After ten years of faithful service my RV refrigerator has taken its final journey. It's a remarkable piece of technology--in fact, it might be the only part of an RV that is high-tech, regardless of the size or expense of the RV. Just think, cooling food by burning propane!

It was great fun to go through the polemics of replacement. The minute you try to escape the conventional idea of putting in a new RV refrigerator, you are forced to think about issues that you seldom consider. I finally decided to build a well-insulated ice chest.

This blog doesn't compete with RV forums so I will spare you minute details stripped of all mental content and over-endowed with abbreviations and acronyms, IYKWIM. Besides, I seize on practical projects as a chance to inflict my philosophical prejudices on something real. 

A microwave oven, a refrigerator and a boob toob are co-conspirators in suckering people into lives as sedentary fatties, and in spending too much on convenience food.

What would you eat if you had no way of cooling food? Would it be healthier and cheaper? How did our recent ancestors do it?

When pulling the old refrigerator out of the travel trailer, I expected to see exposed staples a millimeter from the propane line, evidence of water leaks, mice or wasp nests, etc. But the frig slid out cleanly, leaving a simple hole in a cabinet. It was an anti-climax.

I took it to the Tucson landfill. What a wonderful place for a young boy!--so many huge Tonka trucks, pushing and shoving mountains of junk back into the ground, from whence it ultimately came.

It was a testosterone-besotted place. The customers had big shoulders. Garbage truck after truck came in, and disgorged it load. The drivers knew exactly where to go, and they drove fast.

You could think of a landfill as the opposite of mining. It was ironic that this huge landfill was only a few miles away from one of the biggest open-pit copper mines in the world. This landfill even had a huge hole in the ground instead of a mountain of trash.

Full time RVers are well-traveled compared to the average person. But think how well traveled all this junk is. It might have been mined in Chile or Australia, sent to China for manufacturing, combined with so many other materials, and subjected to diverse manufacturing processes. What a story it all has.

Finally it came state-side, but only as an inert assemblage of manipulated molecules. It lacked the divine spark of marketing razzle-dazzle and easy financing. But of course it got all that here.

There was recycling at the Tucson landfill. How do they recycle objects made from several materials?

Which $10 item of household junk has travelled the most before getting to the consumer? It was mind boggling to consider this, and I had to give up.

It is easier to identify the junk that traveled least. That would probably be an item of a single material. Of course that makes it easy to recycle, so instead of eternal rest here at the Tucson landfill, its travels continue indefinitely. It lives on through a sequence of forms like a Hindu soul.