One hot summer day my brother, our next door neighbor and myself were discussing what we were going to do on this day. Someone said, “Let’s go to the dump.”
The county landfill was about four miles from our neighborhood and we all loved to go there. One man’s junk is another man’s treasure and when we went with our fathers on Saturdays we always took the junk and brought home something.
This was in the days before the landfills were fenced off. There wasn’t even a locked gate and you could go 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and no one was ever working out at the landfill, when we would go.
So we rode our bicycles to the dump that summer day. When we got there, the first thing we saw in the dug out area of the dump, where the trash went, was a huge pile of cardboard boxes, with an even bigger pile of wooden pallets right beside the boxes.
We decided to ‘help’ the county, so we piled those wooden pallets on the pile of boxes. We then scrounged around until we found a book of matches and we started the boxes and pallets on fire. (The county in those days would burn everything before they buried the trash.)
After we got the fire going good, we noticed a big pile of car and truck tires on top of the hill over looking the area where the fire was burning. So we went up on the hill and started rolling tires down the hill into the fire. Now we really had a huge fire with great clouds of black smoke filling the sky.
The next thing we noticed, up on that hill, was a pickup coming from town on the dirt road. The pickup was traveling at a high rate of speed. Soon enough that pickup arrived right next to where we were rolling those tires into the fire. We noticed a county works sign on the pickup door as the man got out. The man immediately started yelling, cussing, swearing, screaming and I can still see his angry face in my minds eye. He wanted to know what we thought we were doing. We told him we were helping out the county by burning up all this trash. Our answer just gave him time to catch his breath and he started screaming, cussing and yelling at us to get out of his landfill and never come back!
So we got on our bikes and headed for town. We learned several things that day. Number one was don’t go to the dump without our fathers. Number two, we learned every cuss word known to man. Number three, we had a great story and adventure to tell our friends.
Everyone has a story to tell. Stories have been used throughout the history of mankind. In today’s world are you doing anything that will be a story someday to pass on to your wife, husband, kids and grandkids?
The Bible is a book that it is filled with stories that are fun, sad, inspiring, truthful and disappointing. They were stories told over and over until someone wrote them down on paper.
