Some weeks ago, in the reserve beside our house, this mattress appeared as a makeshift bridge across Byarong Creek. At various times I have considered dragging it out of the creek, but, with no clear strategy for disposing of it, have ended up leaving it there, hoping, with a sense of guilty complicity, that the next big rain will carry it off towards the sea. I suspect that some local kids are responsible. Crossing the creek normally involves jumping from stone to stone. I can imagine the kids thinking, why not employ something larger, softer and more evidently bridge-like?
Of course I can’t really see things in their terms. Any sense of ingenuity is dwarfed by a sense of the object’s incongruity. Surely better to hop across slippery green stones, to risk getting feet wet, than to pollute the creek with an ugly piece of household junk? Yet now that the perverse bridge has been in place for a few weeks (we’ve had little rain), it has gradually, strangely, adapted to its surroundings. While remaining an obvious eyesore, it has started to sink into the creek and become part of it. It has found its own place amongst the rocks. The creek flows around it. Leaves collect in eddies around its base. The mattress is now pink, green, muddy and resolutely soggy. It has the moist and abject appearance of a corpse. Partly for this reason and partly to avoid acknowledging its usefulness as a means of crossing the creek, I avoid stepping on the thing. As I say, I am just waiting for it to disappear.
I realise, however, that his waiting reeks of bad faith, not only because I fail to practically intervene but also because of a larger dilemma. While the mattress certainly does not belong where it is, moving it elsewhere – out of sight – scarcely solves the problem. What proper place can be found for this thing? Where can it be shifted to so that it can no longer offend or affect? Is there some some place with no significant impact on soil, water, air, wildlife, etc? The tip is clearly better than the creek, but does this address the problem? Does drawing all manner of abandoned things together in the one spot, pushing them beneath the ground with bulldozers, suddenly make their material legacy and implications disappear? Or does it serve as just another means of removing things from sight; preserving the illusory scene of an intact creek, waiting disingenuously for an elusive cleansing rain?
This is a lovely evocative and thoughtful reflection on your everyday environment.
As one recent environmental theorist has said, the trouble with throwing things away (in an era of global consciousness) is that we are now aware that there is no longer any “away”.
In permaculture, some folks believe that toxins are best locked into the local environment, rather than dispersed and taken away somewhere else.
If we were still running Social Intersections, we could organise for the students to come and take that mattress off your favourite river bed.
And then they could collectively decide what to do with the horrible thing.