Best of 2000: Best Garbage Dump

Miramar Landfill

Don't laugh, it's really an inspiring, thought-provoking place. First of all, its immensity is impressive. It takes five minutes to get from the gate to where you can dump your load of old building materials and tree branches. In the meantime you drive through a vast lunar landscape that wasn't formed by God and nature, but by man and machines. Buried under the scraped, angular surface is the waste of urban society. At the dumping site, always in a different spot from the last time you visited, enormous bulldozers, which make the earth shake beneath your feet, bury San Diego's garbage under the soil. Until the stench drives you away, you can sit and contemplate the waste of our wealthy society, or the image of the earth taking back what she has given us. Or, you can just watch big machines push around mountains of garbage.