Ew.

Johnston. Stink lines added. (Map: RI Sea Grant)

I have a problem with Johnston. I admit it. Not the people in Johnston, necessarily; a good friend lives there, and my husband’s cousin, who’s a lovely person, does too. But Johnston also gave us Pauly D., and ruined zeppole day for a bunch of people last year. Also, it stinks. Literally. Johnston is where we Rhode Islanders send our garbage, and it gives the whole town the unmistakable odor of a pay toilet in Times Square. You know you’re passing through Johnston on 295 because that’s when you roll up your windows and hold your breath.

Lately, Johnston has gotten even stinkier. So stinky, in fact, that instead of the usual two or so complaints it receives each month about the smell, the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC  the dump) has gotten close to a hundred in November alone, and some have come from neighboring Cranston.  From ecoRI:

The "active face" of the 100-foot trash pile is getting about half the amount of trash from four years ago, so there is less material to cover the older, exposed and decaying waste… [and] heavy rainfall each of the past two years has flooded the system of pipes in the trash mound. The pipes typically vacuum the methane to a nearby power plant. But the water has slowed the system, allowing the methane to release into the air.

Wait wait wait. There’s a hundred-foot trash pile in Johnston? That’s the width, right? Please tell me they don’t mean it’s ten stories tall. And it’s because we as a state are producing less trash that the smell has gotten worse? That… well, it stinks. Apparently the dump has sent letters of apology and explanation to everyone in Johnston and Cranston, and they say that the solution is going to be to lay a foot of topsoil over all of the garbage, which will happen in a few weeks. This, however, is not fast enough for the state senate. One of Johnston’s state senators, Frank Lombardo, wants it done a whole lot faster, and he’s introduced legislation to make sure the dump never gets that smelly again, ever. From GoLocalProv:

Senator Lombardo will submit legislation to ensure that RIRRC is acting to effectively contain gases and odors on an ongoing basis. The legislation will prohibit the use of construction debris, including wall board, as part of the soil cover that caps the active area of the landfill. Further, the bill would allow independent inspectors access to the landfill on a random basis, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, to ensure they investigate and monitor the material being used as cover.

The legislation will also mandate air quality testing in Johnston and nearby communities, as well as a health-oriented analysis to protect the Johnston residents living closest to the landfill. It would assess a $5,000 per day fine for each day that air quality and odors exceed a certain threshold.

To recap: there is a smelliness threshold in Johnston. It can be smelly, but not too smelly. Then, we’re changing some laws.

Nature? Not in My Backyard!

Look at this.

Isn't that nice? I took this today at the crack of dawn while I was walking my dog. We went to the nature preserve across the street from my house, which we didn't even know existed when we moved to Cumberland. But it's there, and it's a great place to walk, especially now that the leaves are turned and the path is (relatively) clear. There's a little pond in this preserve, and the remains of old stone walls, and the whole thing abuts the Monastery, a town-owned piece of land where monks used to make jam until most of their buildings burned down in 1950. (The monks fled to Massachusetts, where they remain today, still making delicious jam.) Today the remaining buildings on the property house our town library and a few social services, and the land is covered with beautiful walking trails that go on forever.

Not many people use this preserve. There's nowhere to park if you drive to it, so it's pretty much used only by those of us who live in walking distance. Once in a while I'll come across another human being on the trail, but not often. And yet nothing will ever be built on this land, or on the hundreds of acres in similar conservation areas around town. I had to do some research just to find out where the other areas were, because they're not widely advertised. The one I use is marked only by a small sign that you can't even really see if you're driving by. It's all very New England. If you need to know it's there, you will, and if you don't, it's none of your business.

So I was kind of surprised to read in my little local paper that a handful of people in Lincoln, the town next door, are up in arms about someone who wants to build on a piece of land there. This developer owns a handful of acres and wants to build 20 houses, and then he wants to turn the rest of the land into a conservation area. I understand why people might be concerned about new house building, especially in the current economy, but it turns out that they're none too happy with the idea of a conservation area, too.

Wait, what?

What I gather is that certain residents don't want people like me, with my obvious riffraff ways, walking their dogs and such so close to their homes. One guy's deed bars him from building a fence, so he'd be forced to see me, and another lady thinks only dangerous criminals enjoy undeveloped nature:

"Look at your police records. Do you want those people in your back yard?" She [also] said she does not want to have to change how she lives in her own house, and putting a public space or a development of houses in her back yard would do so.

Seriously. I am dying to know who she's talking about in these police records. Also, what I wouldn't give to have my house back up to a conservation area. It's a selling point in real estate, for crying out loud. If there was nothing but wilderness behind my house, I might never draw the curtains at the back of my house, ever, even if I wasn't wearing pants, which would be always. The thing is, there's already vacant land behind these houses. What they don't want is for other people to know about it, and be free to enjoy it; i.e., walk through it silently, perhaps with an adorable dog, first thing in the morning.

The neighborhood might never recover.

Halloween: it happened.

Happy Halloween, everybody! Say, did you get a big pre-Halloween snowstorm? We did! We got the kind of late-October snowstorm that dumps six inches of incredibly wet, heavy snow on you, breaks your trees in half, makes a giant mess, and then melts away within hours of falling. We had 10- and 12-foot sections of maple break off in our front yard, but, thinking the worst was over, I managed to move them aside enough for my daughter to make a tiny, adorable snowman. Later that day another 12-foot section broke off and crushed it, leaving me to wonder in horror what would have happened had we been building that tiny, adorable snowman at a different time. Anyhoo.

A few days earlier a coworker passed along free tickets to the Roger Williams Park Zoo Jack-o-Lantern Spectacular, which is kind of a big deal among some around here, so we counted ourselves $24 richer and headed out on Friday evening to see what was what. We got there just as the sun was setting, and I was a little disappointed that the animals weren't staying up to join in the fun with us; they turned in as usual while we were guided along a very specific path to the pumpkins. In any case, it was... nice? It's one of those exhibitions of thousands and thousands of pumpkins - some intricately carved, some simply - lit up along a walkway along which many, many people move very slowly. Personally I find large groups of slow-moving people to be incredibly irritating, but I find large numbers of softly glowing anything to be very pretty, as long as those anythings are not lava pits or plutonium rods. There were some smoke machines and piped-in music thrown in, too.

Tell me: when did an approximation of a human face become an inadequate design for a jack-o-lantern? Somewhere along the line people moved away from faces and toward just about anything else. There were recently-deceased business visionaries:


Photo by Rick Payette on Flickr

Bumper Stickers:

Photo by Rick Payette on Flickr

Golden Girls:

Photo by Svenstorm on Flickr

And Dexter next to Lightning McQueen, because why not?

Oh, right: all those reasons why not. There were also Snooki and Pauly D pumpkins, but I'm having a hard time finding pictures of them. Maybe those abominations won't photograph. Like vampires.

It turned out that this was all a very roundabout way of finding out that my daughter is terrified of jack-o-lanterns. But really: why wouldn't she be? With the exception of the ones that are used as artists' canvases, these are big vegetables with faces on them that are burning up from the inside while looking at you malevolently. In this instance, by the thousands. And hundreds and hundreds of people are puttering through, drinking hot cider, eating fried dough, and taking picture after picture after picture. It's cool, but it's also really surreal. I can't even imagine how confusing it must be for a three-year-old. Maybe we'll wait a few more years before we go again.

In the meantime, let's take a minute to thank our sponsors: