Good Bye to the Bulb: A Place Worth Fighting For

The struggle to keep the landfill wild and unruly and habitable for those
otherwise without habitation has been lost. Its a loss for all of us who loved the landfill,
but above all its a loss for those who lived there.

When the City of Albany closed the landfill in December 1983, it

erected a fence to prevent public access. The fence stayed up for ten
years, but if you wanted to, you could find a way around it. By the mid
90s the landfill had been discovered by those refugees and displaced
persons we have come to call, for convenience sake, the homeless.
The term defines them generically by what they lack. They called
themselves many things tramps, hobos, bums, gutter punks. Many
discarded the names their mamas and papas gave them, the official
names of birth certificates, drivers licenses and rap sheets. They took
street namesJimbow the Hobow, Rabbit, Moma Bear, Sparky, Scrappy
names without hooks to the past or a possible respectable future.
For over 15 years, interrupted by an eviction in 1999, they burrowed into the
strangely beautiful wildness of the landfill and became part of an ecosystem that nobody
had planned. Nature, left to its own devices, had gradually transformed the wreck, rubble,
and excavated dirt of the landfill into a vigorous and diverse landscape, harborage for a
vast variety of birds, a skittering collection of lizards and small mammals, and a
community of outcasts, living on the tailings of a society, which had rejected them.

Landfillians, as we shall call them, were no longer homeless. They slung tarps
over the rebar, erected tents and cobbled together makeshift shelters. The more ambitious
built elaborate shacks with windows, doors, carpets on the floor and million dollar views.
They hauled in supplies on bicycles and shopping carts. They shat in the bushes and in
plastic buckets. They peed wherever they felt like it. Middens of cans, bottles, old
newspapers, discarded clothing, broken appliances, bicycle parts, and disabled shopping
cartsthe accumulated trash of daily living and the treasured spoils of dumpster diving
formed around their campsites. They proclaimed themselves totally satisfied with
their condition, and scornful of those tethered to the responsibilities of jobs and
ownership.
They acquired dogs and cats who had puppies and kittens. They lay at night
wrapped in sleeping bags and thin grey blankets embedded with thistles, burrs and fox
tails. The inexorable wind that blows in from the Bay burrowed into their bones. They
were given to bursts of anger and self-pity. They were distrustful and protective of each
other by turns.
Memory crowded their sleeping quarters, and hunkered down amidst the rags and
bottles, the empty cans of ravioli and tuna, the dirty sheets, the muddy newspapers, the
porn magazines and portable radios. They dreamed sometimes of a former life, of door
bells and closets, refrigerators and bathrooms. In the darkness they fucked and
masturbated, groaned and fartedas we all do. At various hours of the day and night they
indulged in the contraband pleasures and canned forgetfulness of the street. The drunks
drank. The addicts, more numerous than the drunks, smoked and stuck needles in their
arms.

All this wildness, this beneficent anarchy, this mix of the licit and the elicit, this
self regulated and at times unregulated co-mingling of species in a landscape where trails
meander into cul-de-sacs and its still possible to get lost, displeased the powers that be in
the City of Albany. In 2002 it had transferred two thirds of the landfill to the state for
incorporation into an East Shore State Park, but it retained jurisdiction over the Bulb, as
the tip of the landfill is called. The Bulb is where the landfillians lived. Albany was
anxious to excise this unruly appendage and deliver it to the state for incorporation in the
Park, but the state had no interest in accepting it as long as people were living there. And
so, in May 2013, the Albany City Council voted unanimously to evict forthwith the
landfillians from their homes.

Between the landfill and the town runs a river of cars; countless and endlessly
commuting they flow by on the freeway, windows rolled up, traffic and news on the
radio. When night falls on the landfill it falls softly, and settles in like a blanket. In town
the blanket is punctured and thinned by light from headlights and streetlights, marquees
and shop windows. From a satellite, the landfill would be dark like large swathes of
Africa and the hinterlands of Asia and South America; bright like the rest of profligate
America would be Albany. Divided by the freeway, the landfill and town might be on
different continents.
When they learned the Council had voted to evict them, landfillians made an
effort to obtain a reprieve. They organized a march to City Hall the next time the question
of the Bulb was on the agenda. The landfillians waited as the Council members, three
men and two women took their seats on the dais. They appeared to be made of a material

that permitted only a limited range of motion, and remained permanently at a low
temperature. Landillians spoke at them for their allotted two minutes. They begged to be
left alone. They begged for more time. Some were eloquent; those who werent, spoke
with great sincerity. It didnt matter. Nothing they said raised the temperature of the
people on the dais, who waited with various degrees of obvious impatience for them to be
done.
Having failed to move the City Council, the landfillians filed a lawsuit to prevent
the eviction, or at least delay it sufficiently to allow them to find places to live other than
doorsteps and back alleys. The lawsuit stopped the eviction for half a year, but ended in a
settlement, which amounted to a defeat. 30 people were offered $3000 if they agreed to
move within a week. The rest got nothing. And everyone had to go.

The end comes with brutal swiftness in the last week of April, 2014. A crew of
workers in orange T-shirts arrives on the landfill in pickup trucks. They begin the job of
dismantling camps and removing all traces of habitation. They gather armloads of
belongings and throw them into the bucket of a yellow skip loader, which carry them to a
dumpster. Possessions accumulated in years of scavenging are mixed with garbage and
refuse. The skip loader is relentless, squishing and pulverizing whatevers been left
behind. Landfillians feel their lives are being pulverized along with their clothing, their
pots and pans, tarps and tent poles, propane stoves and propane tanks, stuffed animals,
chairs and tables, milk crates, suitcases, mattresses, bedding, accumulations of scrap
metal dug out of the landfill and meant to be recycled , shopping carts, bags of food,
computers, cables, keyboards, monitors, solar panels, cell phone batteries, and lots and

lots of bicycle parts, wheels and inner tubes, and frames and smaller bits and pieces of
breaks and sprockets and gears.
Snapshots of an eviction
The City has given people a week to get out. On the last day it rains. All over the
landfill people are arguing and cursing. They curse the rain. They curse each other. They
curse bike racks that fall off for lack of a bolt or a nut, handlebars that twist loose, the
stuff that falls off, because a bungee cord comes loose, the stuff that oh fuck it they
have to leave. They curse Sgt. Willis, a predator nuzzling his prey, who for years has been
an uninvited intimate, walking in on them unannounced, casually asking questions that
must be tolerated, siphoning up information to store away in police files.
People curse and when theyre not cursing, they are silent, lost dazed. When
asked where they will go, they become angry, because they have no idea.
April is angry at Pete. He came back to help her, having gotten his $3000, but it
doesnt matter to her. She is trying to reattach a bike rack thats been falling off and
rubbing against her wheel. She struggles with the linkage that wont stretch around the
pole holding up the bike seat.
Zuber stands outside his tent in a field of tall blooming grasses. He wrestles with
some kind of buckle on a strap and swearing,
Fuck you. God damn faggot. God damn faggot. God damn faggot.
His shouts ring out across the landfill.
He has packed a small trailer with a boombox and a couple of cases of tools. But
he doesnt have a way to attach it to a bike. He asks if Tom is still there; Tom may have a
trailer. But no, Tom is gone. Music plays from the boombox he spent yesterday fixing. He

has a two-seater, three-wheel baby carriage, the kind you see women joggers pushing
who have just given birth and want to get into shape. He thinks it would make a great
trailer, but he cant figure out how to attach it to his bike.
Glenn huddles at the entrance to the one remaining shelter left to him, a tent too
small to stand up in. He hunches over; rain drips off his yellow slicker and his mustache.
Enoch, his even-tempered lab pit mix reaches up his head to have his throat scratched.
Glenn wipes his eyes and peers out through the rain at his devastated campsite. All
around are jumbled piles of stuff, representing years of collecting. Tools are strewn on the
ground, plastic water jugs lie on their side without tops, crates that once held cooking
utensils, books, papers, and all sorts of odds and valuable ends are overturned and empty.
A black tarp covers a row of suitcases that hold the clothing that he wants to keep.
The damn rain, he swears. It wont let up.
Chet has been busy attaching a cat box to his bike for Baby Blue, his long-haired
gray-blue Persian. Blue is all Chet cares about now. Hes his one trustworthy companion,
his soul mate, his familiar. Chet wont consider leaving without him. He goes into his
shack and comes out with Blue in his arms. Carefully he opens the wire mesh door to the
cat box and attempts to coax him in headfirst. But Blue is an outdoor cat. Hes never been
confined. He jumps out of Chets arms, stalks away and stares back at him from a hunk
of concrete. Chet picks him up again, all the while quietly murmuring reassurances. This
time he manages to get him in and shuts the door. He leans his face down close in order
to explain to Blue what is happening. He sticks a finger through the mesh for Blue to lick.
Finally he gets on his bike and pedals off, to where he does not know.

Bob and Danielle are in a small tent surrounded on all sides by piles of
belongings. Bob is sitting on one side, Danielle on the other. Between is a narrow space
where Dollar, Bobs pitbull puppy, is squirming rambunctiously. annoying Bob who
shouts at him to stop. For over a year Bob and Danielle had lived in a multi-story
ramshackle contraption of a house, teetering on the edge of the landfill. Bob, an ex-con
who had never built anything in his life before, built it from scratch. He worked on it
incessantly, adding outcroppings, porticoes and passageways, until a horrified building
inspector, who pronounced it the most dangerous building he had ever seen in all his
years of his long career, had it red tagged and demolished. Bob refuses to believe that the
inspector knew what he was talking about.
All morning he has been hurried by work crews to sort his enormous pile of
belongings. The City crews have filled an entire container with stuff to store for him, but
theyve hardly made a dent and now time and their patience is running out. Bob still cant
reconcile himself to leaving anything behind. He has assembled two large piles he
intends to take with him. But how? He demands that Danielle rent a U-Haul. The
problem is Danielle doesnt have a license. That doesnt matter to Bob. She should figure
out a way to make it happen. He calls his mom on Danielles cell phone. Does she know
anybody who has a truck? His mother consults. No, there is no one.
Bob gets up and goes out of his tent. He sees Kim, standing on the edge of his
campsite, moving among his piles. Kim was in my law school class in the late 80s, but
something happened, and now shes homeless and hides out here on the landfill,
emerging in this moment of crisis with an odd smile on her face as if she has some secret
knowledge or is preparing some secret scheme. Bob looks around and sees that the wind

has blown the tarp off one of his piles. He runs over, looking for a power drill. Not
finding it, he turns furiously to Kim, yelling that she stole it. Kim just keeps smiling. His
rage increases. He starts throwing things. He overturns a box of stuff, and hurls it across
his campsite. He continues to kick things and yell at Kim. Kim just stands there, until I
urge her to leave. He continues to rage back and forth running from one end of his piles
to another kicking and shouting. Just then Robin Lasser arrives. She is planning an art
installation about the Bulb and begins filming Bob for a documentary that would be part
of it. His rage only increases. Now that hes on camera, he begins declaiming and turns
angrily at me, accusing me of not supporting his plan for a therapeutic rehabilitative
camp for ex-cons, who could learn to build houses just as he did.
Im angry at Robin for, as I see it, displaying, at an inopportune moment, the
narcissism of artists for whom all the worlds pain-and-suffering is only material to be
molded into a work that is their self-expression. She insists that she is there to help Bob
and Danielle move their stuff, now that they need to go. To her credit, she spends the next
hours taking their belongings down to her car.
So it ends, with curses, tears and mute dejection, with the sound of the diesel
motor of the skip loader, replacing the clink of horseshoes in the horseshoe pit, the
barking of dogs out for a morning pee walk, the conversations at crossroads in the day
and under blankets at night.
The Exhibit
What remains? Among other things, Robin Lassers exhibit, Refuge in Refuse, a
strange and curious amalgam of art and documentation, which takes the Bulbalong
with the impoverished, but empowered lives of its inhabitants, with all their messy

incoherence, and tremulous contradictionsand creates out of it all a kind of diorama.

The exhibit is an artifact, which can be consumed aesthetically. I imagine that visitors
will enjoy it in that not particularly intense way in which we enjoy museums, our legs
getting tired after a while, our interest peaked here and there, as we as we step back from
an exhibit to get a better view, or lean in to read an interpretive sign. And who is this we ?
Most of us will be white. We will have mastered the necessities of life sufficiently to
allow us to take a few hours off for a cultural experience. Most of us will be housed.
In a waxworks there are perfect likeness, but nothing moves except by mechanical
contrivance. There is something eerie about lifeless verisimilitude. Is that what this
exhibit will be? Life embalmed?
Why not think of it as memory preserved? Why should the life once lived on the
landfill, and the struggle to preserve it be forgotten? We need to know our history.
And why should we not make art from horror, loss and pain, and suffering, and
the vitality that survives despite it all. If we did not make art from such material, of what
would we make it? Goya etched the disasters of war; Kollwitz drew the pain of mothers
whose children are dying; Grunewald gave us the cross as an instrument of torture. Their
work is beautiful and horrible a peaceable kingdom mapped onto a world of suffering.
In their work reality suffers no loss. It is not left behind.
Is this what we have here?
Is this exhibit celebration or appropriation?
I think its worth thinking about these questions.

Why it Matters
Why have I cared about the landfill? The world reels toward
catastrophe. Pain is the air we breathe. The rivers are choked with
corpses. Crops fail. Rebellion brings swift retribution. The tortured pray
for death while children forage in the dirt with the rat of hunger in their
bellies. Meanwhile the rich and powerful, their eyes attuned only to the
spectrum of profit and power, lose no sleep over the plight of their
invisible victims. And the icecaps melt. And the frogs die. And the
whales go mad.
There is no escape, but there is a need for temporary relief. And
those who lived on the landfill had a greater need than most. Nature,
despite its utter indifference to whether human beings live or die, has
provided release from the discontents of civilization. Living in nature
quiets the human mind with all its nattering intentions. On the Bulb,
the landfillians benefited from that quiet. Nature on the Bulb was
solace and refuge.
We no longer have a safety net. People who are homeless fall
through its tattered remnants. If they fall onto our streets, the police
treat them like human garbage to be swept away as quickly as
possible. Out of sight and out of mind. The lives of homeless people
become a series of crimes. They sleep in doorways and they are
trespassing. They sit down on the sidewalk and they are blocking
traffic. They have a drink and theyre drunk in public. The law in its

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majestic equality forbids the rich and the poor to sleep under bridges,
to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. Its an old story. Few and far
between are places of refuge. The landfill was one. There the
landfillians were, for a time out of sight. But not sufficiently. The good
people of Albany, walking their dogs or bicycling with their children
might run into them. And they were doing drugs. And what were they
doing with their shit? It was unsupportable. On top of which they were
in the way. Albany had a higher purpose for the landfill. All over the
world, shantytowns spring up on abandoned land on the margins of
cities. They flourish until such time as it is decided to build a stadium
or some other public amenity. Then their land becomes valuable and
the bulldozers arrive accompanied by police. Albanys higher purpose
was to incorporate the Bulb into a Park. The local chapter of the Sierra
Club and Citizens for East Shore State Parks lobbied furiously to have
the eviction happen as quickly as possible, never mind what happened
to the people, and they had the Albany City Council in their pocket.
The End
The battle to keep the landfill wild and unregulated has seemed
to me to be the tiniest piece of the larger battle in which the fate of
humans and the fate of nature are intertwined. Now that the
landfillians are gone, Albany will turn the Bulb over to the state, which
will incorporate it into a park. Incorporation will mean destroying its
wild, unruly, and diverse ecology in which the homeless have been a

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keystone species. Nature will be gentrified, made safe for the housed,
neat, clean, and unsurprising. To hell with that. May those
environmentalists who perpetrated the evictions receive the scorn
they deserve. May the rest of us continue to fight for the things we
love.
What choice do we have?

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