(Cross-posted to Peaknix)
"Clop clop clop" the noise droned her to a quiet meditation as she and the horse lurched ahead of the others, a bit of a trot into some shade both she and the animal appreciated. Their makeshift wagon carried baskets, covered by white cloths, filled with aged goats cheese and fresh bread. She had pulled these toothsome grainy loaves from their earthen bread oven that morning, ducking as the poof of hot moisture blasted past the broken clay seal on the door.
-- do the jump --
She loved days like this, market days, because it was a chance to meet up with neighbors who lived on the other side of town. It never really mattered that the news seemed to stay the same – someone gave birth, someone moved away, a newcomer had settled at the homestead they claimed they had inherited when their grandmother had passed on. No real new news was fine; she had her fill of news when she was a child, back during the transition.
Her meditation must have veered toward lethargy and sleep because she awoke to the singular smell of the town reclamation facilities. Her horse, which knew the way to market better than she did, was passing what had been a landfill in previous times. She covered her nose and mouth and, even though the smell was overwhelming, stopped a moment to marvel at the operation. Above her rose a hill, shining bright and glossy in the sunlight. She didn’t remember what it looked like before the facility had been built, she only knew it with the containment dome hovering over the site.
The roundness of the dome was broken only by a smokestack, steaming from the middle. It was actually more correct to call it a steam-stack because this facility was allowed to release only water vapor. It still smelled. The smell, which must have come from something in the steam and perhaps around the pipes that emerged from the dome or when the double air-locked doors were opened, it was a heavy stench that seemed to be unique to this particular place.
At her home, garbage was really not an issue. All waste was organic and went into the compost. Ever since people began growing their own food and had to package their own products if they were going to barter them (no one sold things anymore, or very rarely), the packaging was made from things on hand like baskets or sacks. Plastics had long since been appropriated by the reclamation company.
She knew a little about what went on inside the dome. She had learned as a kid that old landfills, which had previously been liabilities (rightfully so in terms of the poisons seeping from them) were now profit centers. The impossibly large hills had been enclosed by the white domes, the overfill dirt had been peeled back and the contents sifted and then fed into the maw of the Fischer-Tropsch conversion furnaces. There, plastics and organics were transformed into SynGas. Large barrel-bellied tanker trucks would lumber up to the facility on occasion, belching acrid biodiesel haze, and cart the gas away to Boston or Worcester where it would be sold to the highest bidder. Supposedly, the state of Massachusetts used those monies for second generation transition projects but she never saw any evidence of that.
She wasn’t terribly interested in the whole thing other than to wonder how long it would take for the site to be depleted and for the whole thing to be dismantled and taken away.
She nudged her horse because the day had worn on and the market would soon open. She wanted to barter her cheeses and breads for some open pollinated barely and wheat seed and perhaps get a chance to catch the noontime concert on the green, acoustic Spanish guitar and some traveling dancers.