[Scpg] THE SODFATHER: Californian compost wizard TIM DUNDON

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

APR 2, '09 12:44 PM
THE SODFATHER: Californian compost wizard TIM DUNDON
http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/04/02/the-sodfather-californian-compost-wizard-tim-dundon/.



The Sodfather
Californian compost wizard TIM DUNDON talks shit with Daniel Chamberlin.
Photography by Eden Batki
Originally published in Arthur No. 27 (Dec 2007). 
Original design by Molly Frances and Mark 
Frohman. Find bonus Sodfather photos by 
Chamberlin at Into The Green.
Alchemists are often characterized in modern 
times as bumbling would-be wizards at best, 
greedy charlatans at worst. They're portrayed as 
fumbling hopelessly in cluttered laboratories, 
unenlightened madmen trying to turn lead into 
gold. The reality is more complex, of course.

Alchemists were up to plenty of things, many of 
them having to do with relating to the natural 
world-and understanding its processes of 
transformation and transmutation-in philosophical 
and spiritual dimensions that transcended 
traditional religious thinking, both Christian 
and pagan, and preceded modern scientific 
thought. The whole "lead into gold" thing was but 
the most lucrative of the alchemical -or 
hermetic-practices in the eyes of the monarchs 
and rulers. Alchemy's material prima as Peter 
Lamborn Wilson writes in the recent collection 
Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology, "can be 
found 'on any dung hill.' Hermeticism changes 
shit into gold." It's an image memorably realized 
in Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 film The Holy 
Mountain wherein the thief character takes a dump 
in a fancy bucket, and Jodorowsky, playing an 
alchemist, distills those fresh turds into a 
hefty chunk of golden bling.

Such fantastical processes are well known to 
dirt-worshipping gardening sage Tim Dundon, the 
beneficent caretaker of California's most famous 
compost pile and the kindly warden of the 
tropical forest that has fruited from its rich 
humus. It's here that Dundon, a scientist-poet in 
the truest hermetic sense, finds hope and 
salvation in the transformation of death into 
life-of rotting organic matter into nutrient-rich 
soil-that takes place daily in the fecund jungle 
he maintains on his one-acre yard.

The botanical odyssey of Dundon, the 
self-proclaimed "guru of doo-doo" and the man 
whose mammoth compost pile once covered a 
football-field-sized lot, begins in 1967 with a 
marijuana shortage. Like any good gardening 
story, it encompasses Hollywood producers, fires, 
suicide, PCP injection, a nude Quaker iconoclast, 
standoffs with city officials and a violent pet 
coyote.

Dundon, a 65-year-old lifelong resident of the 
Los Angeles suburb of Altadena, relays the tale 
with the voice of a true bard: his gospel of 
compost is told in a pun-filled rhyming style 
akin to the braggadocio-laden poesy of Muhammad 
Ali. He's been a fixture in the bohemian scene of 
Los Angeles for four decades, known among the 
circle of outsider intelligentsia that has 
gathered for Bacchanalian parties at the Altadena 
ranch of Turkish Armenian painter Jirayr Zorthian 
since the '60s. He often marches in Pasadena's 
farcical Doo-Dah Parade clad in white robes, a 
purple turban atop his head-the garb preferred by 
his guitar-playing alter-ego, Zeke The Sheik.

Dundon provides anyone within driving distance of 
his home with what is widely considered to be the 
finest compost in Southern California. He does 
not charge for the actual raw material, but asks 
for a delivery fee-$35 and up, depending on where 
you live-for a steaming pile that could serve a 
small subsistence farm. Many of the recipients of 
his fertile mixture of manure and lawn clippings 
end up hosting impromptu mulching parties, 
inviting their neighbors to come and fill 
wheelbarrows and buckets with the organic matter 
left spilling from their yards onto sidewalks and 
streets. Due to the freshness of the manure 
component of his compost, his deliveries 
initially reek of ammonia, but the smell fades 
within days leaving the pleasant odor of healthy 
vegetation in its wake.
The mother pile from whence this compost comes 
once filled the multi-acre lot that his 
neighbors-the Mountain View Cemetery-granted him 
use of. After multiple battles with city 
officials and several fires, this sprawling 
organic mass has been confined to the lot where 
he lives, and where he's been piling compost 
since 1973.
Dundon resides at the intersection of Mountain 
View Street and Fair Oaks Avenue, the main 
thoroughfare connecting Altadena with Pasadena to 
the south. Altadena is an unincorporated 
community of almost 43,000 residents that falls 
under the jurisdiction of the city of Los 
Angeles. Its northern border is the Angeles 
National Forest and the San Gabriel Mountain 
range; it last made the local news in February 
2006 when a resident spied a mountain lion 
napping in the shade of her backyard shrubbery, 
prompting a lockdown of local elementary schools. 
It's also known for its population of human 
predators, with 10 homicides taking place in the 
vicinity over the first half of 2007. Gangs are 
one of the first things Dundon talks about to me 
when I call to set up the interview, complaining 
that some of his neighbors-they're Bloods, he 
says-have parked a broken-down pickup truck in 
front of his property in order to "make whitey 
look bad." This is to be distinguished from the 
fully functional pickup truck-complete with 
hydraulic lift-that he uses to haul compost far 
and wide.

Dundon's place is not easy to find as I cruise 
down Mountain View on a sunny Saturday afternoon 
in late August. Young black dudes draped in red 
clothing pass blunts, chat with their friends in 
sparkling Escalades and give me quizzical looks 
as I circle the block peering at street numbers. 
The houses are one-story ranch affairs, the yards 
are dirt interspersed with yellowing patches of 
dry grass and weeds.

After driving up and down the street several 
times I park my car and decide to investigate on 
foot, soon realizing that I can't see the compost 
for the trees. Dundon's yard is literally 
exploding with plant life: A riot of cacti, 
palms, walnut trees and succulents strains 
against the sagging chain link fence that marks 
his property line.

I find Dundon at the gated entrance to this 
chaotic lot. He's stooped over a fresh load: 
rotting plant matter and manure from a local 
stable falling through the tines of an ancient 
pitchfork. Dundon's tall, about 6'4? with broad 
shoulders and considerable biceps. An urban 
mountain man, his beard explodes from his face, 
white whiskers frizzing out from his sideburns 
down to the middle of his chest. His moustache is 
stained light brown, I'm guessing from drinking 
apple cider vinegar as he has a slightly sour, 
though not unpleasant, odor. His long hair is 
dark gray, pulled back into a ponytail. Blue eyes 
sparkle from above rosy cheeks and a 
weather-beaten face. Give him a conical red hat 
and he is an unmistakable garden gnome.

We exchange greetings and without hesitation he 
launches into his pro-compost spiel.

"I'm here to capture the rapture and the 
resurrection at the same time," he says, pushing 
a wheelbarrow brimming with fresh mulch, leading 
me up the inclined path into his shady tropical 
reserve. "Isn't life triumphing over death the 
resurrection? The body turns back to basics and 
then the basics are picked up by the next 
generation and the next generation makes use of 
it and is happy to live inside this new entity 
because it didn't go to the landfill. It went to 
the hill with the will."
The ground is spongy and soft, piled into rolling 
hills of nutrient-rich soil that rise a good four 
or five feet above street level. Black hose-part 
of a DIY irrigation system-criss-crosses a 
pathway lined with black plastic gardening pots 
filled with young ferns and prickly-pear cacti. 
Dense foliage spreads out on both sides of the 
path: Kaffir and Stargazer Lilies bloom amidst 
the psychedelic red, green and yellow leaves of 
coleus plants. Myriad other tropical species 
compete with jungle cacti for the shafts of 
sunlight that splinter down through the banana 
and walnut trees. Palms tower 30 feet overhead, 
swaying in the slight breeze of what, on the 
street, is a hot August afternoon. The 
temperature in the shade is a good ten degrees 
cooler. The air smells of wet dirt and blossoming 
flora.
"When the county came after me one time they said 
it was a pile of debris and trash," he says, 
dumping the load of mulch; spreading and turning 
it between ferns and broad-leafed fan palms with 
his pitchfork. "The reporter from the local 
newspaper came, and I said, 'Do you realize what 
the question is?' I told her I'm sent to be the 
modern day Shakespeare/ The sincere seer engineer 
that's here to commandeer the sphere/ Because 
your atmosphere and the pure have already started 
to disappear/ So you better get your rear in gear 
my dear because the real enemy is right here/ I'm 
like Paul Revere crossed with Shakespeare. And 
the question is: Debris or not debris." He stops 
for a second.
"See?" he asks. "It really gets 'em when you say it in rhyme."
The Dundon family moved onto this piece of land 
in 1933. Tim was born in 1942, and grew up here 
with his two brothers and a sister. He tells me 
it was a flat lot full of weeds, and that an evil 
spirit inhabits the house itself. "My family's 
been possessed big time," he says. As we walk 
through this fertile microenvironment he tells me 
about his nephew's habit of "gunning" PCP, his 
sister's "demonic possession" and an attempted 
intervention cum exorcism that ended with a 
family fistfight and a pile of flaming Bibles. 
"Over and over again my life has been full of 
weird, weird stuff," he says. "I don't want to 
freak you out."

Chickens, roosters, ducks and geese patrol the 
paths of Dundon's forest, and their work rooting 
through the top layer of mulch brings his 
attention back to the matter underfoot. "You can 
see the chickens have been digging," he says, 
kneeling down and plunging his hand into the warm 
soil.

"That's the powder that makes you prouder and 
prouder," he says, bringing up a handful of rich 
humus. He lets it run through his fingers and 
sings a verse from Creedence's "Proud Mary:" "Big 
wheel keeps on turnin'/ Proud Mary keeps on 
burnin'." He smiles. "See, it's burning with the 
fire of life. I call it yea-palm instead of 
napalm. Rather than burn people to death it 
brings 'em more alive. This stuff here, the raw 
material?" he comes up with another handful of 
the same fine black soil. "I call that 
craptonite. Craptonite does to the forces of evil 
what kryptonite does to Superman.

"There's so many bacteria," he continues, "so 
many worms and living creatures that when I wet 
this thing down at night there's this big party 
that comes out. They just chew it up and turn it 
into the black stuff. So it's crap tonight, soil 
tomorrow," he pauses for a beat, to see if I'm 
following his joke. "Like when it goes to the 
black form there, when it's completely done, it's 
called humus."

The process of composting is, to quote the the 
Rodale Book of Composting, "the biological 
reduction of organic waste to humus." Which more 
or less means when plants or animals die and fall 
to the earth, they become food for other 
organisms. This process is both hindered and 
harnessed by humans: The billions of bacteria and 
fungi that dwell in a handful of soil are largely 
absent from, say, asphalt, concrete or the 
compacted mash of garbage in a landfill, but the 
process is streamlined and accelerated by 
traditional organic composting practices.
The first stage of decomposition in composting is 
chemical: microscopic organisms flock to the dead 
thing and start to secrete enzymes that break it 
down on a cellular level. As bacteria, 
saprophytic mushrooms and other fungi eat and 
digest, they give off considerable heat, causing 
compost piles to steam and occasionally even 
catch fire from the trillions of tiny post-dinner 
bacterial farts. Such a catastrophe took place at 
Dundon's place in 1990, and nearly cost him his 
beloved pile. As temperatures fluctuate within 
the decomposing matter different communities of 
organisms rise and fall according to their 
ability to withstand the heat, which can approach 
160-degrees Fahrenheit.

As the chemical decomposers make the dead organic 
matter a bit more malleable, the physical 
decomposers start to show up. Millipedes, sow 
bugs, springtails and snails are happy to chomp 
up the plants. Flies arrive bringing more 
bacteria to the buffet, leaving behind eggs and 
maggots for spiders, centipedes, mites and 
beetles to eat. Ants replenish the fungi, 
transport minerals from within and without of the 
pile and eat plants and insects. But the most 
accomplished of all the decomposers is without 
question the earthworm. In his blockbuster 1881 
essay "The Formation of Vegetable Mould through 
the Action of Worms with Observations on their 
Habits," Charles Darwin writes, "It may be 
doubted whether there are many other animals 
which have played so important a part in the 
history of the world as these lowly organized 
creatures." These original slimy alchemists eat 
dirt and shit out the organic equivalent of gold: 
castings, also known as vermicompost. Castings 
enrich the soil with nitrogen, calcium, magnesium 
and other minerals, in addition to increasing its 
ability to retain water. And they attract more 
earthworms, too.

If the aspiring organic gardener's compost is 
comprised of the proper materials-check out a 
good composting book like the aforementioned 
Rodale guide, but no meat, cat, dog or human poop 
for starters-it shouldn't smell bad or attract 
rodents. The primary odor that emanates from 
Dundon's pile is the deep funk of healthy soil. 
Which is actually the smell of the spores 
produced by actinomycetes bacteria, a chemical 
decomposer that thrives in the latter stages of 
the composting process.

This is how the majority of humans grew their 
gardens for most of recorded history, taking cues 
from the world around them. The original 
practitioner of this composting process would be 
the forest floor itself, where a mulch of dead 
leaves, needles, bark and branches covers over 
and protects the networks of roots, mycelium, 
bacteria, insects and worms that take part in 
soil genesis activities. The first people known 
to have written about composting were the 
Akkadians, an empire that thrived in Mesopotamia 
between the 22nd and 24th centuries B.C.

There are irregularities in this history, of 
course: Rodale cites a 10th century Arab 
agriculturalist as endorsing human blood as a 
potent addition to compost. Colonial-era American 
composting seems to be predicated on "fish to 
muck" ratios. In the '50s gardeners were going 
bonkers over mulching with wet straw. Dundon 
credits his pile's success to cemetery grass 
clippings and never fails to point out that 
there's a lot of manure involved.

This cycle was interrupted in 1840 when German 
scientist Justus von Liebig discovered just what 
it was that plants liked about humus. Prior to 
Liebig's research it was commonly accepted that 
plant roots were chowing down, literally eating, 
humus. Liebig's research showed that plants were 
benefiting from the absorption of chemicals, 
specifically nitrogen, present in humus but also 
easily isolated and applied to roots directly. In 
short, Liebig's discovery enabled the synthesis 
of fertilizer. As is often the case when 
industrial scientists decode a natural process, 
he proclaimed his methodology to be superior and 
actively dismissed the process of composting, 
forever changing agriculture.

The widespread use of synthetic fertilizer 
instead of humus was quite a coup in that a 
naturally occurring-often free-recycled substance 
that enriched the soil was replaced by an 
industrial product requiring nonrenewable 
resources that was often not only detrimental to 
long-term soil health, but also expensive for the 
farmer. Further refinements to the production of 
fertilizer-most notably the Haber-Bosch process 
of synthesizing ammonia to be used to boost crop 
production, developed in 1909-are often credited 
as enabling the population boom that has 
contributed so drastically to the environmental 
degradation of the planet.

So when Tim Dundon talks about how his pile is 
the answer to "all of mankind's problems," he's 
not kidding around. And there's no question that 
the pile has saved Tim Dundon.
Dundon spent his early 20s as a plasterer, 
shooting fireproofing on the structural steel of 
the skyscrapers going up across Los Angeles in 
the '60s. When a doctor told him that the 
asbestos that was getting in his eyes would 
eventually leave him blind, he switched jobs and 
became an ironworker.
"I was being a tough young fella," he says, 
sitting on a lawn chair in a salon-like clearing 
framed by the winding, sometimes horizontal trunk 
of a decades-old pepper tree. "I got really super 
powerful," he says. "My barber was the third 
contender to the bantamweight championship."
Dundon boxed too, both in and out of the ring. He 
and his hard-knock friends would get into bar 
fights and street fights, "dusting off Mexicans" 
and getting dusted off by Mexicans, high on acid 
and pills. They'd take "racks and racks" of 
Benzedrine, Seconal and Percodan and spend the 
weekend hunting in Arizona or in the rugged 
forests north of Altadena, "beating the hills and 
catching rattlesnakes." After these strenuous and 
sleepless weekends he'd return to the work of 
building bridges and buildings. "I was breaking 
my back," he says. One of his friends, the 
bantamweight barber, was eventually murdered when 
"a guy he'd worked over a few times in street 
fights caught him coming out of bar with a twelve 
gauge shotgun. Right in the face. He wasn't quite 
tough e.nough to take that punch. That's a good 
way for somebody like that to go out though.
"This is the kind of people that used to be in 
Pasadena," he says. "You talk about heavy duty, 
these people were way above and beyond the call 
of duty."
By the late '60s Dundon was living with his 
second wife in Altadena, raising snakes and 
trying to keep his pet coyote from killing his 
neighbor's dogs, or his wife. "One night me and 
my wife did acid," he says, "and he wanted to 
kill her so bad you could see the hate vibrations 
coming off of him. If I'd a let him go she'd a 
been in pieces."
It was around this time that he first smoked 
marijuana, coming up on his first batch of 
cannabis by way of a "mailman guy" he was hanging 
out with. "I took a couple hits on some really 
good stuff," he says. "Then I had a big steak, 
and then went home and played with mama and it 
was like whoa!" He bugs his eyes out and smiles. 
"This is good."
The following year Dundon started on the path 
that would eventually lead to the lush garden 
where he and I are now talking. "It was one of 
those summers when you couldn't score any of the 
stuff," he says. "I decided to plant some stuff 
behind the garage. Put in a couple tomato plants 
and some corn to camouflage. I saw the miracle of 
growth happen there. That was '67." His expanded 
his garden of legal and illegal plants when he 
and his wife bought a house in 1970. Three years 
after that they split up and he returned home to 
take care of his aging parents: Frank, who worked 
in the aerospace industry, and Edna, a concert 
violinist.
"It was my calling," he says. "My father is the 
gardener, I am the vine. This is one of the heavy 
Bible statements. My middle name is Francis. 
Francis is Frank. Remember the Catholic saint, 
St. Frances of Assisi? I'm St. Francis of Afece. 
Is that funny shit or what? It goes on and on and 
on."
The genesis of the modern organic gardening and 
permaculture movement of which Dundon is an icon 
occurred in 1940, two years before his birth. 
Almost 100 years following von Liebig's discovery 
of fertilizer, Sir Albert Howard, a British 
botanist and the Director of the Institute of 
Plant Industry at Indore, India, published An 
Agricultural Testament. The landmark book was a 
result of Howard's years of study of the 
indigenous agricultural practices of India, and 
it lays out a vision of symbiosis between animals 
and plants and a scientifically validated 
methodology of composting that have become the 
core tenets of the organic farming movement. And 
the dude talks a lot like Tim Dundon, if Dundon 
were a British knight. "How long will the 
supremacy of the West endure?" Howard asks in the 
introduction to Agricultural Testament. "The 
answer depends on the wisdom and courage of the 
population in dealing with the things that 
matter. Can mankind regulate its affairs so that 
its chief possession-the fertility of the soil-is 
preserved? On the answer to this question the 
future of civilization depends."

Howard's work flew in the face of an agricultural 
fertilizer industry that was already entrenched 
across the planet. And he inspired a generation 
of organic farmers, among them American gardener 
J.I. Rodale. Rodale started publishing magazines 
and gardening guides-including the composting 
book quoted above-in 1942, based around his 
enthusiasm and belief in organic farming. Among 
the many authors that he published was one Ruth 
Stout, a rebellious woman raised as a Quaker in 
Girard, Kansas. Though her work is often 
overshadowed by that of her brother-Rex Stout, 
the author of a series of mysteries featuring an 
obese detective-Stout published her first book in 
1955.

How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back 
outlined her philosophy of permanent mulch, 
summed up with the maxim "no dig, no work." Like 
Howard she recognized nature as a gardener that 
didn't need to be improved upon, and was reputed 
to tend to her bountiful, chaotic roadside 
gardens in the nude.

After Dundon moved back to his parents' place in 
1973, he continued to garden, but it was Stout's 
writing that gave him the inspiration to start 
his now legendary compost heap and the jungle 
that has sprouted from it. "I read her book about 
mulching," he says, "and how it had turned her 
place into a virtual paradise. She had all this 
stuff growing, really wild, just by spreading hay 
and organic material on the ground. I took Ms. 
Stout to a new level.

"I had a vision in early '73-I was right over 
there," he points through the trees to a spot a 
hundred yards or so from where we're sitting. 
"All of a sudden it dawned on me that that this 
was something that could change the whole world. 
People could create their own well-being, their 
own good health, happiness, have peace on earth, 
just by using organic material, turning it into a 
game or a competition or whatever to get everyone 
excited and involved. Something that could really 
work."
Dundon soon began collecting the yard waste that 
his neighbors at the cemetery were incinerating. 
His pile grew to cover over the lot on which he 
lived, and soon the cemetery let him expand onto 
the land that connected their two properties. He 
claims the eruption of foliage occurred 
naturally. "I used to get the grass cuttings with 
the tree seeds and the shrub seeds," says Dundon. 
"Instant forest." He's obviously done lots of 
planting though, as it's likely the banana trees 
didn't come from graveyard grass clippings. 
Likewise the massive dioon-a member of the 
ancient cycad family and a native of Central 
America-that spreads its palm-like fronds over a 
dilapidated shed. Or the exotic epiphytic cacti 
that bloom from the trunks of host trees reaching 
up toward the sky. Amateur botanists who travel 
to Dundon's forest with a field guide in hand 
will be richly rewarded.
Dundon picks up a walnut from the ground 
underneath our chairs. "Just throw a little mulch 
on top and before you know it there's stuff 
everywhere," he says.

Dundon also kept up his marijuana cultivation. 
After his parents died, they left the property to 
him and selling pot augmented his income from 
doing odd jobs and gardening work. By the early 
'80s he claims that he was the "kingpin grower 
and dealer" of Altadena. "The people I was 
dealing with, they weren't into cocaine and all 
the other stuff," he says. "They were just into 
doing the herb. I had a bunch of women that were 
coming around and I could of said 'Drop your 
drawers and I'll give you a half pound!' Never 
any of that. I knew the growers; I got the super 
price, to where the people felt they got the best 
deal on the best stuff. This is the way it should 
be."

He was busted in 1985, charged with cultivation, 
sales to a narcotics officer and possession of 
magic mushrooms with intent to distribute, all 
felonies. He was busted again while out on bail 
and charged with possession of more marijuana and 
psilocybin. He represented himself in Pasadena 
Superior Court as his alter ego Zeke the Sheik, 
dressed in a white caftan and making his case in 
rhyme. "I was obviously guilty," he says "but I 
was claiming that I had dominion over the plants, 
because I was a true Christian believer and that 
my father in heaven according to the Bible gave 
me dominion."

He was convicted following a famously comical 
trial, but the judge let him off easy: 60 days 
for each set of felonies, but to be served 
concurrently at Camp Snoopy, a minimum security 
prison camp. He only served 18 days, and had a 
pretty easy time inside: "One day I was 
pretending like I was asleep on the ground and 
these black guys were talking about me, sayin', 
'Hey man we were in Altadena and this guy was 
selling this weed that was so bad that we didn't 
need no cocaine or none of this other stuff. 
That's him right there!' If you're a child 
molester they're gonna kill ya, but if you're a 
weed dealer they're gonna say 'This guy's cool, 
man. He's all right.'"

Dundon's next encounter with the authorities came 
in 1990, when his compost heap caught fire. "It 
was like hell on earth," he says. "It was like 
Puff the Magic Dragon and Dante's Inferno right 
in the back yard." He was oblivious to the fire 
until two police officers notified him of the 
smoke that was rising from his pile and lying so 
heavily on the street that it was stopping 
traffic.

Dundon was in a massively depressed state at the 
time: His 26-year-old son had committed suicide 
two weeks earlier, following the death of his 
mother, Dundon's second ex-wife. "He broke up 
with his girlfriend. He was having trouble with 
the man," he says. "He was gonna have to go to 
jail for 10 months or something like that. He got 
involved in some kind of drug deal. It was just 
too much for him to handle so he did the big 
one." Dundon points two fingers at his head and 
pulls an invisible trigger. "So right at that 
time the pile was starting to catch on fire I was 
so bummed out, so blown out."

He managed to contain the fire, but it broke out 
again the following day. The fire department was 
sympathetic to Dundon, but warned him that he'd 
be facing massive fines if they had to intervene. 
With a combination of water and silt he finally 
contained the blaze, and with the assistance of 
scientist friends he was able to verify to county 
authorities that his pile was no longer a hazard: 
the compost had mostly burned up, and what 
remained was non-combustible humus.
But the assault on the heap was only delayed, the 
issue handed over to county planners who claimed 
that Dundon's pile was in violation of Los 
Angeles County zoning regulations. In 1999 senior 
county planner John Gutwein told the LA Times 
that "Mr. Dundon is a very nice man, conducting a 
large-scale composting operation. Frankly, he is 
doing very positive things Š But Mr. Dundon is 
going to have to move the pile somewhere else."

It came as no surprise that Dundon was unable to 
transport his pile-which had grown to be at least 
40-feet high, and was reportedly the length of 
"five school busses"-to an appropriately zoned 
industrial area. Shortly thereafter the owners of 
the land-the Mountain View Cemetery board-were 
threatened with jail time and a $1,000-a-day fine 
if the pile remained. It was soon bulldozed. 
After the compost was removed, the ground was 
sprayed with herbicide and is now a barren dirt 
field dotted with tufts of crispy, sun-baked 
weeds.

Still, this major setback, disheartening as it 
is, can't detract from Dundon's progress: Not 
just on his own land, but through the work of the 
compost disciples that swear by his humus, a 
congregation whose members range from prim rose 
hobbyists to crunchy urban farmers, bohemian 
permaculturalists to straight-laced landscapers. 
He shows me a calendar that features images from 
his customers' gardens:

Sprawling groves of tropical plants, flowerbeds 
and vegetable plots bursting with life, even a 
few images of gardeners who've followed his model 
and added chickens and ducks to their backyard 
biospheres.
Where would you be without your compost? I ask 
him as we wander around his house. It's one of 
two on the property, though the foliage is so 
thick that I never manage to discern where the 
second structure is. (I later learn that he has 
another garden growing on top of one of these 
buildings, a green roof that serves as a refuge 
for a pride of feral cats.) He stops to look down 
on a cage with two baby rabbits inside. It's 
stacked up next to more cages holding chicks, 
chirping in alarm at a black and white cat that 
has emerged from the undergrowth. He looks back 
at me and raises two fingers to his head and 
pulls the trigger. "Probably," he says. "The ups 
and downs got so bad. Suicide was close many 
times. When the pile got destroyed and the whole 
thing got so weird.
"Death, and bad relationships with women and 
having to be alone," he continues, noting that 
his last girlfriend left 20 years ago. "If I 
could've had some breaks Š" Dundon has 
aspirations to Hollywood stardom, brushes with 
television producers and media attention that 
have fueled obsessions with becoming a celebrity 
through the transformative power of compost. 
Which makes sense considering how much it's 
enriched his life. "It would be neat to go back 
and write a novel about what would've happened if 
I'd gotten in contact with all these people. How 
much different the world could've been if that 
had happened. It could be Ecotopia already."
It's one of the only moments in the hours that 
we've been talking that he seems to be at a loss 
for words. It passes though, and as we continue 
to walk through his garden he tells stories about 
his brother Pat's singing abilities, and then 
freestyles humus rhymes: "That's the royal soil 
wrapped in foil/ So it'll never spoil for those 
who are loyal/ and put in the toil/ and create 
the thing that will not only end the turmoil/ but 
replace oil."

Dundon's enthusiasm for compost goes beyond the 
sterling scientific theses of Sir Howard, and 
nearly eclipses Ruth Stout's candid mulching 
genius. While compost guides stress that humus 
springs from all organic matter-plants, kitchen 
waste, cardboard, et cetera-Dundon mostly focuses 
on the manure component. He loves the Paul 
McCartney album Flaming Pie and never fails to 
make a reference to the fact that a lot of his 
yard-all dirt on earth, in fact-is in part made 
out of poop. I could find only one other 
accounting of compost in all its degraded glory, 
and this from an inverted perspective; one of 
repulsion at the death, disease and decay that 
makes up this nourishing part of the cycle of 
life. Walt Whitman's "This Compost" is a 
selection from his 1855 masterwork Leaves of 
Grass wherein the bearded poet shudders at the 
thought of "every continent work'd over and over 
with sour dead." He closes the selection with the 
following lines:
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with 
such endless successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and 
accepts such leavings from them at last.

Dundon expresses similar sentiments, only true to 
his style, and to the holistic tenets common to 
both alchemy and permaculture, he embraces the 
corruption as much as the sweet things that grow 
from it:
"There's three parts to life, right: The father 
is the male. Spirit, or space. The second is the 
mother. The female, the matter, the material. 
Third is 'it.' Like these chairs," he gestures to 
the lawn chairs we're sitting in again. "All 
these inanimate things are it. So the pile is 
what I call she-it. So that way they can't bleep 
it because it's a bunch of shit." He smiles.

"No shit?" he asks.
I nod and reply, "No shit."
He shakes his head. "Nope. All shit."
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