Building Community - A Scrap at a Time 9-11-9

Anderson, South Carolina

One year for Christmas I was given a pallet of ordinary red brick. This pallet of 500 bricks cost $25; a nickel apiece. These bricks might as well have been gold bullion. This was the most glorious of Christmas prizes, except for one. When I was nearly nine years old, almost ready to apply for my contractor’s license, my older brother went down to The Pantry; a local grocery store, and bought about thirty orange crates for 15 cents each; the really good kind that had a single wood slat on either side, two uniform slats on the bottom, and a ¾ inch piece of wood on either end. He carefully dismantled these, took out all the nails, and then neatly stacked them inside a gift wrapped box. Now this was the most glorious possible Christmas gift in all the known universe. I have been a builder ever since.

Every morning while riding my bike; besides gaining cardiovascular conditioning, I am conducting surveillance. On Mondays and Tuesdays, the days before trash gets picked up in the neighborhoods I ride in, I take extra vitamins and fish oil; to insure having high functioning memory so I can recall where as many as six or eight piles of treasure have accreted curbside during the previous night. After my bike ride I revisit these high-yield veins with a car or truck and make an abundant harvest of the detritus of a secular consumer culture.

The returns can be astounding. Not long ago a fellow discarded nearly the entire contents of his house. I ended up with his dining room table and six chairs, beds, bookcases, stereos, paints, exercise equipment, and all sorts of good books, DVDs, CDs. It took a 24 foot box truck to haul off this lode. Over the past year at least six really fine oriental carpets have appeared in the roadside depositories. Even cars with clear titles have been proffered to me. Along with this kind of premium treasure, the more ‘usual’ sorts of things present themselves, $37 a gallon paint from abandoned decorating projects, all manner of lumber from failed do-it-yourself engineering works, and a lot of perfectly good porcelain bathroom fixtures from flushed plumbing efforts.

The Habitat for Humanity thrift store where most of this consumer largesse ends up is now making about $40,000 a month. The staff there loves to see me coming. A 12,000 square foot building full of discarded and unwanted building materials, home furnishings, books, and family treasures has become a major shopping destination in our town. Sometimes as many as several dozen people are in there at a time trolling for the next uncut Star of India sapphire. More than one piece of fine sterling has turned up in there. Habitat in turns keep a bunch of people employed and earns enough profit to keep the county-wide Habitat volunteer program busy building dreams for people that never learned how to.

I am not utterly altruistic in my salvage operation. I have long since progressed from orange crates and need more substantial feed stock for my assorted projects; keeping nearly all the really good timber that manifests in my world. This wood has turned into hundreds of book cabinets, other furniture pieces, gifts, and various capital home improvement projects. All the casework in my house is made of 13-ply furniture grade birch that once lived in a nursing dorm at the local hospital. Old kitchen cabinets torn out of a lock smith shop became oak-clad home-theater sound cabinets. Being a bit entrepreneurial, the book cabinets get converted into real money and most of it then funneled overseas into some projects in Asia and Africa. I have to keep part of it for boy toy tools.

The next tier down in quality in my timber harvest goes to the cultural advancement of our town; having found new life in perhaps a hundred stage sets in the local community playhouse. For fifteen years the theater has been spared the harsh fiscal realities of paying retail for wood and paint in one of our modern indoor lumber yards. Really marginal solid waste from roadside repositories is easily transformed into the magic of illusion on the theater stage, at no cost. A stage set only has to last three weeks indoors and it is only viewed from a distance. Illusion, masking tape, and distance are grand allies in the theater business. All those gallons of unwanted paint work perfectly for set decorating.

My re-manufacturing itself produces solid waste, wood scraps that would in most circumstances go to the wood stove on crispy January days. A fellow I met in the YMCA ‘reprocesses’ my small wood scraps into the most amazing children’s toys. This beneficiary of my salvage has always had an ethic of environmental sustainability and his craft/toy business has been fueled entirely by 100% post consumer waste wood. Periodically, Tom meets me at the Y and we transfer my latest treasures from my old Toyota Corolla into his gas-sipping hybrid. He especially liked the new unused 4/4 pine stock that would work perfectly for his pull toys.

There are many invisible people living just below the radar of an individualistic society - people who do not have the means to furnish their lives with pretty basic stuff. The trash in many of our lives really is treasure to the marginalized living among us.

Recently I hauled the scraps of a destroyed book cabinet home, rebuilt it, and then hauled it to two women who don’t have luxuries like money for even cheap furniture. Rebuilding it took perhaps two hours and about a dollar’s worth of glue and nails. You might have thought I had just given these women a $250,000 Sheraton sideboard. Scraps can be the building blocks of community. Just glue them together with love and you can build bridges of community to those around you.

Next time you haul your trash cans to the road; think about what is in them. There might just be scraps of community in there.