One afternoon in 1984 when I was eleven my father unexpectedly announced to all of us in the household that the organizing principle of our entire family economy would be “llendo verde.” “Going green” in Spanish. Well, ok---that is not exactly what he said. “Going green” are the equivalent words I now wished my father would have used at the time but in 1984 neither he nor I were prescient enough to dream up this modern day evocative phrase on our own. Instead what my father literally said in Spanish was that we as a family would immediately start “juntando carton”-----in English “gathering carton.” What this translated into was that our new family business would involve foraging for, flattening out, piling up, tying down, and then unceremoniously dumping truck sized payloads of discarded corrugated cardboard at local industrial recycling centers for the then going rate of sixty dollars a ton. If you can imagine carton gathering as a sort of late 20th century urban conjugation on cow chip recycling, you start to get the idea.
Looking back on my father’s announcement now, instead of “going green” what my father could have justifiably said was that we were“llendo amaron”: “going brown.” Had he done so, he would have been simultaneously literally correct (corrugated cardboard is almost always the color brown), physiologically correct (endless summer hours sifting through city dumpsters in the exposed sun had a crispifying effect on all of our skins), and literarily correct (a la Brownoptopia). My dad, alas, was not quite so creatively inclined.
“Gathering carton” was his own catch phrase for what turned out to be the focus of our family’s economic activity for a period of time lasting over two years. I should note here that our new family project recycling carton had nothing explicitly to do with an informed concern for countering global warming or saving the whales with cardboard enhanced mouth guards or anything PBS style noble like that. Then Congressman Al Gore’s little brown environmental shock troops we were definitely not. Our particular recycling activity was undertaken to quite literally keep food on the kitchen table from week to week and to stave off the specter of rental eviction. The execution of this grand recycling project constituted an economically desperate and physically arduous twenty four plus months that me and my younger brother Edwin retrospectively memorialized as the Carton Era.
The Carton Era involved all of us nuclear family members. Me, Edwin, dad (then referred to by us as the Old Man), even my mom all participated in the carton gathering business. We were a dawn to dusk operation, hunting, breaking down, and packing said broken down cardboard by the ton onto my father’s recently acquired temperamental 1962 Ford F-150 truck that still bore the plumbing business markings of the truck’s previous owner.
Together we ran the cardboard circuit throughout the Pasadena area, as my father developed a carton collecting tour of greatest hit locations that were embedded in legions of Pasadena neighborhoods. Very early into our family’s incidental contribution to the nascent national Green Revolution, I discovered that there were relatively preferred and non-preferred kinds of carton and carton generating repositories.
By far the best (meaning the cleanest and the bulkiest) cardboard source was the Sears shipping and receiving center, located directly behind the large Sears department store in east Pasadena. Sears cardboard made for the sublime stuff of recycling dreams, because their cardboard was virtually made to order for incidental environmentalists like ourselves. The cardboard boxes Sears produced were gigantic and chancing on a trove of used appliance grade cardboard felt a little to us like how I imagine 19th century safari hunters must have felt when bagging African vintage rhinos and hippos. Sears appliance boxes were prized by us because they had originally stored brand new heavy oven stoves, massive walk in refrigerators, and huge cathode ray tube televisions. This clean and heavy professional grade cardboard was the carton equivalent of Top Chef grade filet mignon. We hit Sears every Friday around sundown like precision clockwork and the Sears technicians became so acclimated to us that they kindly “reserved” the best cardboard for us on pallets sitting closest to the loading dock, where we could most easily break them down and load them onto the F-150.
Alas, the premium department stores represented a rare fraction of the kinds of places we had to hit for sustaining our recycling operation. A step down from Sears were places like Farmer’s Market or Vons. Grocery store cardboard, being intimately connected to the human food chain, did not resemble the comparatively clean boxes of Sears. Instead grocery store boxes conjured the dismal scent of expired foodstuffs and spoiled milk. And, of course, since there is no such thing as six feet tall tomatoes or fridge sized cans of Campbell’s soup, the boxes were that much smaller than what Sears had. This meant we had to break down a lot more grocery cardboard boxes to approximate the weight and density of department store carton.
The shipping and receiving centers for grocery stores, such as they were, also sported no friendly uniform clad technicians thoughtfully securing piles of carton for us to easily pick up. Getting carton from places like this involved true extraction operations. My particular job was to crawl all the way inside the grocery store dumpsters and to toss the cardboard overboard onto piles on the pavement. Perhaps needless to say, I learned to breathe shallowly during these dumpster excursions.
But the true epicenters of ghetto unfabulousness for carton recycling were vegetable produce centers. Produce centers in Pasadena during these years were authentic mom and pop operations. They were small, very hard working family owned businesses--the kind that as an adult I have endless respect for. But as an eleven year old boy, I sure did hate digging through their used cardboard. Produce store carton had the most distinctively unpleasant features of all. Carton from a produce store dumpster was invariably soggy, grease stained, slippery to the touch, and reeked of lettuce detritus that had long since made its way to the great Vegetable Patch in the Sky. Traversing the graveyard of vegetables sometimes felt like I was regularly living through the garbage compactor scene from the first Star Wars film. It got so that in my mind I could virtually hear Han Solo sneer to my inner self “Great, what an incredible smell you’ve discovered [again].”
But the physical labor was not the hardest part of the Carton Era for me. Having turned eleven the year we started this part of our lives, the hardest part, on par with my father’s late mid life crisis I previously wrote about, was the public nature of what we did for a living. Openly crawling in and out of garbage dumpsters in public places on a daily basis is no American sixth grader’s dream of how to spend the beginning of their personal “wonder years.” I was born very shy as it was and had always preferred to draw exactly zero attention to myself. And now there I was, at an age where I was just feeling the first stirrings of adolescence, with all the normal awkwardness and intense self consciousness that is part and parcel of that developmental stage, living through what I experienced at the time as the mortification of being a sort of very public human facsimile for Oscar the Grouch, minus the wondrous trappings of Sesame Street.
One emblematic memory indelibly etched in my mind involved a freeway trip my dad and I took one Saturday afternoon to the Glendale recycling center. We had a full load of carton packed into the back of the F-150. A full pile of carton meant that the stacked cardboard towered at least 10 feet up into the sky from the bottom of the truck bed. The load was secured with reams of rope tied into some seven different knots at different places on the cardboard pile.
Over half way to the recycling center on the 210 freeway I noticed that new and nearly new cars were speeding up and passing directly by us on both sides and that as they zoomed ahead of us the (white) drivers and passengers were turning their heads as if on invisible swivels back to look at me and my dad, with openly astonished looks on their faces. I was immediately perplexed. Were they trying to insinuate that our brown selves had made some sort of breathing mistake just getting up that morning? I could not immediately fathom why we were getting this rubber necking treatment. Finally I checked the rear view mirror.
In two seconds I recognized what was happening. Close to a third of the piled up, supposedly secured carton behind us was literally flying off the truck bed onto the freeway concrete like so many large individually flattened cow patties gusting into the prairie air. The trail of flying brown carton stretching out for who knows how many miles behind us, our decrepit truck looked for all the world like it was having a diarrhea attack right there on the 210 freeway. I felt my insides dissolve into ice water. I quickly told the Old Man what was happening but all he did was shrug and continue to drive. Being so close to our fast approaching freeway exit, there was nothing he could do, he said emphatically.
Our role as incidental environmentalists temporarily devolved into incidental polluters, I shrank into the contours of my seat and prayed that nobody would get hurt by the flying cardboard, which by the end of that infamous trip no one did, as best I could tell from looking through the rear view mirror. Still, the end of the Carton Era, when it finally came in 1986, could not and did not end one minute too soon, from my point of view.
