Zen and the Art of Dumpster Diving

Dirk Jamison's father is a dumpster diver. He's seventy-something now and still dives, but he started in 1973 as a sun-burnished Orange County surfer with a penchant for taking "vacations" away from his wife and three kids. In his memoir, "Perishable" (Chicago Review, 2006), Jamison describes his dad having a revelation and quitting a construction job on the day he met a man eating a thrown-away chicken in a parking lot: "Trashing makes money obsolete. No reason to pay for food. It waits out back" -- behind markets and restaurants -- "same as on the shelf. Maybe it's not as clean or spiffy, but it looks plenty tasty, and it's free." Still-sealed but stepped-on Mars bars proved a marvel, cereal and pies in crushed boxes, jars of pears and pickled eggs just past their sell-by dates.

"Making a living," Jamison's dad declared, "means simply finding something edible. Then the rest of the day is wide open."

Boiled down to that, it sounds so true. Hippie-esque, but a bolt from the blue now, when even telecommuting is a far cry from "On the Road." Capitalism makes you mistrust free time and freeloaders, makes you even mistrust what's free. Every second of every day, shiny ads for shiny stuff persuade you that price equals quality. Scavengers are neither in nor out of that equation, neither suckers (as some would call you) nor outlaws but odd byproducts, skimming the foam off a bloated system that leaks luxury, a wasteful want-then-toss system, the most wonderful system in the world.

Enlisting his reluctant kids in dumpster runs and the subsequent sneaking of cargo past a hulking, class-conscious, compulsively dieting wife who ate barrels of KFC on the QT and believed that knee surgery entailed the Tinker Toys-style total removal then reattachment of legs, Jamison's dad -- he dubbed himself "Aark, the Heathen Scavenger" -- had wide-open days.

He vowed never to waste a single one. Yet in short sharp sentences that thunk like timed mallets wired to your temples, Jamison invokes a liar, a quitter, a ditcher, a deadbeat: The sort who gorges on the sweet hearts of watermelons without offering anyone a slice. And here we have a moral Magic 8-ball. Like hopping, say, or sipping water, scavenging is a neutral action: neither bad nor good, itself, nor rendering those who do it bad or good. A scavenger might be a saint. And a scavenger might just as easily be Jamison's dad: self-satisfied, never saving his son from "this shark we'd been asked to call Sister" -- the nameless hitting, kicking, stabbing, rope-whipping sibling, their mother's "little sweetness pie," who beat the future author bloody, daily: "What hurts more, kidney or spine?"

Jamison, who has also made a documentary film about his father that played at Sundance, tells interviewers that he remains angry at the old man -- angrier still that the old man has no regrets. Scavenging is neutral, but society's attitudes about it aren't. So if you scavenge, you have to be cool with what folks will say. About it. About you. Which makes every scavenger a rebel, a tower of steel. But is it fair to haul others into the fringes who haven't asked to go there? Especially when dumpsters and food are involved. Double-especially when those others are children, who should never have to scrounge their own meals, whose tender immune systems might not withstand whatever lurks in expired YooHoo, whose sense of self is still amorphous and whose friends might skate past and call them bums.

This isn't to put the emphasis on some scavengers being rich and some being poor. They are, but that's not the dividing line. Some have to ragpick, marooned in the margins with no other choice, but most of us are faced with free stuff every day and decide what to do with it.

And some scavenge. Some don't.