Where were you in the Summer of '79?

I was in a ditch.

If I told you I really hate recycling, you might be quick to judge me, but I have my reasons.

The day before my tenth birthday, July 1, 1979,  the state of Iowa implemented the Beverage Container Deposit Law. In an effort to reduce litter, empty beer and soft drink containers could be returned to retail stores and/ or redemption centers for a  five cent refund. 

I had no idea how much trouble this new law was going to cause me.

I have already written about my love of rescuing old tools, and the joy I feel when I repurpose something that's been discarded. For example, when the "T" handle on my lawn mower's starter rope broke, I didn't run out to buy a new one. I found the old doorknob Daphne's grandpa was going to throw away, and I used that.

A doorknob on a mower might look a little goofy, but the original handle painfully dug into my fingers, and this knob is really comfortable to pull. Best of all, I now smile a little before I first start the mower. That's something I didn't do before. 

My dad would have approved of this repair because it saved me a couple of bucks. But that's not why this solution makes me happy. I had fun solving the problem, and I'm proud of the creativity I used. I'm also pleased I saved the doorknob from the landfill. That's one big difference between my dad and I. I like to save things. My dad liked to save money. 

And for Dad, the only thing better than saving money was finding money. Because of the '79 Bottle Bill,  my dad no longer saw old pop cans as trash. Instead, they transformed into big, shiny nickels right before his eyes. You'd think he had discovered alchemy. 

At first, Dad kept his obsession with free nickels behind closed doors. My family drank a lot of Coke, and it was hard for my sister and me to remember to keep the cans out of the garbage. He took every can thrown away as a personal slight. After a couple of weeks, Dad made it my job to dig through all the trash bags to make sure no empties had escaped. I don't know why it was my appointed task, but soon this responsibility extended beyond our home and to the gravel roads of Sioux county. 

Rather than driving the highway to Sioux Falls for our weekly shopping trip, Dad now drove the back roads mining for aluminum gold. As usual, I'd be in the back seat, lost in a book, and then I'd notice that the road noise had died. Dad would then yell from the front seat, "Cans!", and I was expected to jump out of our car to retrieve what ever road treasure was buried along the gravel.

I'd wade out into the thigh-high ditch grass and trip over dirt clods and into hidden gopher holes. As I worked my way along the fence line, the rusty barbed wire would catch my shirt, and my shoes would slip through camouflaged mud puddles. The cans would then spill backwash on me as I tried to bear hug them back to the car. Sometimes I'd be lucky enough to have a thick, brown rope of chewing tobacco spit spill down my chest. I'd dump the empties into our trunk and then crawl behind Dad's seat to get into the back. My sister would pinch her face together as she eyed my dirty clothes, push herself as far away as she could get, and disgustedly whisper, "You're so gross."

This went on for the rest of the summer and well into the fall's hunting season. Dad and I never came home with a deer, a duck, or even a pheasant, but we always returned heavy with cans. By December, there was too much snow to go stomping through the ditches, so all was quiet on the aluminum front for the rest of the winter.

Then spring arrived, and the gates of the Rock Valley Golf Course opened. As soon as the first golf cart buzzed by with a twelve pack of Bud Light in its basket, Dad again had nickels on the brain. He'd keep us on the practice green, pretending to be putting,  but we were actually waiting to follow a group of guys loaded with beers.

I had a stove pipe style golf bag that looked a little like this:

Back then I only carried five golf clubs, and by the time we had completed nine holes, all of my clubs would be in Dad's bag, and everyone else's beer cans would be in mine. Man, that golf bag reeked of beer. And it was pretty embarrassing during the golf unit at school when the gym teacher would stop me and check my bag for booze.

After years of cleaning up the backwoods of Northwest Iowa, I promised myself that when I moved out on my own, I would never return another aluminum can. In the trash they would go. And for some time, that's where they went. Sure, I was wasting the refund money, but I felt like I had earned that right.

Today I understand the moral obligation I have to recycle, and now that I have one of those big, blue recycling containers, I can fill it at will and not have any guilt or any problems.

At least, that's what I thought.

Someone in my neighborhood has figured out that I don't return my cans, and they sneak up our house and take them out of my recycling bin.  It doesn't matter when I put in my empties. If I drop in a 12 pack of Diet Pepsi at 10 at night, they are gone before I leave for work the next morning at 7. If I recycle in the morning, they're gone before I come home for lunch. It's creepy.

I suppose I could take the high road, and think Who cares if someone else is claiming your deposits? At least, the cans are being taken in, and you're not the one doing it. But I think raiding someone else's recycling is pretty ballsy, if not illegal. Until I put it out on our curb, the receptacle sits right next to our attached garage. If whoever is helping himself to my cans feels comfortable enough to get that close to our house, then what's next?

See? I hate the recycling program.

I'm not taking these cans to the store, but I don't want this goofball digging through our stuff, either. And I still want to do the right thing. So, the best thing I can do is render the cans worthless before dropping them into the recycling cart. I've seen the cans being removed from the inside of the can reception machines, and they're all crushed flat. So, maybe I can do that, too.

I couldn't find a can crusher in any of our local stores, so I looked online. Turns out it's illegal to sell one to me. Seriously? Yep, check the bottom of this online ad for a Harbor Freight can crusher:

Seriously, the recycling program sucks. I can string a bunch of cans together to make a prom dress or a duck blind, but I can't buy a crusher to mash them?

Looks like I might have to get creative...

PS. This isn't a movie from my garage.

Yet.