People at Work #1

GARBAGE COLLECTOR

Yesterday I came up with the idea of doing an occasional series of pictures of 'people at work'. The world is full of people who directly, or indirectly make our lives better.   Many of them are in plain sight  yet virtually invisible because we take them for granted, others we never see, but we benefit directly from what they do.   My first subject presented himself this morning as I hiked down the driveway to pick up the newspaper.

A behemoth garbage refuse truck  clattered and rattled its way up the narrow road and paused at the bottom of our driveway. We have three different bins, a green can for garden clippings, a blue one for recyclables, and a grey one, half the size of the other two for garbage, which we are instructed to line up at least three feet apart with the handle side facing the street. The truck ground to a halt extended its arm, plucked up the can, lifted it, tipped it into the truck and lowered it neatly back to the ground. When the driver, who never left his truck, looked up and saw me, he waved before clanking off down the road to the next line of bins. A couple of cars, unable to get around him, patiently trailed along behind. This happens three times on collection day, because there are separate trucks for each bin.

Things were a bit more primitive back in Berkeley. At least two guys clinging to the outside of the truck, ran around collecting bins and returning the empty ones. The truck was just as big and the street was even narrower, with parked cars on both sides. In New York, the trucks began their rounds long before dawn, just as many New Yorkers were making their way home and others were trying to sleep. In Saluzzo, garbage was deposited by householders in several central locations because even the smallest of collection trucks couldn't navigate the steep, narrow, medieval Italian streets. Wherever they are, garbage trucks seem to have one thing in common…they make an ungodly amount of noise, usually at dawn.

Behind the scenes all the garbage must be sorted, dumped, piled, raked and handled by many more workers. Yet where would we be without them? I wouldn't want to go there.