This may look like a pile of crap dumped on public land. Really though, it's a portrait of the human spirit in action, and our ability to adapt and find opportunity in unlikely places.
I pass this spot quite regularly, and over the last couple of weeks I've watched something both comical and spectacular unfold. It all began when a storm hit Reservoir and a huge branch came down from that tree. It lay there for several days without interference, not even capturing the interest of the crew replanting the street trees at the time.
It wasn't long though before a local resident did the maths on the nett weight of firewood in that enormous branch, and one day shortly thereafter as I drove by I noticed a bloke had brought a trailer and a chainsaw to the site and was doing a tidy job of cutting the branch into logs.
The following day I saw that when our urban lumberjack was done removing his loot he had politely gathered all the leftover leaves and twigs into a pile for someone else to worry about. And this was where the real fun began.
No sooner had the pile of leaves and twigs been formed than the locals identified the corner as a dump. The very next day a pile of old kids' crap appeared next to the leaves. The day after that I drove past a guy walking down the street towards the corner with two mattresses balanced precariously on his head. It was awesome how fast everyone adopted a sense of license to dump crap in this fairly arbitrary spot. The fridge though, really, was the crowning moment to my mind.
The dump wound up being noted and cleared surprisingly quickly. A day or two after the photo above was taken the whole pile had been efficiently removed. Mystifyingly though, the waste crew left behind the original pile of leaves and twigs.
Now as we well know, a pile of leaves and twigs on public land is basically an indicator of a free dumping site, so....
