Trego's Mountain Ear

I went to the greenboxes about noon on the Saturday after Christmas.  By carefully spreading out my garbage into vacant spaces in 4 dumpsters, I was able to unload my pickup.  I walked behind those dumpsters to see that, by noon, garbage had missed the containers and was on the ground.

Garbage is no new thing to Lincoln County.  When I surveyed in the Cabinet Mountains, I came across an old dump that showed some interesting old cans.  I tossed a couple in my pack to show my archaeologist colleague – he identified the cans as Civil War era – the drop of solder in the center of the lid was the identifying feature.  The same dump contained a fragment of a crosscut saw that he identified as 1877 at the earliest, so I’m guessing the cans were well past their ‘best used’ date when the saw broke.

In the Yaak, my task was to retrace the old mining claims – kind of a fun job – while his was to look for the old dumps, where he made the discovery that the main dining item for the Yaak silver miners was the woods caribou – he figured that their near extinction came from those miners . . . and that when they abandoned their mines and went north to Alaska with that gold rush, they were pre-adapted for the short days of Winter and eating caribou.

As a kid in 1960, I saw the piles of rusted cans left at the old dam on Fortine Creek.  As I think back, and realize the dam operated for 20 years, I realize that there really weren’t all that many cans.  In retrospect, a lot of the food they cooked must have came in something other than cans.  Alongside the first old road (Fortine Creek Road is in its third location) I’ve encountered old ham cans that preceded Spam.

We didn’t have green boxes in 1960 – for Trego, the dump was just north of the turnoff to Rattlebone, on a chunk of Forest Service.  Some folks still dumped in holes on their own places – and the dump was the best place to see a bear.    

In the mid-sixties, as all of our communities turned into boom towns, expanding rapidly because of the construction projects, trailer courts popped up to provide housing options for the workforce.  At that time, the Health Department and DEQ didn’t have the funding, staffing or authority to make folks jump through hoops to get things built.  It couldn’t be done under today’s regulatory environment.

Now we think of Libby as a superfund site because of asbestos contamination associated with the vermiculite mine on Rainy Creek – but that was not Libby’s only health hazard.  The early sixties also included a health hazard along Libby Creek – shallow wells, sandy soil and septic tanks.  The caution that went along with 4H meetings was to avoid eating or drinking anything from Libby – stay healthy and eat what you brought.  Additionally, there was an area contaminated by wood preservatives. As the county population grew with the construction impact associated with Libby Dam, Public Health began its growth to county power status.  There are many heroes in Public Health – Snow with the Broad Street pump handle (the situation had some similarities with the shallow wells, sandy soils and septic tanks along Libby Creek), Pasteur, Salk, Pauling, Banting – the list of health heroes is long.  The century between John Snow removing the pump handle to stop the spread of cholera and Jonas Salk developing an effective polio vaccine led to great public trust in the health profession – something that was forfeit just a few years ago by Anthony Fauci and the mismanagement of the Covid outbreak.

Lincoln County’s Garbage moved from something dealt with at the individual level to being handled by the county health department.  Since Lincoln County has two virtually unconnected populations – drive 37 and look for residences between Pinkham Creek and Jennings Rapids – the decision was to have a couple of landfills.  When the landfill at Eureka panned out short, the Health Department recommendation was to have one large landfill close to Libby, and drive the garbage trucks from as far as Stryker and Trego to the Libby Landfill.

In all fairness, Hooper didn’t make that recommendation – her predecessor did.  Still, she is the heir of that decision – and the commissioners granted her the power to write and enforce the Lincoln County Decay Ordinance LINCOLN COUNTY ORDINANCES .  Until Covid and the green boxes, only food and water providers came into contact with the Health Department – though everyone should click the link and see just how much authority the commissioners granted the Hoop and her department.  (Perhaps D.C. Orr is more correct than we realize when he refers to the Hoop as “empress.”

As I think about garbage, maybe it was inevitable that the Health Department would screw up the landfills as the departmental leadership worked at becoming something that could inconvenience everyone.  After all, they got a free chance at it during the covid thing.  It does seem a bit foolish to leave the same department that screwed things up in charge of fixing the situation.