thebigp

April 12, 2024—printed off 4/14/24
Victor Davis Hanson
6. The fornicators. I’ll be brief. Recently, I have stumbled upon a growing number of fornicators, if I may use such a term of disparagement—in cars, on blankets on the ground, on mattresses even. As the town grows closer, so the farm seems ideal for trysts. I am no Puritan, but I resent the detritus they leave behind of soiled toilet paper and paper towels, used condoms, and other unspeakables. Usually when surprised, they leave in embarrassment. (You walk up to the car because you have no idea whether those inside are shooters, or dumpers, or thieves, or the car is stolen.)
The last time I did, two women in the back seat popped up, one dressed quickly and jumped into the driver’s seat and rolled down the window. When I asked them to leave, she unleashed a string of profanities. Then she jammed the car into drive and drove the car over my foot (thank God for sandy soil and their lightweight compact). I smiled. Is there no gratitude for using our farm for their own gratification? It was as unpleasant to have my walk spoiled by them as it was for them to have their activity interrupted.
7. The Liquidators. We often pick up trash, or our renter does, or our neighbors do. Oddly, the flotsam is predictable: entire front car seats, child car seats, tires, ruined appliances, plastic toys, household garbage in bags, dirty diapers, and lots of cast-off building materials such as paint cans, junk lumber, and shingles. Reader, you might condemn me as biased since I have suggested nearly all these encounters involve Spanish speakers. They do, either because they have spoken or cursed at me, or amid their trash are Spanish-language junk mail, or instructions, or magazines (but never once a bill stub identifying their address).
But as I wrote earlier, once, a few years ago, I stumbled in the vineyard onto the work of professional liquidators. There are criminals who visit homes and businesses and offer to take away all the taboo things that the companies will not: toxic dirty fuels, half-full paint cans, florescent tubes, fifty-gallon drums of residual hydraulic fuel, huge piles of broken drywall, large mounds of questionable insulation.
Strangest, the junk was not in a pile but strewn by some sort of lift-trailer down an entire ¼ mile row. Tons of stuff!
I called the sheriff. He warned me of the bad and worse choices I had. If I called the state environmental protection services, they might fine me as if I was the perp and require me to cart it all away to a state toxic waste dump or hire someone to do it.
As the sheriff warned, they will have no proof you didn’t do it (but on my own property?) and thus should be cited.
Or I could pick up the pieces and over months in small amounts take them to the dump myself. A year later the vineyard was finally clean, although for about five years I saw broken florescent light glass shards shine among the disked dirt. And when later I pulled out the vineyard, the bulldozer turned up shingles and insulation fragments still. Do we ever tally the environmental damage from i*****l i*********n or is it low on the intersectional calculus?