Going for a walk
I spent several days last week trying to figure out how to get my city-issued recycling cart from the road and up to my house.
For those unfamiliar with them, the carts stand about 4 feet tall and have a pair of wheels in the back. In what has to be the most epically cool part of their job, garbage collectors use a robotic arm to pick up the carts and dump the waste into the truck.
The challenge with the carts is that even empty they are a bit unwieldy. OK, I was being excessively nice there. The carts move with all the grace and ease of a full grown Rottweiler coming out of anesthesia. Not only are they awkward and heavy, but if you are not careful, they will bite you.
The proper way to move these carts is to use both hands and lean it over to roll on the wheels. Fully loaded it is about as easy to push around as the Festiva your buddy drove in high school.
Since most of us remember that it is garbage collection day on the way out of our front door while we are late for work, the ideal method of moving the carts is ignored in favor of a one-handed dash for the curb ahead of the trash guy. I would suggest that no matter how much of a hurry you are in, attempting to pull two loaded carts at one time is a bad idea. At best, you will end up with a tipped cart and the joy of picking up spilled garbage and at worst will suffer a wrist injury as you frantically attempt to keep the cart upright and prevent it from falling and crushing the overweight rabbit sitting in your front yard silently mocking you with its beady black-eyed stare.
With the recent cycle of snow, freeze, thaw, refreeze, freezing rain, sloppy snow and ice, the eight feet of my steeply slanted driveway closest to the street has become a sheet of ice.
After spending more than a week recovering from taking a tumble while curling earlier this winter, I have learned that Brians, unlike Tiggers, do not bounce.
It is officially my 16-year-old son’s job to take out the trash and bring the empty garbage and recycling carts back. Parents of teenagers out there can imagine how that is working out for me.
Added to all this, is that I have yet to figure out how to decipher the code to the map households received showing which weeks are for garbage and which are for recycling. Usually we wait to see what carts others on our block have put out and then copy them. This works some of the time, but often I end up taking full carts for walks up and down my driveway.
The challenge this past week was that there was really no way for me to get from my driveway to the cart and back up my driveway without ending up spending time in the back of an ambulance.
As I stood in my kitchen staring out at the cart, I ran through various scenarios. I thought about fashioning a grappling hook using an old tow-strap and winching it up. I rejected this plan because my luck would have the hook slip and go flying through a windshield. I pictured in my head, the cart then careening down the hill in front of my house and crashing into the fire hydrant located at the corner resulting in a comical geyser of water and massive repair bills.
Other ideas such as training the freakishly large and disturbingly bold rabbit that thinks it owns my property, to have it haul the cart up, were discounted as taking too much time. Not to mention that an internet search to buy harnesses for bunnies is more than a little alarming.
I eventually decided to forego grace and gingerly ventured onto the slick surface — sliding along like some rotund walrus. I then relied on brute force to drag the, thankfully empty, cart over the snowbanks and through the snow on my front yard in order to haul it back to the house.
Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.
