It’s hard to get here by road and it’s expensive to fly. The story is no different for freight. So, most of what comes to Yellowknife stays in Yellowknife, and, sooner or later, it ends up at the local dump, which festers just a couple minutes drive from downtown. Stereos, records, TV sets, cars, ancient sets of encyclopedia, furniture, building materials, rotting food, even jewelry and cash—it’s all here amid the spent diapers, decaying insulation, and, occasionally, caribou or muskox parts.
If you see something you like, you can haul it away for free.
A few dozen people do it for money. The best earn thousands of dollars collecting scrap metal and shipping it south. One lucky scavenger may have stumbled on a bonanza a few weeks ago when, according to a witness, the military dropped off a huge pile of old aluminum tent poles. Others pick up radios, vacuum tubes, toys, and board games, which they sell to collectors over Internet sites such as eBay. For most, though, a visit to the dump is a chance to cruise for useful things, gossip with neighbours, and, most important, partake of a deep and proud local tradition.
Yellowknifers are among the last municipal taxpayers in North America permitted unfettered access to their neighbour’s trash. That status spooks city officials, who are paid to think about the safety of people crawling around landfills. A number of years ago, they evicted the otherwise homeless residents of a small shantytown that had sprung up near the trash heaps. The fire department then burned the shacks, which the residents had built from handy scraps. Yellowknifers bristled and called the move a hard-hearted assault on the town’s freewheeling, live-and-let-live character.
The heat was on city administrators again last summer when Katherine Silcock, environment coordinator for
the public works department, inadvertently suggested at a public meeting on solid-waste management that the city could limit public access to the dump. Quoting her comments selectively, the Yellowknifer, the local, twice-weekly newspaper, pilloried her in its next edition.
Yellowknifers—already angry at the city over a bylaw that banned downtown hotdog vendors—erupted. Silcock became a pariah, ostracized at parties and harangued in public. “Every time I walked down the street, someone would come up to me and say ‘Don’t shut down the landfill,’” she says, recalling her summer of discontent.
Yet the city had reason to worry about public safety, as well as the possibility of a lawsuit arising from an accident at the dump. Silcock herself had recently pulled a wandering kid out of the path of a loader as it backed up through the narrow lanes of garbage. Eventually, the municipal council stepped in. Its members claimed that blocking access to the dump had never been on the agenda, although they agreed that measures should be taken to protect public safety. Some also noted that no councillor would want to head into the fall election as the candidate who helped shut down the fun.
Why did the mere suggestion of limiting access to the dump raise such as fuss? “The tradition goes back to early days,” says Walt Humphries, a prospector and artist who’s made weekly visits to the dump since moving to Yellowknife thirty years ago. “Everything was boated or planed in, so people salvaged pieces of metal, pieces of wood—anything that was a valuable commodity. It’s carried on since then.”
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