Press


NOVEMBER 2003
Landfill Living
The Bay Area's Reality Tour
By Milan Gagnon

If it weren’t for the fog-shrouded outline of San Francisco to the south and west and the telltale industry and pollution of Richmond to the north serving as landmarks, a visitor could be anywhere in the world at the Albany Landfill. Robert "Rabbit" Barringer soaks in the sunset on a hilltop futon, absorbing the fiery, peach-colored trail left in the evening haze as the star drops behind the mountains of Marin.

Down the hill sits a waterfront castle built concrete slab by concrete slab, for the landfill’s fairies and pixies by fellow resident Mad Mark, who took his inspiration from Bullwinkle and Rocky. Because of the peninsula’s shape, landfill denizens—residents, hikers, artists—call the former dump "the Bulb."

Today the Bulb is not only an oasis for urban homesteaders who defy California law, but the subject of an engaging documentary and a destination for off-the-beaten-path reality tourists.

Tour guide-slash-keeper of the Bulb Barringer is a not-quite-52-year-old man who has lived in the Albany Landfill on and off for the past five years. By degree a painter, nature an outcast, and circumstance the landfill’s resident manager, the bearded Barringer defies stereotype or easy one-word descriptions like "homeless."

"Only the very rich and the very poor can live this way," Barringer says, showing off his stash of freshly dumpstered delicacies—crab, oysters and shrimp are potentially on the Bulb’s menu tonight. "I’m living so large," he says. "I’ve never wanted for anything here." If dumpster diving is a science, then by sheer experience, Barringer has exceeded his UC Berkeley bachelor’s degree in painting. The trick is arriving early to catch the packaged perishables while they’re still cold. Stores discard food the day it expires or if the packaging is blemished—a stain on the cardboard’ll make a $6 frozen cheesecake free for the fortunate scavenger—and a nick on its peel makes an apple yours.

The Bulb ceased being a landfill and became a public park in 1986, but traces of its old life remain in sculptures fashioned from salvaged rebar and broken toys and in the non-indigenous bamboo that has sprouted from discarded yard clippings. "Homeless"—Barringer says he doesn’t know any homeless people ("Everybody I know has a home.")—people began moving in a few years later. They occupied the area in tents, trailers and hand-built houses until a mass eviction in 1999. The recently released "Bums’ Paradise," directed and produced by Tomas McCabe and shot and narrated by Barringer, picks up three weeks before the evictions that sent 30 people back to the streets and follows the saga through the police raid on the residents’ last day.



The film provides an insider’s view of life in the landfill and is told as much in visuals as the spot poetry and prose of residents, including Barringer, Jimbow theHobo and Ashby, who puts a for-sale sign of $145,000 on his don’t-call-it-a-shack. "And as long as they keep fucking around, each day it’s gonna go up," Ashby tells the camera in the defiance of the upcoming eviction by Albany police and state troopers. Besides Barringer, who returned last year, and castle builder Mad Mark, none of the film’s players remain there. Jean Paul, a resident for nearly a decade, was found dead in his tent of natural causes on Oct. 15. When the City of Albany turned the Bulb over to California, state officials said they evicted everyone because of the improvements necessary to make a state park out of a former landfill and homeless encampment. However, four years later, the Bulb remains much the same, with nary a drinking fountain, public restroom or garbage can added.

McCabe is still struggling to pay for the film despite local media acclaim and awards including "Best Use of DIY Resources" at the DIY (Do It Yourself) Film Festival and Second Place for Best Documentary at the Saint Ann Film Festival in Moscow. For him, the film is as much a labor of love as the product of hard labor—he’s as handy with a camera as he is with a jackhammer. He totes a backpack full of DVDs to screenings and passes around a donationbag for those who don’t buy. Another method McCabe and Barringer are exploring to pay for the film is "Rabbit’s Reality Tours."

For a donation to Barringer and another to "Bums’ Paradise," the curious and daring can experience two to 24 hours of homelessness. So far, the tour has had few takers, although a county garbage commissioner has expressed interest in the dumpster-diving aspect to see what people throw away and how scavengers find ways to reuse it. Landfill residents make decisions as a group, and Barringer ran the idea of the tours past his fellow Bulb dwellers before going ahead with it.

Barringer shares his community with five fellow residents, occasional overnight campers and partiers in the landfill amphitheatre—a fire pit ringed by found-object sculptures—not to mention the fauna. A local woman feeds a family of feral cats; raccoons, possums and vultures scavenge leftovers; and falcons soar over manta rays sunning themselves in a shallow lagoon.

After camping out for the past five years, Barringercan’t see himself returning to the rat race he ran in various nine-to-five gigs or the Berkeley rents he paid for 30 years before circumstances brought him to the landfill. "I’m not antisocial, but corrupted, I guess," he says, "an alien, an expatriate."

Morning in the landfill starts not with blaring car horns or alarm clocks, but with bird chirps and train whistles, and everything smells wet. It’s as much audio and aroma as it is emotion and sensation.
Morning breath and that un-showered stickiness may be the first things a person notices unzipping a sleeping bag and peeling off the ground, but the odors are quickly offset by those of last night’s campfire and the peaceful ocean breeze. Coffee is brewed on a gas-powered stove using dumpstered filters, which in a pinch can double as facemasks when the siren squeals at the Richmond refinery to signal a southbound cloud of gas.



But the easy landfill mornings and 24-hour tours may not last for long. And those wishing to experience the Bulb’s artwork, sunsets and serenity would be well advised to contact Barringer pronto. The discovery of Laci Peterson’s body in the Berkeley Marina just south and the defense used by her husband’s attorney— she fell victim to a satanic cult that operates in the landfill —have focused new police attention on the camp. Never mind that in five years Barringer hasn’t heard a single chant, witnessed a single sacrifice, or seen anything stranger than a dozen topless moon-worshipping lesbians camped around a fire in the amphitheatre. Never mind that the artists collectively known as Sniff, responsible for much of the landfill’s artwork since the early '90s, proclaim that their images of heaven, hell and purgatory are not satanic and none of them are Satanists. A crackdown’s a brewin’, and Barringer
won’t be evicted a second time.

"Basically, I just want to break it down and get out of here," he says. "I’m totally ready to go. I’m tired of this. I’m getting too old for this. I mean, I’m having a good time, you know. I’m not complaining." He hasn’t seen a doctor in a while, wants to make sure everything’s working, knows his eyes at the very least aren’t in the shape they once were.

Barringer isn’t sure what will happen to his home when he leaves. Dwellers keep the area safe from fires by clearing trails, keep it clean by asking partiers to recycle trash, and keep the Bulb’s scavengers—raccoons, vultures—fed with their own scavenged food. But Barringer won’t deny that he’s responsible for much of the order—if a potential resident isn’t cool with him, chances are he won’t be with anybody else, and Barringer has sensitivity to the personalities, addictions, and mental afflictions of residents. Because of all this, he says, "I’m gonna come back in the spring, and I’m gonna finish what I started here."

So when the sunsets start earlier, when amphitheatre campfires and good conversation aren’t enough to fight off the Albany freeze, when the bird chirps stop and the coffee can’t brew soon enough, Barringer’ll break down his tent. He’ll hide away what he can, get rid of what he can’t, roll up his bag, and spend the winter indoors to wash up, to write, to sleep in a bed. He’ll continue promoting "Bums’ Paradise"—a possible Ann Arbor Film Festival screening will allow him to reconnect with the Detroit family he hasn’t spoken to in six years—and he’ll continue his work in the Bulb when springtime comes.

"I want to have a lasting effect when I go," he says. "The story will continue to spread about ‘Oh, Rabbit did this and did that,’ you know—it’ll be all complete, you know, there won’t be any messes or anything. And so it’ll be kind of an urban legend, like a Johnny Appleseed-type story. It doesn’t have to all be true, you know, to keep it alive." – Milan Gagnon milang@ sfsu.edu

BACK TO TOP OF PAGE