Free Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte Page A

looked a little like George W. Bush, but taller. He had longer hair, too, and a different set of politics.
    Together we strapped a three-person kayak onto Alderson’s battered Toyota, then drove to our put-in spot, on Travis Road. We manhandled the boat down a rocky grade and into a creek that was just a few inches wider than the kayak. As we adjusted the foot pegs it began to snow, but neither of us mentioned this development. The slate gray mud stretched out for yards on either side of us. I heard the rhythmic
thwack
of a hammer to the north. New houses were going up just outside the refuge, while old ones leaked raw sewage into the creek. “I try to avoid touching this water,” Alderson said.
    I didn’t know what to make of the refuge, which had been the first wildlife sanctuary in New York City. Our put-in, high on Main Creek, lay amid a twelve-square-mile complex of derelict brownfields and thriving industry. There was a paper mill to the southwest, the landfill to the east, and a checkerboard of oil tanks to the west across the Arthur Kill, which carried more boat traffic annually than the Panama Canal.
    Hemmed and hampered by this built environment, the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge provides shelter for hundreds of native plant and animal species. Founded in 1928 with a land purchase by the Audubon Society and named after a Staten Island naturalist, its 260 acres contain salt meadow, low marsh, forested uplands, rock outcrops, a swamp forest, spring-fed ponds, and alluvial dunes. Those dunes, which protrude like whale backs above the marsh, are composed of sandy deposits that were swept up by strong currents or prevailing westerly winds from the bottom of Lake Hackensack when its water level plummeted some ten thousand years ago. The lake itself, which once covered the western shore of Staten Island and the eastern shore of New Jersey, was formed by the terminal moraine of the retreating Wisconsin glacier. When the lake drained (possibly due to a breach in a natural earthen dam), its rushing waters carved the narrow channel known today as the Arthur Kill, into which Main Creek flows.
    We stroked downstream through black water flanked by mudflats and brown grasses. A raft of mallards pivoted in the rising wind. Then suddenly, as we rounded a bend, the mound of Fresh Kills’ Section 6/7 rose before us. (The garbage at the landfill was heaped into four enormous mounds, called sections.) I had expected something massive—the size of the dump impresses every visitor, and few media accounts fail to mention that astronauts can see Fresh Kills from low Earth orbit. But from the water, Section 6/7 was just a steep hill jutting maybe a hundred feet above the deck of our bow, its knee-high brown grasses undulating in the breeze. A few dump trucks, burdened not with garbage but with dirt, trundled up switchbacks, black dots on the landscape. The air smelled lightly of methane. Crushed plastic bottles and old tires festooned the creek sides.
    With our fingers growing numb, we shipped our paddles and shoved our hands inside our jackets. I turned to look north, toward the refuge, and was struck by the beauty of this place, the alacrity with which the marsh turned into scrub forest—white oak, red maple, sweet gum, and black willow. Before the city began dumping here, this patchwork of marsh, meadow, and forest was the norm. “The landfill supplanted one of the largest tidal areas on the East Coast,” Alderson said. “The salt marshes of Fresh Kills, Jamaica Bay, and the Hackensack Meadowlands were unrivaled in their abundance and diversity.”
    Fifty-three years ago, the writer Joseph Mitchell spent some time in the marshes with Happy Zimmer, a shellfish protector for the Bureau of Marine Fisheries. Zimmer described the marshes and their uplands as a busy and bounteous place. Locals hunted for mushrooms in the autumn, dandelion sprouts in the spring, mud shrimp, herbs, and wildflowers in the summer. Wild berries and