300. Dragon Boat Races 2018

Northern California International Dragon Boat Festival

I was trying to remember on Sunday how many of these I’ve worked. Three now at Lake Merritt and at least five at Treasure Island. This year things went pretty smoothly, we were even done a little early both evenings. But let’s start with getting there.

It took me three years to look up the other bus line that runs by Lake Merritt in Oakland, where the event is held now. When I did, I discovered there’s a perfectly lovely AC Transit bus that I can take from the new Transit Center in SF to a block from where we previously had dumpsters and this year parked a very big truck we loaded with sorted trash bags. It only takes twenty minutes as well. Since I usually have breakfast on Geary before work days, and the Geary bus terminates at the Transit Center, I simply jumped on the bus after breakfast, rode up the escalator to the bus deck and caught the bus to Oakland. Easier and almost certainly faster than my previous train then bus method.

I did arrive early to catch the bus, so I spent some time checking out the new bus deck. It occurred to me, also on Sunday, that it was either brave or stupid of them to have a bright white ceiling there given that all the buses are diesel powered. Virtually every surface is bright white. The buses are much cleaner now than they were before the old terminal was terminated, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see the ceiling get darker in time. 

I’ve now taken the trip from SF to the East Bay and back three times and it really does work great. The connection to the Bay Bridge is as smooth as advertised. Normally this only saves a minute or two, but I’m sure there were times when buses got stuck in street traffic going to or from the Temporary Terminal. Back to the Dragon Boat Races. 

I meant to bring my camera on Sunday to photograph the inside of the truck, but forgot. I posted some photos of the event last year. I work the racing crew areas at the far end of the event from our truck, so I only visited at the end of the day, before I walked the short block to catch my bus home. On Saturday night my favorite crew chief had a little sorting station inside of the front right and the entire left side of the truck was a wall of bags stacked a single bag deep. An amazing creation, but he is a genius at trash organization. J___, my favorite event person -- actually he doesn’t work for the event but runs a separate team of haulers so that we sort and they haul -- was also impressed with the truck organization. I was advocating moving the truck closer to the event, but J___ was concerned the bags would fall if the truck moved. Though by the end of the day the back of the truck was mostly filled with bags, so that wouldn’t have been a problem. Maybe next year.

Usually I complain about the food vendors, but the support crew people are worse. Here are the ways you can ruin the sorted order I’ve been maintaining in our eco-stations all day long: 

1. Actually the first option doesn’t ruin it, and this is what we hope people will do, just set their unsorted black bags and boxes next to the station so we can do it properly. Officially, in general and especially at some events, the vendors are supposed to sort it all themselves -- but they can’t, and if they try we are still left with the mess.

2. Toss the unsorted black bags or boxes into a random container. It’s a mystery to me how they pick the stream to ruin. This isn’t so bad if I can get to it and remove the bag before there’s a pile of additional trash on top.

3. The worst, and I happened to be walking to the station and saw the crew guy doing this, is dumping the unsorted bag into a random container. In this case, the bag was primarily compost -- in fact a huge amount of heavy fruit mostly -- but it went into the landfill. That was on Saturday so on Sunday I grabbed their cans periodically and took them out to sort at the station. And I gave them so much shit about the dumping that they were good about placing any black bags, reverently, beside the station like a sort of offering to the trash fairy (me).

When you order a large amount of coffee from someplace like Starbucks, it comes in a plastic bladder inside a cardboard box. There were hundreds of these things since every crew needed coffee apparently (the non-coffee drinker judges them all). As with everything else, they tend to toss these into a random container... though I will admit that they are usually either in recycling or landfill. The bladder is not recyclable, it belongs in landfill, but the box can go in either recycling, if dry, or compost, if wet. Which means you have to take every single one of these beasts apart. Needless to say we get very good at this task, but I enjoy educating (making fools of) the high school students on the support crews by, once a year, forcing one of them to do one of these repetitive and annoying tasks they should be doing all the time. This years victim (student) was a girl who walked up with the coffee abomination and proceeded to empty the contents on the grass. This was unusual enough that it caught my attention, so when she then walked over with that “where do I toss this” look on her face I explained that she had to take it apart and put it in two places. I got to take a short break as she discovered how the box opened,  then how you can pull the bladder out of the box. I only wish we had more time for “education.” 

I’ve already sent in some suggestions for how we can improve this new truck-based system for next year. Why the event couldn’t obtain dumpsters I don’t really understand, but that’s not my responsibility, and this system seems to be working at least as well. Maybe better.


My favorite thing about the crew zone are the camp dogs. Many people bring dogs who hang around the camps all day long. Some are tiny ones who peek out from under chairs and bags, but there are also the decent sized ones who make eye contact with me, mostly, I’ll admit, because I’m usually carrying a bag of compost.