On What We Bury

Abstract

From my kitchen window near Boston, I can see a hill where I otherwise shouldn't. It stands at the center of a park that also has a playground, two ball fields, and some skate ramps. Its scale always strikes me as disproportionate to the more gradual rise and fall of our eastern New England landscape. Nevertheless, in the winter, my sons march up one side and sled down the other. When they look back on their childhood, this “hill” will serve as landmark. It is the summer of 2012 and I am at this playground with my sons. The other parents complain about the odd weather. Hurricane Sandy hasn't arrived yet to churn the conversation into something more gritty and real. She'll come in the fall. So for now, the weather is a common topic of small talk. And to many parents here, the weather seems strange, but it's my experience that these conversations never go anywhere, which is why playgrounds are the place I feel most estranged. Climate and environmental issues, as pressing as they are, are subterranean here, which, at this park, strikes me as especially ironic. This park, you see—the one visible from my house, the one on which my sons now play—was once the Reed Brook municipal landfill, which explains the “hill” as a mound of our forebears' trash.