Wednesday, March 11, 2020
We called them pop bottles in the early-1970s. One summer morning, my friend and I bicycled two kilometres north to the local dump and scrounged about 200 10-ounce pop bottles. We laboriously hauled them back to my family's acreage a couple kilomtres north of town. We washed them at the tap on the outside of our house. My dad agreed to drive us and them to the local bottle return depot in nearby Edson, Alberta. We got two cents for each bottle, about four dollars in all. That was big money when ten cents bought a chocolate bar or fudgesicle and twelve bought a bottle of pop.
Less than a month later, the bottle deposit refund rose from two to five cents.
The deposit remained at five cents for decades. In the 1990s, bottles and cans my spouse and I collected cans and bottles in the Indigenous community of Alkali Lake. We lived there for two years and I taught school there for three, commuting 50 kilometres from Williams Lake the last year. We took turns pushing our infant daughter in her baby buggy as we walked around collecting containers, which filled plastic shopping bags hung on the back of the buggy. We added more than a thousand dollars to her savings account this way, in two years.
By then I knew that collecting cans and bottles was something that poor and/or Indigenous people did in Williams Lake. I joked that Williams Lake had Indigenous "troopers" and Alkali Lake had me, a white "trooper." My Vancouver professor friend who grew up in Edson when I did calls them "binners" for scrounging in garbage bins. I've also heard them called "dumpster divers."
Today's Williams Lake paper's front-page photo is of a homeless "white" man scrounging for bottles in the dumpster behind the local Indigenous hall while people inside discuss homelessness.
That brings me to the point of this story: "appearances deceive," as I told a man and woman surveying the homeless who crossed my path between home and the bottle depot yesterday morning. The cans were from my spouse's Anaham house. We brought them to Williams Lake a couple days ago to sell. We got too busy to sell them before the bottle depot closed. I took them from the trunk that evening, before she drove back to Anaham.
The next morning, the annual day that local anti-poverty activists seek, question, and count the local homeless, the surveyors politely stopped me as I walked with the bag toward the bottle depot about a kilometre away.
"We're doing a homeless survey," they said, or less ambivalent words to that effect. I'm sure the survey had a home, as did the surveyors.
I also had a home. "I live in that building there," I pointed for them. "Appearances deceive." I held up the bag of cans.
I wished them well and we parted.
As I walked toward the bottle depot, I regretted that I hadn't talked longer to them. I wondered about their survey and much else, but I was happy I didn't delay them more, and happy I chipped a bit off a stereotype in their minds: not all men, Indigenous or otherwise, carrying bags of bottles, are homeless, or even poor. I'm thrifty, a nice word for cheap.
My coat has my spouse's band's logo, and I'm a prominent walker around here. Recently I got my photo in the local paper's online edition for joining a demonstration of solidarity with the Wet'sowet'en blocking a gas pipeline planned for their traditional territory a few hundred kilometres northwest of Williams Lake.
In recent months, the bottle deposit refund rose from five to ten cents.
My bag of containers earned me exactly ten dollars. That's about how much my friend and I would have earned for our 200 or so pop bottles had we waited a month or so for the refund rate to rise from two to five cents.
The bottle and can deposit thus rose five fold, from two to ten cents, in my lifetime. The price of a chocolate bar rose about twice that, ten fold, from ten cents to a dollar.
I eventually attended university, whose tuition is now about ten times higher than I paid; but summer job wages aren't ten times higher now than then. United States Marxist economist Michael Parenti wrote and spoke of the "Third Worldization" of people overseas and at home.
Would Karl Marx or Michael Parenti collect and sell beverage containers?
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