So Much garbage!

There is an old picture in my grandmother's house, one from seventeen years ago. In it, I am standing in front of a fire truck, posing with a bunch of firemen while the smoke from the fire they had just put out lingered in the air. There had been a forest fire, a controlled burn that exceeded the intended lines a little bit and reached the moutain in front of our house. Back then, this was rare, and for us kids, this morning was so exciting, we ran around hoping to catch a spray from the hose and pretending that somehow, by being there, we were helping. All the neighbours came out of their houses to watch, someone had us pose in front of the fire-truck and took a picture. A fire was exciting, but later, when everyone had gone back inside, when I went up to the mountain and saw everything was blackened, burnt and dead, it didn't seem so exciting anymore. That mountain was my part of the house, it's where I went to read, to write, to be alone and later when I was older, get high, and to see it so utterly destroyed, broke my heart. It grew back, though, the pines recovered and the grass grew back.

This morning as I walked through the tea gardens towards home, I crossed dozens of black mountains, burnt and charred, not forest fires but fires from burning garbage. They won't grow back as easily as the little patch of land that used to be my home. There is so much garbage. As I drove to the house yesterday and turned towards my bathing-river, I saw underneath the range of perennial white Himalayas, an entire side of the mountains that was just garbage. You know those perfect postcard views of snow-clad mountains? Imagine one of those postcards but one of the glaciers melt not into a river, but a cascade of garbage across an entire moutain. There's so much garbage. And I know, I know I am not supposed to be one of those people who turns up my nose at the "tourists" and the people who come to visit, nor the people who migrate here because it is beautiful and peaceful, I shouldn't do that after all for every person who comes to live in my home, there is a person, like me, who goes and lives in theirs.

But there's so much garbage.

This town, these mountains, this state whose biggest crime may be its accessibility from big cities, it wasn't built to handle even a morsel of that garbage. I'm not saying we are any better, I am certain the locals are sometimes as careless as those who visit, but there is no plan on how to deal with the garbage. They burn it. That's the state-sanctioned solution to the problem. Only five years ago did they start offering garbage collection services to the citizens of the state, they are nowhere near having the facilities to handle a weekly mountainful of garbage. They burn it. With it, our land burns. I am not possessive, with my things, nor with what I love, but it hurts me so much to see this. I don't know what to do, I feel like that young girl in that picture, I pretend that somehow by being here, I am helping. Somehow by not ever littering, I am doing my bit. I pretend, it doesn't bother me to watch my childhood disappear into five-star resorts or *cool* hostels that host paid bonfires for the guests each evening.

It fucking bothers me.

I went to the river and there was garbage in it. Bags of chips, bottles of soda, broken glass from beer and plastic bags. I bathe in that fucking river. We all did. I know, I know, it's really fun to come on vacation, sit in peace beside a river and make noise, but seriously, as noble as I want to be, I cannot tell you how much it hurts when I try to find my peace, not the peace of leave but of home, and I have to lay down in a flowing river of garbage. I know it's beautiful and peaceful, I know that's why they come here, it's part of why I come too, but it's my home. It's my fucking home. It's where my family lives. It's where, someday, I will grow old. You're welcome to visit my home but I see it, each time, a little bit more excavated and a little bit more expanded to make room for the same hotels you find in the capital. I come, each time, through more traffic. To hear more conversation about how this place they choked full of garbage isn't the "cool" mountain destination anymore, the cool kids are moving to a different valley. Now we get the uncool tourists, I suppose, their Instagrams look the same and the maggi-noodles they travel hundreds of kilometres to eat taste the same, and the garbage they leave behind is the same too.

There's just more of it now.

There's so much, our once anonymous existence isn't cool anymore, they have to move on to the next undiscovered town, to pump its rivers full of plastic and inconsideration. I used to come here and wander all of the land with the freedom of belonging, and now I cannot go anywhere, because I step outside into a world that looks exactly like the cities I left behind. There's nothing but garbage. There's garbage everywhere. I feel so helpless. I want this to stop yet I cannot tell people to stop moving freely around their country. I just wished sometimes they'd stop photographing the "view" that we are to them, and snap a picture of garbage mountain. We're not made of waterfalls and quaint mountain simplicity, right now we're breaking from lack of civic amenities and drowning in a sea of fucking garbage.