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Lieutenant Raymond
E. Foster, LAPD (ret.)
I really wanted that green backpack. It had green and
white stripes with a large “ecology” symbol
on the back. The symbol was essentially an
upside down peace symbol within a circle.
Its aluminum frame and nylon construction
weren’t particularly comfortable,
lightweight or even useful; but, in 1972 it
was groovy. I imagined I would explore the
wilderness with it on my back. I never
imagined the journey it would take me on.
I had a paper route and with the money could buy
whatever I wanted. My parents were
disconcerted by the green backpack. Although
I was a straight-A junior high school
student; a Life Scout; in the band; and,
played little league - for my parents the
green backpack with the ecology symbol was a
gateway drug to the hippie movement. Right
after the purchase I got the “drugs are
bad,” “birds and the bees,” and the
“college” speech. Maybe it was turning
thirteen earlier that Spring, but I think it
was the backpack that shocked them into
defensive action.
Scouting was different in 1972. It was centered on
Patrol activities and was made up of a group
of eight or so boys whose Patrol constituted
the larger Troop. Mine was the Rat Patrol.
While Patrols would be, generally, named by
the boys based on forest animals, we picked
the name as a dual reference to the popular
TV show. The Rat Patrol, on television, were
a group of World War II desert guerilla
fighters who outfoxed the Nazis in North
Africa. This was us - a small group of
mobile, active guerrilla Boy Scouts.
We were a backpacking Patrol. We carried what we
needed; went where foot trails took us and
despised Base Campers. Base Camping Scouts,
with their pop-up trailers, outdoor kitchens
and fancy meals were restricted to the roads
and more importantly, to wherever their
parents drove them. In truth, our blue
collar Patrol carried what it had, as
opposed to what it needed.
In the early 1970s, Southern California was different,
too. Suburbia was just beginning to devour
the foothills and farmland. Out neighborhood
was wedged between large rolling hills of
barley. The barley gave us our seasons:
green was Winter and Spring; brown was
Summer and Fall.
It was mid summer and out Patrol was
planning a trip. There were no permission
slips, insurance forms, or adult
supervision. There were eight members of the
Rat Patrol, a plan and the green backpack.
The plan was to hike seven miles over the
soon to be harvested foothills to a
campground. We would leave Friday and return
Sunday. Vincent was the smart kid. He had
been Mr. Spock since the third grade
whenever we played Star Trek. He acted the
smart kid part with his thick black framed
glasses and even thicker black hair that
stuck out like a crows wings underneath his
Scout cap. Vince had a map; albeit a Union
76 gas station map. He showed the route from
Dwayne’s house to the campground. He ended
his briefing, pointing to spot on the map,
“By cutting through the dump, we could save
at least a mile.”
None of us had seen a dump. Our backpacking trip was
taking on the air of secret mission. We
would have to time our departure to arrive
at the dump after closing, cross unknown
fences, navigate the dump and leave enough
daylight to reach the campground. And, of
course, not tell anyone of the plan.
Late on Friday afternoon we set off. We quickly
realized the defect of a gas station map.
There was no accounting for terrain. The
hills were steeper and the sun, though
waning, hotter. For the first mile we moved
along, singing our Patrol’s official hiking
song (sung to Colonel Bogey’s March; or the
title song from the Bridge over the River
Kwai):
Comet!
It’ll make your mouth turn green.
Comet!
It tastes like Listerine.
Comet!
It will make you vomit.
So get some Comet and vomit today.
Soon laughter, whistling and singing gave way to the
personal groans, sighing and jostling of the
increasingly longer and steeper hills and
switchbacks.
We smelled it before we saw it. He had been hiking for
nearly two hours when the first faint, sweet
sick odor of decay hit us. Although none of
us had been to a dump before, we all somehow
knew the scent. As we climbed a hill the
odor became stronger we came to a three
strand barbed wire fence on the crest of
the hill. From here, at the fence, we could
see it. A deep man-made hole in the ground
surrounded on three sides by small mountains
of garbage. Sleeping yellow bulldozers,
stopped mid push, were poised near the edge
of the pit and ready to shove another blade
full of trash into the hole. Dirt access
roads wound in and around the heaps of
garbage, quiet conveyor belts, assorted
machines and trucks; even portable toilets.
Our stop at the crest seemed longer than it probably
was. We dropped our packs and started to
assist one another across the barbed wire
fence. After I had crossed, Walter, my best
friend and the biggest and only Black Patrol
member (in 1971, we were Black, Brown and
White) handed me my pack. He passed it over
the top strand of the fence and by the
pack’s metal frame. The back of the pack
with the ecology symbol was at my eye level.
It was a stark contrast, looking back over
the ripening summer barley, smelling the
dump and holding the ecology symbol over a
barbed wire fence.
We followed Vincent down into the dump. We were
resilient. Our momentary pause at the crest
of the hill was now a full-tilt exploration
of the waste of Los Angeles County. There
was everything: rotten food, animal corpses
and even a discarded avocado green
refrigerator. Of course, Dewayne found a
discarded Penthouse centerfold. For a few of
us, it was a day of firsts; the dump and
nudity. As we wandered through the dump, the
odor began to change. Increasingly, it
became a heavy sulfur-laden chemical smell.
Beyond one of the trash heaps we found a large pond,
the source of the chemical smell and in the
center of the dump. It was a football field
across and perhaps twice as long. Except it
wasn’t water. It was a clay red, thick
looking sludge with a blue twinge. Several
large and small pipes fed liquid to the
pond. Some flowed like water, but foamy and
dirty, others like the brightest red liquid,
oozed. On the far shore, there were scores
of 50 gallon drums; some capped; some open;
some swelling; and, others clearly
corroding. We didn’t know that in the future
this place would represent criminal charges,
million dollar lawsuits and a superfund
clean-up.
Dewayne called it the Vulcan Lake of Fire. No one found
it amusing. It looked and smelled serious
and dangerous. We felt like we needed to get
away from it - it was the birthplace of the
Blob - we felt it might grab us. Pushing
Vincent along, we quickly skirted the lake,
climbed a service road and hiked out the
other side. Two hours later, we climbed a
chain link fence and hiked through official
parkland to our campsite.
That night around our fire, we talked about the garbage
dump. We took the trash cans out on
Wednesdays for our parents. We had seen them
lining our street like drunken soldiers,
leaning this way and that, but nearly at
attention. We had seen the huge truck lumber
from house to house and the men swing the
cans into the truck bins. We had heard the
bins labor up, and the crashing and mixing
of our neighborhood refuse. We’d even
smelled the trucks. But, we had no idea
where the garbage went, or how people could
create so much. We knew, based on the pit
and the bulldozers, that we were only
viewing a small percentage of what must have
been dumped. How could the small amount of
garbage our families produced create such an
open sore? We were only beginning to
understand.
Vincent, the smart-acting kid, correctly identified the
pond as industrial waste. He explained in a
13-year-old way that the production of our
bikes, our television sets and even our
packs created waste. It was the extra paint
and chemicals, the washing of machine tools
that had created the Vulcan Lake of Fire.
Great, I thought. My green backpack with the
ecology symbol was part of the problem it
was purporting to champion. Well, 35 years
ago I didn’t think it exactly like that, but
the sentiment was the same. It was the first
of three environmental dilemmas that were
beginning to form in my mind. Everything we
use, even that with a noble purpose, creates
waste.
As we talked we began to discuss solutions, what to do
with the garbage. Walter came up with a
solution. It was the hay-day of the Space
Race. Walter said we should pack the garbage
into a rocket and blast it to the sun. I
know, other kids in other stories have
mouthed those words. But, I heard the
solution come from a member of the Rat
Patrol. As I have gotten older it never
ceases to amaze me how people seeing similar
problems and having a similar mindset will
come up with similar solutions; even bad
ones. We all laughed at Walter. It was
obvious immediately that the cost for so
many rockets would make the solution
improbable. I know, it was the cost, not the
practicability - - we didn’t even consider
that. We were American Boy Scouts and given
enough time and money we knew you could do
anything.
Vincent said of Walter’s suggestion, “The problem is
the weight of the garbage, getting it into
orbit is only one problem. The real problem
is the transferring of weight from the Earth
to the Sun. As the Earth got lighter, the
gravity would get less. Less gravity means
the air would float into space. We’d
suffocate and die.” I had never heard
silence like that before. Vincent had killed
us with Walter’s solution to a problem we
were all creating. Fortunately, Dewayne
broke the spell when he said, “Don’t worry
Vince, your sister will survive, she has
gills.” We laughed, changed the subject and
the conversation eventually died with the
fire.
As I settled into my sleeping bag underneath my lean-to
(okay, we had plastic sheets held up with
clothesline and close pins, but it kept the
dew off us), I began to think about the
second dilemma posed by Vincent. It was the
first time I thought about how our solutions
to problems can have unintended
consequences. Fortunately, we didn’t begin
to shoot the Earth’s mass into the Sun. But,
I can rattle off time after time that a
human intervention designed to alleviate a
human created-problem, created yet another,
often more serious problem. After all the
centralized collection of refuse is a good
thing. The good thing led to the massive
problem of landfills.
On Sunday we broke camp, climbed to the top of the park
and then over the chain link fence onto a
dirt service road. Vincent stopped, broke
out his gas station map and oriented it. He
said, “If we go this way, we can go around
the dump.” Dewayne turned and started to
walk into the direction Vincent had pointed.
There was no discussion. No one wanted to
back to the Vulcan Lake of Fire.
We were tired on Sunday and everyone was in their own
heads. I began thinking about what good
conservationists we were. This was only a
conditioning trip. Over the next three years
we would go on many wilderness hikes with
our larger Troop. We competed and won as a
Patrol and many Camporees. We knew our
stuff: setting up a proper camp, making fire
with one match, first aid, animals and
knots. We were dedicated to leaving the
wilderness as we had found it. Even this
Sunday we had properly “policed up” the
camp, even packing out garbage left by
others.
As we walked along, my pack partially filled with food
wrappers and other garbage, I started to
feel hypocritical. I didn’t know what the
feeling was then, but I certainly do now.
Yes, we were good conservationist, but my
pack was filled with that which would fill
the open wound of a landfill. The green
backpack with the ecology symbol made me
uneasy: it created waste and it carried
waste. I felt like the boys behind me were
staring at the symbol all the while knowing
what I knew. And, to top it off, thus far,
all the solutions we could come up with only
made it worse.
Around this same time, in the late 1960s or early
1970s, the phrase “Think Globally, Act
Locally” came into our consciousness . At
thirteen, I hadn’t heard that phrase, yet.
But, as I hiked home that is the commitment
that began to form in my mind. Indeed, years
later, when I did hear it, it struck a
strong cord and summed up what I had
thought. As a 13-year-old, I realized that
it was the cumulative actions of human
beings which created the massive problems.
Once the problem was massive, only massive
intervention with all the potential
unintended consequences could be applied. On
the other hand, if the many human beings
made small changes in their behavior, the
problem could be addressed as small, not
large.
If my 13-year-old self had any wisdom it was the
recognition that the massive pit and the
Vulcan Lake of Fire were symptoms, not
problems. That interventions on large scale
symptoms don’t solve the problem, but
potentially create other, even larger
problems. I knew then, as I know now, that a
single person doesn’t make much of a
difference, but they do make a difference. I
did make small changes. As an example, in a
few years my father would demonstrate
shaving by running water over the razor
blade to wash away the shaving soap. I
decided to fill the bowl with just enough
water and swish the blade. Over 35 years
that small half gallon or so that I save has
made a huge difference.
It’s those small, seemingly insignificant changes that
really matter. The plastic grocery bags seem
silly. But I know from experience it isn’t
just the half dozen I use at the store, it’s
my half dozen times millions. What happened
to the green back pack? I haven’t seen it
since I returned from Basic Training. I
suspect my parents got rid of it while I was
away. I am afraid it’s in a landfill,
somewhere.
About
the Author
Raymond
E. Foster was a sworn member of the Los Angeles Police Department for 24 years.
He retired in 2003 at the rank of Lieutenant. He holds a bachelors from the
Union Institute and University in Criminal Justice Management and a Masters
Degree in Public Financial Management from California State University,
Fullerton. Raymond is a graduate of the West Point Leadership program and has
attended law enforcement, technology and leadership programs such as the
National Institute for Justice, Technology Institute, Washington, DC.
Raymond
has been part-time lecturer at California State University, Fullerton and
California State University, Fresno and is currently the Department Chair of the
Criminal Justice program at the Union Institute and University. He has
experience teaching upper division courses in law enforcement, public policy,
technology and leadership. Raymond is an experienced author who has published
numerous articles in a wide range of venues including magazines such as
Government Technology, Mobile Government, Airborne Law Enforcement Magazine, and
Police One.
His
first book,
Police Technology (Prentice Hall, July
2004) is used in over 100 colleges and universities nationwide. Raymond E.
Fosters second book,
Leadership: Texas Hold em Style is
widely available.
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