We didn’t start out politically incorrect. We once did the right thing; sorting our aluminum, glass, paper and plastic into separate piles and taking them to the dump. Somehow it got away from us. You see, we create an enormous amount of trash.

Recently, our sixteen-year-old son began a job which requires him to work Saturdays and I found I had re-inherited the chore of taking our garbage to the dump. It’s a daunting task. National statistics say every man, woman and child in America creates an average of 4.3 pounds of solid waste per day. There are three people living in my house these days, so that should be about 90 pounds of trash per week. But, I’m here to tell you that we do more than our share. We usually haul six or seven bags to the dump every week and some of them I can hardly pick up. I keep asking myself, “Where does it all come from?”

In Round Top, most people take their trash to the dumpsters provided by Fayette County at the old landfill on Huenefield Rd off Hwy 237. You have to buy black trash bags that cost $1.00 each and you can throw away as much as you can fit in those bags. An old gentleman at the dump then tells you which of the dumpsters in which to place your trash. He helps with the recycling bins. He is a friendly old guy who always has a joke and a smile.

I didn’t know his name until I started writing this story so we always called him the “dumpman” at my house. His real name is Harold Bergmann. His family has lived around Warrenton for over a hundred years.

When I decided I wanted to do a story about the incredible amount of garbage we humans create, I thought it would be good to start with a grassroots expert. Mr. Bergmann has worked at the dump since 1984 when it used to be a landfill. He knows garbage.

Harold will be 72 years old on the seventh of March. He was raised on a farm on Hwy 237, a corner of which now holds the “world’s smallest Catholic Church” and a cemetery. His great grandparents first bought the property in the 1880’s. The day I interviewed Harold marked the 48th year of his father’s passing, to the day.

I asked him if much had changed since he first went to work for the county.

“Well,” he said “it was a landfill when I started. In 1990, we started with the dumpsters and the bags.”

Mr. Bergmann recently suffered a loss. He had lived for many years with his cousin on her place just across Cummins Creek from Round Top. Not long ago, she passed away. At her place, Harold has collected a lot of cast off treasures from the dump. He was into recycling long before it became popular.

“I give more stuff away than most people have ever owned,” says Harold. “One time, I had a good friend and I told him ‘You need a baby bed?’ I had a nice baby bed. All it needed was one little rod. He said ‘Naw, at my age I don’t need no baby bed no more.’ About a week later, he called me and he said ‘You still got the baby bed?’ and I said ‘Yeah.’ And he said ‘Well, I think I’m gonna have another grandson so I think I better get that baby bed.’

I noted that it seemed like people threw a lot of good stuff away.

“It ain’t so bad (I think he meant good) now as it was when the landfill was there” allowed Harold. “I had a chance once when a divorcee... was sellin’ out. She got everthing that her man had. She had a bunch of these big electric roaster,” I thought, ‘I ain’t got no damn use for those things.’ But after a while I was wishin’ that I would a bought them things. She was sellin’ ‘em cheap. I guess I coulda’ bought ‘em for $5 a piece. But you know, one Saturday, I pick me one up out of the landfill and it’s still in use.

“Sometimes,” claims Harold “you’d even find new stuff in the landfill.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1995, approximately 208 million tons of municipal solid waste were generated in the United States. Not only that, and even more frightening, is the fact that in the same year nearly 20,000 hazardous waste generators produced a mind-numbing 279 million tons of hazardous waste.

A typical fast-food restaurant like McDonalds produces an average of 238 pounds of waste each day. In 1995 alone, we wasted at least 14 million tons of food and over 81.5 tons of paper. There are a few hungry people and a few decimated forests that are likely to have a complaint about that fact.

The United States is the greatest garbage producing country in the history of the world. The next most substantial producer of those that report statistics is Japan, which produces less than a third of the trash we throw out here in the good old U. S. of A.

We also win the per capita garbage lottery but Canada comes in a close second. I asked Mr. Bergmann what he thought about this. I said “People have a lot of garbage. It looks to me like a good business if you could get into it.”

“Yeah,” continued Harold, “...lotta people makin’ a lot of money out of garbage right now. Absolutely. What it’s designed for now which is recyclin; the people is supposed to recycle more because we don’t have no more land for landfills. We gotta conserve it to where it goes further.”

Every time I haul my excessive load out to the dump, it seems like Harold is surrounded by a group of locals. They always seem to be having a good time. The dump is a regular hang-out. I asked Harold about this. “We get up on the latest gossip,” he said. “It’s like when women go to the beauty parlor. I have a plaque out in my truck. It says You meet your best friends at the dump.”

Every Tuesday, the county sends out a big recycling trailer to the dump. I asked Mr. Bergmann if people were taking to recycling pretty well.

“Yeah,” he allowed “but there is still some that won’t do it.”

I asked him what kind of problems he had at the dump.

“People are funny you know,” philosophized Harold. “When they go to the doctor , they can wait. To get in traffic, they can wait. But when they get to the dump and they enter the gate, they want to throw their garbage right off. It’s bad if they have to wait two minutes on somebody. That’s aggravatin’ to ‘em.”

“They get cranky huh?” I asked.

“Some of ‘em do” said Harold. “There’s no need of it. You wait everwhere in your life. Sooner or later you are always gonna wait for something. Am I right or wrong?”

I told him he was right.

Harold talked a lot about what the area was like when he was a boy.

“When I was growin’ up in World War II yet, you pretty well knowed everybody that drove on Hwy 237 on a Sunday. You always knew when somebody had a different automobile. You always knew that. When I was a boy, my transportation was a horse. I didn’t have no automobile. I was in a wreck when I was 12 years old and I didn’t want to drive a car. But then when I was 18 my folks said ‘It’s time for you to learn to drive a car.’ I said I don’t give a damn. As long as I got my horse to ride, that’s all I need. It gets me there and gets me back just as well as y’all go.

“Everything is different nowadays. All this land was under cultivation. That was all farmland. It’s all cattle now. You don’t have no row crops. Cotton was the main crop. Corn tops, they were cut. They was winter feed. After a while, they said the corn tops wasn’t no good ... no food value ... but many a cow and horse would have starved if it weren’t for the corn tops.

“Back in the older days, there was a lot of stuff put on stakes. It was not put into bales. It was stakes Hay, cane or whatever you had, it was put on stakes. I never made one but my daddy was pretty good at it. You start shrinkin’ after so much time until you get a pretty good point on it.

“We had our own syrup or molasses, ribbon cane or redtop cane. Warrenton had a wonderful molasses press. They cooked the syrup there. They cooked it with steam. You go get your molasses after a while and put it on a biscuit. If it was cold, it barely come out of that barrel.

“They used to call Warrenton Little Chicago. Lots of fights, but they never got to shooting. Where the Warrenton school set, there was a Catholic church there. That little church was set there for the few remaining members. It was supposed to be pretty much a Catholic settlement at one time but there was a priest in Fayetteville and he drawed the membership towards Fayetteville.

“Old people are dyin’ off and young people movin’ in.”

I asked Mr. Bergmann if he got along with the new people.

“I try to” he laughed. “That’s all I can do. I mean, if they don’t want to fool with me, I can’t make ‘em associate with me.”

Harold told me an exciting story about some strange events that happened during last fall’s antiques show. “I had antiques out at the dump when the antiques show was in the fall. Well, I got there Tuesday mornin’ to open up the dump. I called back to the warehouse and told ‘em I need somebody with a pickup or somethin’ ‘cause I had a trailer sittin’ right in the middle of the way and stuff was thrown on both sides of the road, you know. I could barely get through with the county truck. You can’t expect other people to drive through there ... and they left a dog with it. A trailer and what was on a pickup and a dog was over there.”

Bizarre events had happened at his home a few days before. Harold began to put two and two together. “That Saturday night, I was here by myself. I was sittin’ at the table and all of a sudden I heard some noise out here. I thought I heard somebody hollerin’ for help. So, I went out there to the door and they hollered around there a little bit. Then the door slammed and they took off and pulled in at the neighbor lady over there. They pulled around ... reved the motor up, hollered a few times, reved the motor and all of a sudden they took off to Round Top. I called 911. Took a little while for the patrolmen to come out. I told them what the score was. They drove up to Round Top and didn’t find nothin.”

The next Tuesday, he found the trailer blocking the road into the dump. Then the final pieces of the puzzle fell together. “I went up to get the mail a few days later and found these business cards on the side of the highway. The dog had a telephone number on its tag. They traced the number to New Mexico. A good friend of mine picked up the dog at the dump and took care of the dog. On Saturday mornin’, she (the woman from the car Saturday night) came over here and wanted to know where the dog was at.

“We figured there was something else in the trailer. They (the police) put the trailer under lock and key in the warehouse but she opened it up for them and it was nothin’ but baskets.

“What it was ... was that lady that was hollerin’ out here. She was hollerin’ for help. The man that was with her was beatin’ her up. He hit her so hard that the nose piece on the glasses cut her nose. I guess he took her back to Warrenton. They was done set up in Warrenton. He took off with the truck and trailer again. He parked the damn trailer up there in that road and then unhooked it and threw the stuff he had on the truck on both sides and he took off. They never heard hide nor hair of him ... He might be layin’ somewhere around here yet, you never know. I was told there was two or three women against one there in Warrenton.

“I was all innocent but you can get in all kind of trouble without even askin’ for it or lookin’ for it.”

It is clear that Harold lives an exciting life. I asked him what he had done to make a living before he got in the garbage business.

“Well,” he said “I’ve built some fence. I’ve done some plumbing. I have also been a grave digger. I started in ‘73 and the last two I helped dig was in 1991. That’s what I did most of my lifetime ... and hauled a lot of hay. In 1976, I cut up the meat for the Warrenton Butcher Club for 10 years. I started in ‘76 and quit in ‘86. I couldn’t do it no more on account of my back. I had trouble with it. If you can’t do it, you can’t do it. I can’t do nothin’ now no more.

“You can watch,”I offered.

“I can raise Hell,” he countered. “I’m good at that.”

He gave me an example of his life as a grave digger.

“When I started out with the fellas, it was a day about like today you know but a norther blew up that afternoon. We had to open one in Rutersville and another one at Florida Chapel (a cemetery on Hwy 237) about 3/4 way done. The next morning it was freezing. We had to finish the one at Florida Chapel. By the time they got there with the vault ... they shipped them out of Houston ... it was sleetin’.

“Well, we closed that one in Warrenton and we had to go back to Rutersville that afternoon and it was ALL sleet there ... all was sleet there. They would come up to the tent ... when the funeral got there...their umbrellas went ‘Whoooop’ and was crooked the other way. The struts on the tent were all froze. They couldn’t take the tent down. It was cold.

“We’re in a modern age now,” says Harold. “We don’t use a lot of that stuff any more. Like your hand tools and all that. That’s history. Like we used to dig graves at the church over there. (In Round Top where much of the ground is solid rock.) We never had a machine there. We never use dynamite in there. Now the new digger, he went to Brenham and got a jackhammer. Our ruling was we had two days to dig the grave... a pick and pins and hammer and sledge hammer.

“We had one grave, the lady was in a coma for two years. So finally, the family says the money is gone. We have no more money. They can pull the tubes and let her go. I had just bought me a second hand sharpshooter (shovel) and one of the older fellas, he says ‘You sure wouldn’t need to bring that sharpshooter over there cause you sure as Hell ain’t gonna use it. Okay, we started diggin’ and we had about 18” of solid rock. Then we got down into pure D white chalk dirt just a white as chalk. By the time we got down to the next rock, we was deep enough. I used my sharpshooter anyhow. You never know what’s underneath ... what’s in the ground, until you start diggin.’

So, the lesson here is that guys like Harold are going to get our business one way or another. Either we start recycling and learn how to control our wasteful ways in time to save the planet or he’ll just have to fall back on his old career and start digging our graves.

I asked Harold Bergmann for advice. He says the whole thing is simple. “I advise the people to recycle as much as they can. And, it’s not enforced but as far as burning goes, on the first day of September in 1989, the law went into effect. You cannot go out here and burn your trash every day. If you have a brush fire to burn or something like that, you go get you a permit.

Okay Harold. I got the message.