A Year for the Garbage Truck
By John Hay
Rising early in the morning, my soon-to-be-two-year-old and I prowl through our neighborhood, on the hunt for rumbling monsters. Some people scout for birds, like golden-crowned sparrows and great blue herons. Others scope out classic cars and hot rods, from Model T’s to T-Birds. We pursue bigger game. My son is a connoisseur of construction—an acolyte of excavators, a devotee of dump trucks. A cement mixer makes his day.
We’ve been taking a lot more of these walks, partly because he loves them and partly because I have more time. My wife and I are English professors at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and we moved from the physical to the virtual classroom last March when the pandemic hit. We also lost daycare for our son, who had just turned one. Ever since, we’ve been alternating our mornings and afternoons between working on our laptops and watching our kid.
I know that I’m luckier than most to have the job security of a tenured college professor; for me, the past year has been a readjustment, not a crisis. I had been an avid coffee shop writer, but now I hunch over the desk we picked up from campus surplus when we moved to Vegas eight years ago. I’ve been learning to become a more efficient correspondent, often replying to emails on my phone while pushing a stroller or heating up soup. But these are “champagne problems.” My increased childcare responsibilities have been more blessing than burden.
I’ve watched my son develop so much this year—from his first hesitant steps last winter to his exuberant sprints today. Inarticulate monosyllables have become distinct phrases. I often joke that he is the happiest American of the pandemic; the persistent object of attention and affection, he plays with his parents all day long. At a time when our state and our country is facing a setback, he is pushing ahead by leaps and bounds.
And his excitement about the world around him is a welcome antidote to my own work. I study the end of the world. Really—I’ve authored and edited academic books about apocalyptic and postapocalyptic themes and trends in American literary history. (It turns out that people have always been heralding the end times; there have been doomsday prophets in the United States, both religious and secular, since the Revolutionary War.) When everything started shutting down last spring, friends and colleagues asked me if it felt like this was the moment my work had been waiting for. Of course, this is not the end of the world. But I could see some similarities to the brutal cholera pandemic (some insisted on calling it “Asiatic cholera”) that struck the United States in the summer of 1832.
Cities back then were especially hurt, as urbanites who could afford to escape to the country left in droves. Jobs disappeared, quarantine orders were ignored, and “cartloads of coffins rumbled through the streets,” according to historian Charles Rosenberg. The hardest hit was New Orleans, where one out of seven died; a witness there deemed it “the most appalling instance of mortality known to have happened in any part of the world, ancient or modern.” The 1832 epidemic was accompanied by a national political crisis when the state of South Carolina claimed the power to “nullify” federal laws. Accusations of treason and threats of military intervention suggested that the country was on the brink of destruction.
Global pandemic, escalating political divisions—it’s hard for me not to hear some echoes from that time. But, luckily, I also hear the rumble of the bulldozer down the road.
Photos/John Hay.
On a typical day, I might stroll with my son over to the corner of Paseo Verde and Green Valley Parkway. Here is the construction site of a 6,000-seat arena being built for the Henderson Silver Knights, a minor league hockey team. Work should finish in the spring of 2022. While I have doubts about the wisdom of this multimillion-dollar public investment and fears about the arena’s impact on the neighborhood, I’m nevertheless heartened by the spectacle of building. With so much of the country shut down in 2020, it’s been uplifting to see such development.
My own interest in postapocalyptic stories is related to my upbringing in Youngstown, Ohio. Now part of the Rust Belt, Youngstown was once a major steel-producing center. My parents grew up in a growing, bustling, exciting place that offered great opportunities for working-class families, and they profited by being able to attend college, unlike my grandparents. Their advantages certainly extended to me, but I grew up in a world in which time had seemingly stopped in 1977 when the mills shut down. Not much was built during my childhood in the 1980s and ’90s. While not quite the postapocalyptic wasteland of a Mad Max movie, it was nevertheless clearly a region that had once been much more. Downtown was dilapidated. My family told me stories about beautiful concert halls, department stores, and amusement parks, but these were all in various states of deterioration, abandonment, and demolition. The city eventually devised a plan to tear down condemned buildings and plant grass seed instead.
That’s why, despite the terrible effects of the pandemic this past year, I’ve been happy to walk my son through the Green Valley area in Henderson. Everything looks new! New homes, new businesses, new landscaping. The first time my parents visited from Ohio, they kept remarking how “clean” everything appeared. Trees get trimmed, walls get repainted, garbage gets collected. Signs point forward. As much as I wish my son had a stronger connection to Ohio, I’m glad that he lives in a place that’s building for the future—for his future.
While I know that it’s cliched to gush about how having a kid centers your life or gives you a better perspective on the world, I’m nevertheless very glad that my new perspective is centered on dump trucks. It’s gotten to the point that I am now legitimately excited to spot a cement mixer—because I know that a glimpse of it will make my son deliriously happy.
For him, the pinnacle of every week occurs early on a Wednesday—garbage day. Wednesday morning used to mean just another workday. But now we spend it in breathless anticipation, ears strained for the telltale rumble of the garbage truck. My son treats its arrival in front of our house like an audience with the Pope. We ceremoniously open the front door and stand on the front porch as if watching a parade go by. He remains rapt at the vision of mechanical power before him, and the driver dutifully waves to him and honks the horn before moving down the street to the next house. My son politely waves back and cries, “Bye!”
As silly as it sounds, I’ve come to find a weird hope in this ritual. The past year has been a difficult one; I worry about my family, and I worry about my country. But at least they’re still collecting the garbage every week.
Photo/Courtesy of John Hay.
John Hay is an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American Literature (Cambridge UP, 2017) and the editor of Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2020). He has also written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and Desert Companion.
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