If leaf trash chokes the stream-bed,
reach for rock-bottom as you rake
the muck out.
- Marie Ponsot b. 1921 Springing: New and Select Poems
http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/lent1c.html
The summer of "Stairway to Heaven" I worked at Gaithersburg Car Wash and I'd hear that song over and over on the radio playing as I greased the fittings inside the machines. We had a particularly gritty chore once. The (primary) owner backed his old jeep up one day to the front end of the track (the belt that pulled the cars through the washing machines) with a little trailer attached. The muck and filth from the cars washed down into a pit at that end of the car wash - a pit about the size of a gas-station rest room, 6x8x8 or so, and we'd clean it out once in awhile. The owner, Bobby T. Lee, would haul it away in his jeep trailer to dump it out at his farm on some waste land. But how it got there - how the filth got out of the pit - was hands on and up to us. One of us would jump down into the pit and stand upon a piece of plywood board supplied for the purpose, and shovel the muck (on which the plywood - and you - balanced) into a bucket to be hauled up and away (by rope at first, held by a watching companion) and off to the farm, ultimately. You had to dig deep to get to the real filth. I suppose the farther you'd go, the more toxic it became.
10
First Sunday in Lent
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