city’s most intimate and frequent doings. Remnants of quiet routine moments in their kitchens and bathrooms, using basic daily goods and discarding their shells for me to find. All the broken toys that entertained children who were now likely dead of old age. Children who played in the snow while their parents kept warm the buildings. I think of the snow falling on those nights that must have felt so present and modern at one time.
I would later discover the source of the Hamlet, and by way of that, the source of the dump.
It wasn’t the city dump. There wasn’t a city there- there was a Tannery, massive and towering, that owned its own row houses for the workers there- shoddily built two story gabled homes in two long rows, one along the south (where the Taco Bell, Secretary of State, and Giant-Way parking lot would go on to stand), and one perpendicular to the east a bit- on the other side of the creek, now just vague divots in a field.
It was the kind of “town” the song “16 Tons” talked about, more or less owned by the factory, and self sustaining. There was a lot of that in my state in that era, many ghost towns that were once just factory towns.
But the town of “Kegomic,” which is what the Natives called it first- since it was where a creek emptied into the bay, and anywhere there was water- especially creeks- there were natives- would not last beyond the closing and razing of the factory. The row houses were razed soon after, and the massive land mass it sat on was chopped up and sold as commercial real estate.
The dump that I found was the dump for the people in that factory town, something I was able to confirm from an old photo I discovered during my research. Talking about it makes me want to go back and look for more treasures.
It’s one of the places I feel most connected with the world. Something about the minutia of little daily routine things- in front of a mirror, a sink, or a stove. It’s like you can feel the common vibrations we all share using similar things with similar thoughts in similar hours and weather in dim lighting or just the pre-dawn dark.
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