NONFICTION          

When I spoke to the person at Waste Management  -  -  -   photo by  Weebly.com                                    

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Wasteland
by  Yoka Verdoner

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the pandemic. Actually, it happened during the pandemic, sometime near the beginning, when we were already terrified and had no idea it would last so much longer. We had recently been instructed to wear masks, wash our hands frequently and avoid contact with other people as much as possible.
 
As a result, I spent a lot of time isolated in my apartment. I had retired from my psychotherapy practice about six years previously, and this enforced stay-at-home time seemed a good opportunity to deal with matters that I had successfully avoided dealing with the previous six years.
 
Among the left-overs of my years of practice were two rattan chairs, remnants from the first office I had ever rented as a newly licensed psychotherapist some thirty-five years ago. They had witnessed my earliest experiences as a beginning therapist, such as the young woman who in her first session, sitting in one of these chairs, took out a pair of small embroidery scissors from her bag and proceeded to look for a good place on her wrist to plunge it into. My office then was so small that it took only two steps for me to reach her and grab the scissors.  It was an early test of my professional competence in a new profession, and I had passed it.
 
The cheap though comfortable chairs had served faithfully for many years, until they were displaced by more upscale leather ones in a somewhat larger office later on. Relegated to a side room in my home for a few years, they were next put on a small outdoor deck, where I had negligently left them one November to succumb to the California winter rains. Due in part to my neglect and in part to their advanced age, the chairs were now too shaky on their legs even to be left on the street for a potential new owner. They would have to be moved one more time and properly disposed of. I would somehow have to take them to a not-too-distant waste management facility.
 
Since this was the time of the pandemic, and also since I had never disposed of any larger items in this way before, I did some careful research. When I spoke to the living person who answered the phone at Waste Management, I learned that I had to make an appointment for a specific time, that she would give me a reservation number, and that I had to come to the Waste Management facility at the appointed time with that number. Having previously disposed of some items at a recycling center for outdated tech stuff and old clinical notes at a local paper shredding company near my home, I felt the chair disposal would be a breeze. On those previous trips, strong, helpful men had carried heavy items from my car and the whole procedure usually took less than five minutes. 

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On the morning of my Waste Management trip, I wrestled the two chairs onto the backseat of my compact Toyota, cursing the whole time that I had somehow never managed to acquire an able-bodied son or grandson, never mind husband, to do this for me. Still, I was an able-bodied woman and could manage just fine. And off we went.
 
Because of the pandemic, traffic had been very light in recent days, but I soon ran into a traffic jam, cars barely moving on the freeway. I am not generally superstitious, except for some confidence in astrology. Still, this unexpected delay in the form of a major traffic obstruction struck me as a bad omen, and I began to feel less optimistic about my mission to dispose of two old chairs in an unfamiliar area at what was essentially a garbage facility, in the midst of a major global pandemic.
 
I eventually neared the Waste Management plant but suddenly realized that, probably because of my concern about how to put the chairs in the car, I had forgotten to take along my reservation number! The entrance gate to the facility had come into sight. My heart began to beat faster and faster with helpless anxiety. There was no way to make a U-turn and soon only a few cars were between me and the gate. Fortunately, it occurred to me that the Waste Management phone number I had called a few days ago was probably still on my cell phone. I could perhaps reach the person who had originally given me my number!
 
I dialed frantically, keeping an eye on the cars ahead of me, now wishing they would move more slowly. A gigantic “campus” with many buildings and vast regiments of enormous green trucks was visible beyond the gate. Some smoke was rising in the distance. A short way beyond the gate, I could see what looked like a small guardhouse. A petite woman in a smart blue uniform was stopping all the cars and examining their papers, no doubt their reservations.
  
The phone at Waste Management’s administrative office still rang unanswered as I pulled up to the guardhouse. Seconds before I rolled down my window to speak to the guard, the phone was finally picked up by, again, a living person! Amazingly,I was able to relay my reservation number to the blue-uniformed guard now standing next to my car as I was receiving the information through my phone. Saved after all!
 
But not so fast! The gatekeeper, who had the most elegantly made-up eyes I had ever seen above her surgical mask, looked for my name and number on her computerized list and told me curtly that I was not on it. Unmoved by my protestations that someone in the corporate office of the facility was confirming my reservation on the phone at that very moment, she told me decisively in an energetic Spanish accent, that I was not on the list, and I should just pull over since I was holding up the line of cars behind me. Thoughts of Franz Kafka flitted through my mind as I pulled up and parked.   ​

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I opened the car door and stepped out into the loud industrial noise I had already noticed during my shouted conversation with the gatekeeper a moment ago. Deafening machinery roared from all sides while large flocks of angry looking squawking gulls wheeled and swooped overhead. I began to have even more serious doubts about my rash decision to take care of business and travel into this frightening Hades far from home.
 
As I approached the petite gatekeeper, on foot now, I redialed my inside contact in the administrative offices. Surely this tiny issue could be easily resolved after all and I would be able to proceed with my errand. I began to explain the situation to the lady guard again and she replied, but because of the deafening noise, her accent and mask, and my age-related hearing loss, communication was difficult. Doing what was natural, but not exactly according to CDC guidelines, she pulled her mask down in order to clearly let me know that I was not on her list and could not enter. Doing what was natural, but not in accordance with CDC protocol either, I handed her my cell phone and told her to speak to her own administrative office directly. But there was a tiny complication here too. I had forgotten that because of my deafness, phone conversations on my cell phone went straight into my hearing aids and I was the only one who could hear the speaker at the other end. The guard lady could not hear a word. A truce was finally arranged. She took down the number of my contact and told me she would call her from her office inside the guardhouse. She handed my now contaminated phone back to me. I was to wait outside.
 
As I stood outside, my anxiety mounted. Was I now going to die of the Corona virus, having been shouted at from about twelve inches away by someone not wearing a mask? How stupid could I be? I took out an anti-viral alcohol wipe and wiped my phone. As for having been breathed on by a possibly infected person, though at least I had been wearing a mask, that was not something I could do anything about and I tried putting it into another compartment of my mind, where I usually put unacceptable facts.
 
When she eventually came out of her office again, I saw that she had pulled up her mask. She informed me that we would have to manually fill out an extra-special form which would permit me to finally enter the graveyard of old discarded junk. I thanked her and then looked her in the eye, easy since we were the same height, and said, “You took off your mask earlier when speaking to me.” There was not much to be said after that either by her or by me. I turned around to head back to my car to complete the task of discarding my old chairs. ​

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Down the road beyond the guardhouse, there was yet another gatekeeper, but this one was just sitting on a chair and waved me on. Phew! I finally arrived at a gigantic area of discarded goods, a veritable dust heap of civilization. Old refrigerators, old televisions, old stoves, old metal desks lay about in abandoned heaps as far as my eye could see. The gulls swooped and screeched overhead; the mechanical noise was deafening. I felt I had entered a special section of hell and suffered pangs of guilt that this was where I was abandoning my faithful rattan chairs, companions of my earliest professional life, who had never complained about being cast aside or neglected, but had silently and faithfully offered their services as long as they were able. Still, I was on a mission. I got out of my car and wrestled the chairs out of the back seat. There were no other people nearby, only some distant figures in a gigantic building a long distance away. I tried to find a spot that looked slightly less awful and placed the chairs closely together side by side, facing away from the worst of the turmoil. Then, before leaving, I took a photo of them.
 
When I neared the guardhouse on my way out, I again encountered the petite gatekeeper in her blue uniform, walking in my direction and carrying a clipboard. Just to remind her of her irresponsible behavior toward me earlier, quite possibly putting my life in mortal danger, I lowered my window and shouted at her, “I hope I won’t get sick!” She waved at me with her free arm and shouted back cheerfully, “You’ll be fine! You’ll be fine!”
 
Just before I reached the exit gate, a gull swooped down and left a large blob of white excrement on my windshield right in my line of vision. “A perfect ending to a perfect day,” I thought as I headed home. Then I suddenly remembered that, in fact, I had a home, a comfortable, peaceful haven with a luxurious sofa, made possible at least in part by the longtime support of the two rattan chairs, and also perhaps by my own fearless venturing into new and unexplored spaces. ​

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​​Yoka Verdoner is an eighty-seven-year-old hyphenated American. She came here from the Netherlands as a child shortly after World War II, during which she was a hidden child. She has always felt at least half European. Her professional life was as an educator and as a psychotherapist. Her passions are books, film, and the news. The enjoyable first two help mitigate the impact of the third.

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