The Children of Mount Trashmore

by Kevin Bain

My parents told me precisely why they bought our house: "Opportunity."

Located in the western Chicagoland hamlet of Hanover Park, ours was a shrink-wrapped little ranch home, one of many in our newborn 70s track-housing subdivision. Ours was white, and located right in the middle of Zeppelin Drive, a road we had to recognize by location and not name, because blues-rock fans often stole our street signs.

Hanover Park straddled two counties, Cook and DuPage, in Northeast Illinois. It was literally bisected by a large passenger train, a Metra that doubled as a freight line between Chicago and Iowa. Mom told me she chose our neighborhood on the DuPage side, so I could live on the “right side of the tracks.” This was not a convenient metaphor—Mom had very specific ideas about each side and would be damned if I’d be raised on the crap one.

Was the subdivision located on the foothills of a landfill? Yes. Were most of the houses financed at over ten percent interest because 1978 was famously bad for interest rates? Sure. But was Mallard Lakes Landfill going to be the site of a brand-new ski resort as soon as all the trash was gone? Absolutely, and only a fool would doubt such a thing.

Illinois was obviously due for a ski resort. Don’t let its flatness and the citizens’ lack of interest fool you; Mallard Lakes would definitely become the capital of midwestern slalom country. All the neighborhood parents knew it, so much so that most didn’t even plan much for retirement—they were all but paid for, when you think about it. Just like that, a quarter-acre of Seventies-quality track-housing was theirs. This wasn’t a neighborhood, Dad would remind me. It was an investment!

The children of those investors, myself included, had a different name for Mallard Lakes—we called it “Mount Trashmore.” I don’t think the name was literal; try as I might, I could never find any Presidents’ faces on the side. What I did see was typical, I assumed, of things you’d expect to see from a future ski resort: Used diapers, cobs of corn, and moth-eaten Underoos. Capping it all off was the spout of bluish flame erupting from vents atop the hill. To me, these were the obvious trappings of a resort town. Until I was twelve, I thought the city of Aspen constantly belched out garbage vapors.

Another key difference between our city and Aspen was that no ethnic group makes up a majority in Hanover Park, back then as it is today. When my big brother Kyle needed to be beckoned home, we’d sometimes have to specify the race of the person because the name wasn’t enough of an identifier. “White Mikey’s” or “Black Mikey’s” house were necessary descriptors, lest we suffer the embarrassment of calling the wrong home in search of Kyle. Daily exposure to Muslim families, Hindu families, Jewish families, and a smorgasbord of other ethnicities and immigrant groups taught me that all people are basically the same on the inside. Or at least, we’re the same in those parts of the human psyche that get swindled by the same terrible, obvious investment scam.

Summer vacations in the odiferous shadow of Mount Trashmore were made more bearable by gamifying our childhood activities in the context of conquering that mountain: Races were staged and prank wars waged, all for the exclusive and very-definitely-for-real-you-guys access to the cultural icon of our mutual upbringing. My personal favorite competition for the rights to access Mount Trashmore was bicycle jousting: We’d grab a street hockey stick and, very wisely, charge on our bikes into another unsupervised child doing the same. I won that game primarily by virtue of indifference to my own well-being—a bloody winner is still a winner.

Our competitions matured with us, and so too did the mythology surrounding Mount Trashmore and the treasures it held. Our living rooms buzzed with whispered stories of porn magazines and pot baggies to be found in the trash, as our unfounded desires had grown to fit this Beavis-and-Butthead era of adolescence.

In our local legends, anything our hearts desired was ours for the taking at Mount Trashmore—but only for those with enterprise and courage. Having been to Mount Trashmore was a badge of honor, a rite of passage—and I’m pretty sure it was also a complete lie, since I was definitely lying about having gone, and none of us were the type to scale barbed-wire. But still, it remained a unifying monument of schmutzy shared experience.

We spent our entire childhoods on those rancid foothills, until Mallard Lakes Landfill was shut down permanently in 1999. Its oozing, chestnut peaks are now covered over with grass and sod, with nothing but a ventilation flame to remind locals of its former glory, and the memories left under its muddy haze. By then, the damage was done.

Mike Noble was a friend’s dad. Despite stubby legs and a permanently red face, Mike played in the Rose Bowl back in the 70s for the University of Michigan. The year I attempted little league football, he volunteered to drive me because he knew Dad was, at this time, not in the picture. He tried to teach me how to be a cornerback, like him, but my general lack of talent stood in the way, so he decided to make me an offensive lineman instead. I left football after that year, but Mike never stopped being kind to me. I liked Mike Noble, and I didn’t like many people as a kid. Mike Noble died in 2000 from an aggressive brain cancer, only months after diagnosis in his late forties.

Alice Bruce was Mom’s best friend, and our neighborhood’s “big mama.” Our diverse, little murder of latchkey neighborhood kids would rush home after school to Alice’s house for babysitting. Living next door to Alice meant I never had to go over there to be properly babysat, since she could just yell over to keep me in line if she so chose. I often wandered over to her house anyway, just to play with the big kids and their cool toys. I wasn’t turned away, either—everyone was welcome at Alice’s house.

She was a second-generation Polish-American and grew up with stories about what it meant to be excluded, so she wouldn’t turn me away. Even after I excluded her at first, little shit that I was, before eventually conceding to her kindness around age two, with a reconciliatory dandelion I had just plucked from her yard as a gesture of apology. It was my first-ever apology. Alice Bruce died in 2006, at fifty-four, when an abnormally-weak liver (made worse by alcoholism) failed her. A cardiac tumor would kill her husband, the smiling-eyed man we called “Mister Bill” at sixty.

Bob, my dad, died in 2001 from stage 4 lung cancer, at forty-seven. This was no doubt hastened by his cigarette smoking and life of alcoholism, yet he remained the youngest corpse in recent family memory.

Paul H, an upperclassman and a friend of my brother’s from little league football, was the first neighborhood kid of my generation diagnosed with cancer. He died in 2002, a year after I graduated.

Carrie J was the second from that class to die that year, also from cancer. Carrie was a church youth-group leader and acquaintance of mine from High School theater.

Then went Joe C, a class younger than me. He was a tall, handsome kid who recorded his tragic journey in a blog called ‘Cocktails and Chemo.’

I didn’t know any of them well, but news of their passing was in no small supply.

As of this writing, two more classmates are fighting their own cancer battles: Nancy, with striking blue-brown heterochromia and curly black hair, and yet another Joe. This one is a rare buddy of mine and a hearty-laughing party-animal. To my knowledge, both fight to this day, in ebbs and flows of wellness. I sicken to think of. God only knows how many others I stopped keeping tabs on, if only to give my redlining sense of grief some welcome respite.

These weren’t people who were “supposed to die.” They weren’t the ripe, old age of forty-to-fifty-something like Alice Bruce or my Dad. They were my age, and while of course they weren’t all my friends, they could all just as easily have been me. I certainly lived closer to the trash-heap than some of them. All it would have taken was a different roll of the dice. For all I know, I might still be precisely like them, awaiting the creeping, collateral damage of ecologically irresponsible consequence.

In 2006, a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of one of the other subdivisions on Mount Trashmore’s skeevy slopes, naming DuPage County and BFI Sanitation as plaintiffs. The residents of Mount Trashmore learned that year about a chemical called vinyl chloride—the same chemical whose spillage led to a famous environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio in the 2020s. They learned that it was carcinogenic and frequently found in proximity to waste disposal facilities. Nothing was ever proven about Mallard Lake in court regarding vinyl chloride, and the case was dismissed.

Later that year, a test was performed on the groundwater near Mallard Lakes. They didn’t find vinyl chloride as suspected, but pools of methane gas. Attorneys had, to my understanding, selected the wrong chemical as their culprit. In 2007, trees were added to the perimeter and peaks to better filter the groundwater from contaminants, finalizing the project once and for all. Mount Trashmore went from the highest point in our home county of DuPage to a buried memory, a tomb of wasteful consumerism long-since covered.

The children of Mount Trashmore would eventually move away. Most of their parents stayed. Having been back recently, it’s difficult to see Mount Trashmore from the street. The residents, those who are even aware it exists anymore, don’t like to talk about it. Where once was a retention ditch and a thin stretch of access-limiting barbed wire, now are barks and boughs, standing sentinel against the maladies that once claimed my neighbors’ lives. If you didn’t know any better, you might almost say it’s just a beautiful hill with some nice scenery.

But if you scratch the bark, dig just below the surface of that now-lush, now-green hill, you’ll find it: rot. You’ll find generations of trash. Buried, but not deep enough. All of it waiting just under the surface, there to be found if only you have the curiosity (and maybe the benefit of hindsight) to guide you deeper. Mallard Lakes was supposed to be a ski hill. What we received, in substitution, was a fuming heap of trash.

It’s been fifty years since the ski hill ambitions of Zeppelin Drive and the widgetized houses that made up its neighborhood. The realization of this goal would, fifty years after the fact in 2024, still live in the distant future somewhere. While it may be tempting to give into cynicism and admit that my parents were fleeced by a lying developer, or that a negligent city manager zoned residences dangerously close to waste disposal, I almost envy those stargazing old-timers— choosing to live permanently with hope of ambition, instead of the satisfaction of a goal achieved. Staying right there on the surface of things. It comforts me to know that, regardless of the ever shifting priorities of the communities surrounding it, the goal of Mount Trashmore would never change in the minds of its most loyal subjects: One day it’ll be a ski hill. Just you wait.

Mount Trashmore had, over the decades, been a number of things to a number of people.  To my parents’ generation, it was an investment. To us, it was the only topographical feature for miles around in the flatlands of Illinois, and an imaginary playground. Now, as adults, it’s possible that Mount Trashmore was a killer. But ultimately, for those of us who grew up there, Mount Trashmore will likely remain an unanswered question.

It’s possible, as some of my conspiratorially minded cohort believe, that we were slowly poisoned over the course of our upbringings by an indifferent corporation trying to save a buck to maximize shareholder return. They’d say we grew up with toxic barbecues and carcinogenic homecomings, our little league teams lovingly glazed in trace layers of toxic, airborne scum.

Others will point to the lawsuit’s dismissal or argue that those of us with abnormalities or maladies are simply a statistical reality of life, minimizing the role of Mount Trashmore entirely. I can’t dismiss this latter perspective outright; after all, it’s not as if we were the first community in history struck by a spate of illness. The point is that we don’t have answers, and we never will. To this day, if one were to attend a class reunion for a nearby school, debate over Mount Trashmore and its potential effects would rage until dawn.

Fifty years on, Mount Trashmore is just a memory, and even then, it’s a memory of hot debate among those who recall its heyday. 

But all kids who grew up on those fetid foothills would eventually grow up to agree on one thing: Illinois was a shitty place for a ski hill.

BIO: Kevin Bain is a longtime script reader and emerging nonfiction writer. Originally from Chicagoland, he now resides near Cleveland with his wife and small menagerie of cats.