THE BRAND-NEW ORLANDO, FLORIDA, AIRPORT appears to be made exclusively of plastic: fuchsia plastic, aquamarine plastic, tropigreen plastic. One suspects that even the glass, the toilet bowls, and the candy bars are plastic, and everything everywhere is covered with advertising logos. I am looking for a man named Clark Gregory, who is supposed to squire me all over central Florida in order to show me compost.
This is not the natural habitat of a compost guru. In fact, if ever a structure were made to resist composting, it is this airport. I fear that I may miss him. Is he that smiling bearded man in the checked shirt? He looks all-natural enough. Nope. The guy with the gut? He eats well, he could know about digestion. No, sir. Well, I guess he didn’t show.
I should have known better. At the base of the escalator in the baggage claim area stands a tall, gawky Southerner in a billed cap and bright green T-shirt that reads, CLARK GREGORY, COMPOST MAN.
Johnny Appleseed walked around with his cookpot on his head; Gregory travels by plane and rental car. But both of them aim to change the landscape. Sure, an apple tree is sweeter-smelling in bloom than a steaming pile of freshly mixed crab scraps and pine bark, but both vivify the earth. In literal fact, the apple is the gift of the rot that takes place all around it, so Gregory, a.k.a. “the compost man,” and John Chapman, a.k.a. “Johnny Appleseed,” are brothers.
When we settle into the white generic midsize car, Gregory heaves a weighty freezerbag of black, twiggy stuff into my lap.
“Smell that!” he exclaims.
What is it?
“Scallop viscera compost. The stuff we’re on our way to see in the making.”
As I gingerly unzip the lock, I wonder what is the olfactory equivalent of being blinded.
To my surprise, the odor is sweet and earthy, with an orangy tinge at the edges. It’s like herbal tea mixed with fine topsoil.
Out of the corner of his eye, Gregory watches my eyebrows rise and smiles. “Ninety-six tons of scallop viscera, twelve hundred yards of shredded pine bark from a log builder, twenty-four tons of orange peels, and nine tons of shredded water hyacinth,” he intones.
“What?”
“That’s what it’s made of,” he says.
Gregory drives on, his big bony knees jutting out on either side of the steering column.
“It doesn’t stink,” I say, not quite believing my own nose.
“Not hardly”
Among Gregory’s earliest memories is one of his mother burying fish heads in the garden soil of their Daytona Beach home. Later, he tried to study composting, but his Hungarian-born professor sent him to Europe, because there was hardly a world-class composter in all North America.
For three months of 1972, the young man slept on the floors of homes, dorms, and barns throughout England, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria, watching how they did it. He saw composting in vessels, in bins, source-separated and jumbled together, municipal and agricultural. In Zurich, he watched the citizens compost their apartment trash in bins provided by the city.
Part wanderjahr, part vision quest, Gregory’s trip gave him an evangelical fervor that has never left him. For twenty years now, he has wandered America, preaching the gospel of compost. He tells cities to separate their trash and compost the organic fraction, he tells governors to install compost heaps on the grounds of their mansions, and he tells anyone who will listen that all you need is four construction pallets or a roll of chicken wire to get your compost bin started. “We’ll just chip away a little at a time,” he says, “and eventually nothing at all will be going into the landfill anymore.”
Aren’t there things that just have to be thrown away, I ask.
“There’s no such place as ’away’” he replies.
“So all of those wastes from the farm, the home, the lumberyard, and the fishing boats shouldn’t be going to the landfill?”
“It’s not waste” says Gregory. “It’s not waste until it’s wasted.”
He seems to have an aphorism for every situation. As the little white car scoots west into rural Florida, away from sunbelt splendor, I am his captive and willing audience.
In Georgia, where he comes from, Gregory is consultant to an enlightened few chicken ranchers who don’t do what the rest do: discard two million tons of chicken litter per year and one thousand tons of dead chickens per week. A single ranch contains more than seventy thousand full-sized hens, each confined in a small cage. For two years, pumped full of hormones and drugs, the chickens lay and lay. In many cases, they die, because their egg-laying organs blow right out their tails. On a big farm, a dozen chickens die every day.
Here is what the U.S. Department of Agriculture says to do with them: Mix 400 pounds dead chickens, 600 pounds chicken manure, one 40-pound bale of hay, and 5 gallons of water. Mix in 8×4×4 bin with a rain shelter overhead and a concrete floor beneath. Let stand two months.
Gregory makes a scoffing noise.
“Is that good or bad?” I ask.
“It smells like death,” answers Gregory. “They should have said four hundred pounds of hay, not forty, but the farmers are interested in getting rid of dead birds and muck, not using up hay. The trouble is that they think of it as waste disposal, not compost production.” And why, he adds, should they put a roof overhead and a floor underneath, when compost is a process that takes place most efficiently in contact with the soil in the wide-open air?
Birds and shit are high in nitrogen, the dry hay high in carbon. A proper ratio between the two makes microbes happy. Provided they have sufficient air and water, the microbes eat, digest, live, and die, raising the temperature of the pile to about 130 degrees Fahrenheit and turning foul decay into sweet life. A billion of them to the gram, they make the humus—that is, the organic part of soil, which is all that compost is.
A dump, a landfill, or a bad compost heap is an example of a failed relationship to nature. Even where people have begun large-scale composting, Gregory complains, they frequently design closed systems that end by stinking up the neighborhood, giving compost a bad name, and ultimately failing. “Never let an engineer near a compost heap,” says Gregory. “They take a process that requires air to operate, and what’s the first thing they do? They stick it inside a box, so they have to pump in the air at a cost of ten dollars per ton, when they might have had it for free!”
There was a huge building in a Florida city, meant to compost the solid trash from people’s homes. To operate it successfully, the builders had devised an elaborate fan system. Whenever the temperature suddenly fell, the moisture-laden air would condense into a malodorous pea-soup fog. The men whose job it was to drive front-loading tractors to turn the piles could not see the scoops five feet in front of them. The plant closed less than a year after it had opened.
“But even if you make a better dead chicken compost,” I argue, as we drive past a place called Exotic Acres, “isn’t the problem really with the factory farms?”
Gregory slows down and turns left onto a small dirt road. “Here we are,” he says. It distresses me that he has not answered my question. Later, I reflect that Johnny Appleseed never tried to stop his neighbors from drinking too much hard cider. He just took their leavings—the seed-filled pulp from the cider mills—and planted it abroad, turning their bad habits into beauty and use.
Composting as Gregory practices it is an act of healing. It restores the right working of a natural process. In that act, the participants are not just functionaries, they are sharers in an act of faith.
He rounds a corner, and brings our car to a halt next to the assembled landfill hierarchy of Brevard County, Florida. Men in suits, sport-coats, and neat field clothes await us. They are pretending to look down the five-hundred-foot-long windrows of composting scallop viscera that stretch away beside them.
But their hearts are not quite in it. Or maybe I am the distracted one. Because as impressive as these windrows are, dwarfing my father’s old-time four-foot-square compost bin, they are themselves dwarfed by the mountain that rises behind them.
Sixty feet high, it is the tallest spot in the county.
It is also the dump. Before it was the dump, there was no mountain at all there. The county landfill manager cannot hide the pride in his voice when he tells me that someday this immense plateau of steaming trash—so tall that the full-size graders working atop it look like toys— will be three times higher.
Another manager tells me how, when the government tightened the regulations, they’d had to dig all around and under the mountain, lining it with bentonite clay from Wyoming and with plastic, converting the whole thing into an outsized bathtub.
This raised the subject of leachate, the gross stuff that leaks out of a suppurating landfill—and inspired a third manager to describe how they’d counseled a local junior-high girl on her winning state science fair entry, which demonstrated a working leachate-containment system for the home. Unfortunately, she had neglected one step in the instructions, causing her family to move to a motel for four days while the house was fumigated.
We all laugh. These are bright and witty men. “We know where every drunk and every house of joy around here is,” says one. “You can’t hide anything. Your garbage tells on you.”
It does not occur to them, however, that the mountain behind them is doing just the same thing. They speak dutifully of the benefits that the compost windrows will bring, helping them to achieve the state-mandated thirty percent reduction in inflow into the landfill. But the only one who is really enthusiastic is Ollie King.
King has been hanging around the edge of the group, awaiting instructions. He has a couple days’ growth of beard, and wears a worn, blue-and-black-checked shirt and a blue baseball cap. When his bosses call, he takes me up on top of his Scat tractor, cranks it to a gut-shaking roar, and starts to work the rows.
When Ollie is not down here turning the compost with this machine that throws it up behind us like a boat wake, he is up on Mount Garbage, opening up holes to receive the county’s latest offerings.
“I like working the compost,” he says. “I’ve been with the landfill three years and four months. Down here, it smells for a day and then it stops. Up there on the landfill, it smells all the time.”
A whitish cloud of steam rises behind us as we churn up the eight-foot-high rows. He turns neatly at the end of each row and guns the big Scat down the next one. Occasionally, we hit a patch that is less well cooked and a stink of dead meat rises.
Afterward, as we walk down the chocolate-brown rows together, Ollie says of the smell I’ve mentioned, “That’s nothing.” He looks around in the heap, combing through the remains of conch, crabs, whelks, and barnacle-covered cans, the wasted “by-catch” of a commercial scallop-dredging operation. He sniffs at a red crab claw that now has the texture of wet cardboard, then discards it. He sniffs a whelk, makes a face, and hands it to me.
“There!” he says simply.
This is not the smell of ammonia or sulphur. It is beyond odor. It makes the gorge rise.
He knocks it out of my hand.
Within another month, however, all this stuff will smell like what Gregory handed to me in the car. Like sweet soil. As Gregory drives me west across the middle of Florida, I no longer see a simple rural landscape. There is no such thing as the country anymore, at least not if by that you mean a bucolic and unspoiled landscape of small farms. Rural America is the place where the cities conduct their most dangerous experiments in mass production and where they seek to dump what they cannot contain. In almost every case, the soil is their victim.
At the same time, in the small towns where communities still survive, you can find the most deadly enemies of the culture of managers: people who have neighbors and who live close to the soil. They are still capable of common sense.
In neighboring counties, we find two different waste-disposal strategies at work. The poorer county has opened a composting center, where municipal trash is composted, first in closed vessels, and then in windrows. Gregory criticizes the plant because it does not require home owners to pre-separate their trash into compostable and noncom-postable. As a result, landfill employees are stuck with trying to separate it all. The process is less efficient, and toxics like leaky batteries are more likely to contaminate the resulting compost. This means that you could use it to revegetate a roadside, but never on agricultural lands.
But this is a trifle compared with the richer county next door. There, the citizens spent millions to build an incinerator that converts all their trash to ash, generating electricity in the process. Our tour guides are polite and well informed, leading us up and down the steel ladders, past the boilers, and into the control rooms that might just as well have been made for a state-of-the-art aircraft carrier.
In the main control room, an operator sits in a big chair like Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, directing a huge claw that works on the other side of an immense, hermetically sealed window. Below him is a huge pit full of garbage. In a grotesque parody of those carnival games where you try to drop your claw on a valuable prize, he plunges it into the mounds of trash, lifting them up to the waiting maw of the incinerator.
Were this a fifties sci-fi film, you would suppose that the thing was built by a mad genius and was about to run amok. As it stands, it runs amok just by functioning properly. No contaminants escape through the specially constructed and filtered smokestacks, of course. But what happens to the ash, with its super concentration of heavy metals?
“It is buried in a special containment unit.”
Is this the fate of the soil? To become a specialized containment unit for deadly poisons? At least Mount Garbage is visible. You couldn’t miss it. But when a buried pouch full of this supercontainment ruptures, you won’t know it’s there until the ducks start being born with only one wing.
Gregory is oddly silent after our visit to the incinerator. He doesn’t praise it. He doesn’t criticize it. He won’t even talk about compost. We drive on through an eerie landscape of pine forest. All of the trees are small and of about the same girth. Although it is a two-lane road, there are no roadside stands or houses. A smell of hydrogen sulfide hangs in the air.
I ask him what’s going on.
“This whole county, pretty much, belongs to Procter & Gamble,” he says flatly. “It’s a paper forest. The smell comes from the plants where they process the pines into paper.”
We do seventy-five miles per hour through this landscape for the better part of an hour and a half. We are riding through the lonely forest on which America wipes its ass and blows its nose.
At last, we pull into the coastal town of Panacea, Florida. There really is such a town, located right in the armpit of the panhandle, making its living on crabs, fish, Jack Rudloe’s marine biology supply house, and a bit of modest tourism.
Zelda Barron is the guardian of the Wakulla County Landfill just outside of town. She is puffing a Viceroy, sitting in an overstuffed orange desk chair, at the window of a battered trailer. On a shelf next to her shoulder is a paperback American Heritage Dictionary, partly eaten by mice. Large, frank, honest, and not to be disobeyed, she weighs-in trucks, dressed in a red, white, and blue plaid shirt.
Gregory brightens up when he sees her, and the two immediately begin to joke like brother and sister. There are two hundred tons of crab scraps composting together with pine bark and wood chips in her dump, and more is coming in all the time.
A citizen arrives with a load of branches from a tree he’s just cut down. She asks Gregory if they can go into the compost.
“Sure,” he says, with a wide smile. He is coming back to life.
“Just take ’em over to the shredder there,” she says, pointing and forgetting to weigh the incoming truck.
“I’ve wondered for years why we weren’t doing this,” she says. “Crab scrap and tree limbs are our biggest wastes. You ought to combine them and make something valuable, instead of just throwing them away.”
The landfill is in the second year of a compost demonstration project that Gregory is managing. Already, the demand from gardeners for the finished compost is outstripping the supply.
Gregory takes me out to look at the piles. On the way, we meet a man who manages the dump. I know his name right away, because he is wearing a bright green T-shirt labeled ALBERT HARTSFIELD, COMPOST MAN. I laugh. So does Gregory. Hartsfield’s son appears, also in a personalized T-shirt.
Then, I turn around and look into the dump. In the foreground are rough dirt mounds, a pile of shredded tires, and a jumble of old pieces of furniture. But in back is a scene from a Chinese brushpainting.
The long, high mounds of compost are almost black against the dull, rough green of the pines behind them, and wisps of white steam rise from the piles like tendrils of drifting fog. As we walk nearer, the smell of ammonia is strong. Hartsfield volunteers, “I just put fresh crab in. You won’t smell a bit of it tomorrow.”
I am beyond caring about the smell. The usefulness and the harmony of the project with its landscape are what most impress me. Here in the armpit of Florida, common sense still has power. Later in the day, a citizen of Panacea puts it this way: “If we can drop a bomb down a stovepipe, we ought to be able to deal with our garbage.”
That evening, sitting in front of our motel, Gregory is shy and awkward. We will part early in the morning. He presents me with a plastic bag containing something soft. “Here,” he says, “this is for you.”
I imagine that I have just been presented with a pound of crab compost. But inside is a bright green T-shirt inscribed with the words BILL LOGAN, COMPOST MAN.