Community Conversations

Junk Matters

A position paper by Dr. Deland S. Anderson regarding Community Conversations held at the Pratt Museum on 15 March 2002.

This paper will touch upon major themes, concerns, and hopes expressed by the participants in our last Community Conversation. The group convened following the opening of the museum’s Spring Juried Art Exhibit. It comprised a true cross-section of folks from the Homer area: old-timers, newcomers, well-to-do people and subsistence homesteaders, natives, Europeans and breadbasket Americans. Though no residents of surrounding communities attended, moderator Anderson gleaned information and responses to the topic through phone interviews and conversations on the street from people from Halibut Cove, Anchor Point, and Seldovia. Those remarks were incorporated in the conversation as lead-in questions or editorial comments passed on by Anderson.

The conversation was over two hours long, involved comments by twenty or so people, ranged broadly from littering to found-object art, was exceedingly lively, and deemed by many to be worthy of revisiting. If one single theme or corollary could be drawn from the entire conversation it was that “junk” is attitudinal. This proves the old adage that one person’s junk is another person’s treasure. Another item of consensus is that Homer lies in a stunningly beautiful setting, but is a junky little town. While nearly everyone spoke to this incongruity between environment and settlement, few spoke from the same perspective or set of assumptions. It was also broadly recognized that junk matters because it provides an index of change in the area. One longtime resident, for example, bemoaned the tide of new people who were undermining the subsistence lifestyle with a new cash economy. For in this new economy, he argued, junk that had once been stock in trade necessary to keep tools, gear, and infrastructure functioning was becoming a worthless eyesore and even a matter of civil liability. A ratio of junk-to-trash also emerged as a general theme: homesteaders have plenty of junk, but they consume and trash relatively little, whereas professionals have little identifiable junk at their home sites but use and throw away huge amounts of goods. Important single item issues emerged as well: recycling-reducing-reusing, trash and litter, pollution of the environment through dumping, the accumulation of junk in one’s life, the value of found objects, the threat/promise of zoning codes for civility, global population, the monotony of pretty/the sheer variety of junky, the absence of junk in local native traditional lifestyles, the trashiness of the beetle-killed dead spruce forest surrounding Kachemak Bay, and the possible existence of a junk gene in humans.

A very special element of this Community Conversation was the reading of a brief essay by Bill Choate. His think-piece was a narrative about a trip he once took to the Kobuk river to visit relatives and regain a sense of his Inupiat heritage. While at a village site he went about picking up litter that was lying around on the riverbank. His uncle’s glance checked his actions, and later caused him to plumb the depths of what trash or litter means to a given culture. Is it better, he wondered, to collect trash and hide it away in a landfill or to just chuck it on the riverbank or in the front yard? That is, does a culture that hides its trash lose track of its rate of consumption and waste? Does one that leaves its rubbish lying about have a better awareness of its impact on the environment? From the point of view of biology and environment and land, is it better to pile trash up or to leave it where it falls? These and other suggestions set a tone of tolerance and understanding that subtended the entire evening.
Several of the themes that emerged in this conversation were propelled by the tension between junk lovers and junk haters. Several others clustered around the difference between what might be called users and reusers. Regarding the love and hate of junk, it became apparent that most of the long-timers in the area were pro-junk, whereas the newcomers were anti-junk. Longtime residents, for instance, indicated that having junk was a matter of common sense in a frontier community. They spoke with a connoisseur's expertise about various characters and their junk collections. Some characters were somewhat slovenly while others were meticulous. Some collections were for public consumption and others only for the eyes of initiates. One participant — with a look of rapture on his face — remembered an old timer in Seward who had once let him into the inner sanctum of his junk tabernacle. Another participant sitting beside him displayed a look of horror at this story. Several people spoke with reverence for particular old vehicles, boats, or tools in the area. A few mentioned an abandoned clam dredge, an outsized vehicle that never worked but sat where it failed on the Homer Spit for some twenty years before being removed to a local fellow’s front yard. Others spoke of the fishing vessel Vega that used to lie in a meadow miles from the harbor, but which recently was incorporated into a new home site and surrounded by fresh, imported junk. One person told of a loom on which she wove that was made of mismatched castaway parts of other derelict looms. Though it was known locally as the “junk loom”, it was said to weave straight. Newcomers, on the other hand, seemed to see no sentimental value in these relics of infrastructure, interpreting them as a blight on the landscape. Echoing a famous formulation of the definition of dirt by anthropologist Mary Douglas, one fellow remarked that what was really wrong with the clam dredge was that it was in the wrong setting; it didn’t complement the landscape where it was. Another person spoke of a junk vehicle, a lime green Travelall, that she had to look at out her window. It had been there for years, but was tolerable until the owner recently began to fill it with bags of garbage. Some junk haters proposed the need for fences to hide the unsightly messes of their neighbors. One remarked that cruise ships don’t like to stop in Homer because the passengers have to be bussed through five miles of industrial junk before they even get to town.

As to the issue of users and reusers, it can be said that, generally, those who were pro-junk believed in reuse. Stories were traded around about good finds in dumpsters or at the landfill. Someone spoke of the old town dump where a man stood unofficial guard, sorting through the castoff goods of others, keeping for himself what he deemed worthy. Admonitions were voiced about the waste involved in over-consumption and even in the recycling industry itself. It’s just better not to use so much, said one. Though it is hard to generalize on appearance alone, it seemed that those who were anti-junk were affluent enough to use without reusing. Perhaps the issue of consumption is not one they even consider seriously. One fellow, who remarked about his neighbor’s unsightly junk pile, admitted to plundering it for trade goods after the neighbor had left the area. Though he confessed to hating the junk and perhaps even the neighbor for having it, once it was up for grabs, he did not hesitate to take away several old barrel staves on which to paint his artwork.

To summarize such a conversation as this is futile. Instead I conclude with an observation about two things that were most striking to me. They constitute the center and circumference of my sense of junk in Kachemak Bay. The centerpiece of the circle around which we convened for this Community Conversation was a life size sculpture by local artist Don Henry. It is constructed solely of found metal objects, especially tools, is whimsical in design, and bears the title Mother in Law. The contextual circumference of the conversation was an anecdote I shared at the beginning of the evening regarding two brothers who came to the area twenty some years ago pulling a trailer of junk metal because they didn’t think there would be any around. The trailer, with load intact, is said to still sit beside the road at 22 miles out east end.