Digitally reproduced by the USC Digital Library. Photograph courtesy of the University of Southern California Libraries and the California Historical Society. The inside of the Cajalco Reservoir, with a ninety-foot levee. This reminds me, strangely, of a 1939 photograph of a levee, taken by a geological engineer, which features the silhouette of the surveyor hired by the construction company, backlit by the sun as he documents both the site and his own portrait. In one photo I see, in his own backyard in Tarzana, a city surveyor turned amateur landscape photographer: in the background there are the black asphalt and the manicured sidewalks of tract housing, and a residential-size recycling bin frames two conical scoops of dirt, one darker than the other-and in the foreground, nearly centered, is the shadow of a figure holding the basic square of a smartphone above their head to get the most comprehensive perspective. #FREE PRIVATE DIARLY WEBSITE FREE#And so they turn to Craigslist, and to the world of free dirt.īut f ree-dirt photos, unlike most images of monumental landscapes, are evidence of people’s bodily relationship with the land: the shadow silhouette, the calloused hands, the traces of human labor punctuated by the presence of tools coated in dust next to the green coil of a garden hose t he hint of a paved sidewalk in the corner frame, a picket fence, or a half-cameo profile of a worker, maybe somebody’s uncle, in a black cap and a pair of Carhartts. They boast 5,914 matches in the last ninety days.) For the homeowner who just wants to build up the ground around their new in-ground pool or the young couple working on the raised beds in their vegetable garden, all of this is expensive and time-consuming. (“Connecting people who have dirt with people who need dirt,” reads the ad copy on. Some construction companies have even turned to posting their excess soil inventories online via dirt-matching sites. Disposing of dirt in Southern California is a long, bureaucratic process, one San Diego landscaper told me one must apply for a permit to dump excess dirt and must transport it in a vehicle of a particular class. When a project has tight specifications-public libraries, for instance, have highly regulated dimensions and measurements-leftover dirt becomes surplus material. If you bring “non-native” soil to a construction project, you are subject to costly soils testing. But there’s a paradox: the more that dirt is touched and handled by human hands, the more expensive it becomes to move around. Where I’m from, in Southern California, free dirt is abundant.ĭirt moves and circulates as part of its role in the man-made ecosystem of building, demolishing, and rebuilding. There are endless frames of earth spilling onto asphalt, flattened mounds of rich brown soil indented with tire tracks, craggy piles of dirt gathered evenly along the perimeters of blue tarp in driveways. Some shots feature calloused hands covered in tawny fill dirt, vignetted by palm trees and paved driveways in postwar cul-de-sacs. Depending on the angle and composition of the images, “free dirt” posts on Craigslist can look like unintentional landscape vistas. The dirt in each picture was offered free of charge to whoever was willing to pick it up (“You haul”) or, if you were lucky, a free-dirter might have offered free delivery. For the past three years, I’ve filled a folder on my desktop with pictures of dirt that I found on Craigslist.
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