SWAMP GAS

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I had told her where I lived and, indeed, had recently begun detecting an odd smell near my yellow brick house but assumed it was swamp gas or something equally pungent and sulfurous. After all, it had rained hard all summer long—so hard that puddles no longer went away and the vegetation seemed to double in mass each week.

"Swamp gas, my foot," she retorted. "That's a dump site you smell. I know right where it is, too. It's laced with PCBs."

She told me two additional facts, or perhaps they were suppositions. One, that the conflict felt by country dwellers sitting on idle land is genuine when some garbage entrepreneur offers them considerable money—always cash—for the use of that land as a dump site. And, two, as is well known (or at least widely suspected), that this new offshoot of a very ancient business is controlled by quintessentially urban syndicates, groups that initially made their mark in paving and cartage.

I felt like blowing my horn again. "What about local politicians and lawyers," I asked. "I mean, this stuff has got to be hitting them where they live, quite literally. Aren't they doing anything about it?"

"No," she replied. "This is small-town America. There's lots of poverty but also complacency and unwillingness to rock the boat. What's more, the conflict between private property and the public good or the public health is relatively new out here. You've got to understand, there is nothing so sacred is a piece of property and the right of the dead holder to do pretty much anything he or she wants—particularly if it involves making money—no matter how it impinges on the community. Within certain limits, anyway. The irony is that local health officials will quickly condemn, say, an open cesspool :because both the law and the biological effects are clear and well established) but won't do anything about a dump site that contains agents that are far more pathogenic and durable (presumably because the law is as murky is the biochemistry). The result is that the pols and the lawyers would as soon avoid the issue altogether, and tend to do so."

Well, this is tough stuff, I thought to myself as I recrossed the Winkle and headed for the yellow brick house, no longer quite the Ozian, environmentally pure refuge I had Imagined it to be. Frankly, I was also a little—rushed by her dismissal of the possibility of swamp gas, a somewhat volatile mixture reputed to explode on occasion but more widely known for producing strange and luminous visual phenomena, some of which formed the basis for reported UFO sightings in the 1950s, a time when I didn't know what to believe in. Who wouldn't want a little swamp gas nearby to liven up a dull evening, or a dull life, I asked myself in the rearview mirror. I felt deeply deprived, poetically and mythically, limited once again to only stars, moonbeams, and the sounds of familiar animals rustling in the night.

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