A couple of weeks ago I was at the dump dropping a couple of things off. In one of the areas where I knew all the stuff there would soon be bulldozed and buried, a dump treasure was calling out to me “Save Me.”
It was small but rather heavy, I picked it up and as I was lugging it back to my truck, a song I hadn’t heard or thought about in years or even decades popped into my mind. It goes something like this “The road is long, with many a winding curve, that leads us to who knows where. But I am strong and he ain’t heavy, he’s, my brother.”
It is interesting and a little weird when a long-forgotten song suddenly starts playing in your head. It was a song by the Hollies from 1969 and seemed to say that we should help one another. And to me that would apply to things as well as people.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I had salvaged but that is not all that unusual. It was a solid cylinder or core of shiny metal, probably steel, 14 centimetres tall and 13 cm across. It had a ring welded to the top of it so you could lift it, assuming you can lift with your fingers 40 pounds or 18.144 kilograms. So, it was small but heavy.
I am guessing that the ring was there to tie a rope or cable to and that it was some sort of counterweight, anchor or tie down weight. What ever its original purpose one could use it for all those things, or a door stop, a conversation piece or even a piece of modern industrial art. You just never know when you might have use for a 40-pound weight and I even used it a couple times as ballast for the front of my boat.
Now I know that some people are going to wonder what all the fuss is about. After all its just a chunk of metal and metals end up at the dump all the time. This is true, but the whole point is they shouldn’t. This chunk of metal is an incredible example of industrial art all by itself, but it also has a remarkable tale to tell.
I spent my working life working in mineral exploration and I know all too well the amount of time, effort and money that goes into finding a geological concentration of metals that can be mined. It can take years or even decades, tens of millions of dollars and thousands of people working to find that illusive occurrence. As we say in the business “If mines were easy to find we would all own one.”
Finding the ore body is just the first step. It can cost $50 million to $200 million or more to actually build the mine. The ore must be extracted out of the rock and concentrated. For iron ore it is then usually loaded on boats and shipped hundreds or thousands of kilometres to the nearest refinery. The iron that is recovered then gets shipped to a steel mill and turned into raw steel. From there it is shipped to a manufacturer and turned into some sort of product.
The product is then shipped to where it is needed, in this case hundreds of kilometres to Yellowknife. It is then used for a few years and then even though it is still perfectly usable, it is thrown into the dump and buried. Centuries from now some archaeologists doing a dig at the dump would find this buried treasure and they could date it back to the late twentieth century.
This priceless artifact would no doubt end up on display in a prestigious museum. School kids would look at it in awe and ask that earth shattering question WHY? Why would someone just throw something like this away and why would the city, the GNWT and the federal government just let them and then just bury it. Shouldn’t they have been charged with a crime against the people, a crime against the planet and even a crime against our universe. Why wasn’t it a crime to waste the countries natural resources.
Luckily, I saved it. And as I did, the song “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother” played softly in my mind.