For a week I was promised a trip to the local dump. And for a week I was like a kid the night before his first trip to Disney World. Is it today? Are we going now? Are we there yet?

When I was a boy, a trip to the dump was a by-God event. It was a journey to a fantastic place where the imagination soared even as my nostrils tried to crawl from my face and run away.

The dump then was a massive world with mountains of waste that rose into the clouds. There were giant machines rolling and roaring amid those dunes, belching and clawing at the heaps, forever battling the garbage beasts and forever losing.

There was a beefy man named Hans or Henry or Hank who stood watching over it all, giant hands on his hips, cigar clamped between his teeth. Hans or Henry or Hank scowled all the time and he’d yell at you if you dumped in the wrong place, but mostly he just stood and glowered. Glowering was his job.

There were constant fires, eternal flames of burning offal at one end of the dump or another, day and night, as if the garbage gods demanded constant sacrifice.

There were gulls and crows by the thousands, circling and diving everywhere, fighting over morsels even in this land of plenty. There were rats, too, and they were big ones. Fearsome rats that looked like they had been bench-pressing the twisted washing machines and rusted water heaters between feasts.

The dump was rich with the aroma of burning rubber, rotting food and a darker smell you could never identify and never wanted to. But it was better than the zoo, the carnival and the Tosca Fair any day of the week. To me, it was a Landscape of the Unwanted, a meaner and more malodorous version of that island of forgotten toys from the old Christmas cartoon.

To a kid, the dump seemed planet-sized. And it was a planet composed of things that other people had possessed but no longer wanted. It always looked to me as though someone had picked up an entire shopping mall and dumped out all the contents in one place, leaving it all to rust and rot.

Marvelous. Disney might have the teacups and a princess or two, but does it have dog-sized rodents nesting inside an overturned refrigerator? Does it have a discarded mattress so filled with fauna, the mattress itself appears to squirm?

A playground is what the dump was. A noxious, reeking playground, but a playground nonetheless. And it could be anything you wanted, if you got your mind just right.

I always fancied vampires lived there, sleeping days away buried deep within the walls of waste. I imagined them slipping out at night, blackened banana peels hanging from their capes, wads of brown lettuce stuck to their shoes. I would envision myself creeping out to the dump after dark to see them, and then my mind would flee from the thought because it was just too much.

And so, you can see why I never wanted to go to Santa’s Village or Six Flags. I mean, yawn. If there was no chance to witness a raven doing battle with a raccoon over a spill of rotten eggs, then man, why would anybody pay admission?

And so it was with great excitement two days ago that I made my way to the dump off River Road in Lewiston. No, excuse me. I should say that I made my way to the solid waste station, because that is what they call them now. And frankly, I think that is for the best. Such boring scenes don’t deserve the lofty title of “Dump,” as I recall those glorious places.

I stood looking out on a neat little building flanked by rolling hills and uneventful Dumpsters. I saw innocuous pipes rising from the ground, discreetly releasing gases from the natural processes of decay occurring down below and out of sight.

The whole affair seemed strangely polite. Where were the disordered mountains of garbage and mystery? Where were the fires, the rats, the gulls by the thousands? Where was Hans or Henry or Hank, chomping on his cigar and hollering at a group of boys to stop playing soccer with the dead skunk and go to hell home? Where was that powerful, enigmatic scent unique to places where human leftovers are disposed of?

The magic of the dump as I remember it is gone like the last burning bag of trash kicked into the pit. There are no more caverns of filth to house vampires or anything else. The rats do their business in secret.

When I was a kid, I had no inkling that every scrap we throw away is eventually returned to the planet in forms that choke the atmosphere and pollute the water. I had no idea that all those burning tires, milk cartons and old sneakers would someday cause a global crisis.

Waste management is much more efficient these days. Hell, it’s almost tidy.

But boring? Man, I tell you what. I saw one crow at the solid waste station and one skinny gull. They looked depressed, the both of them. And I know how they felt. Though I’m glad we’re doing better at disposing of our waste and adding a thousand years or so to the planet, I’ve been down in the dumps all day.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail him at [email protected].