Waste Not, Want Not

Recycling, refreshing and re-using are very popular subjects on Saturna and are taken very seriously by some, if recent issues of the Scribbler can be trusted. You sometimes get the feeling that this is some dark religious cult or that we are headed for some cataclysmic event, if we don’t re-use those tiny bits of left-over soap or, God forbid, toss out an old sock that has seen better days. Though, come to think of it, there are very practical and beneficial uses for old socks. I will try to address that topic in a later issue.

A more light-hearted look at recycling in another time and place might be a good idea. Recycling is, of course, not new to our age today. I remember a time some 60 years ago when people had to be resourceful and find new applications for things that had outlived their original usefulness. This was part of our common survival strategy. This was long before I crossed to the enlightened shores of North America. This was when I still lived on the dark side, in post-war Germany.

The year was 1946 and refugees from the lost eastern German territories were flooding across the border between east and west. One of those refugees lived on the second floor of our house in one of our guest rooms. His name was Hans Spiess (pronounced shpees) and he came from some place in Czechoslovakia or as he called it, the Protectorate. He was a heavy smoker and he was suffering, because cigarettes were a luxury and he didn’t have any. This was also in the days before filters were the norm. His fingers were nicotine-stained and he held his cigarettes in a very peculiar way between his thumb and forefinger of his right hand, with the burning end up. To take a puff, this meant that he had to twist his hand awkwardly, palm up. It looked odd, foreign, to us. He spent his days crouched behind his second floor window, watching the proceedings in the street below, a pair of army-issue binoculars at his side, particularly when there were American soldiers about, who were known as great wastrels as well as benefactors. They would light a cigarette, take a couple of hits and toss it on the ground.

When that happened, Herr Spiess would rush downstairs and out into the street to where the treasure had been carelessly flicked. He didn’t like Americans and thought of them as slackers. He didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing that he was after their half-smoked stubs. He also didn’t want to let those butts burn uselessly down to the end on the ground. Speed was of the essence. So, to camouflage his true intentions, he had worked a short darning needle into the heel of his boot with its pointed end protruding in back. He would quick-march over to where the errant smoke lay in the dirt, surreptitiously spike it with his boot-heel needle as he walked past, bring his heel up to where he could reach it with his hands without bending over too much, palm the butt, put out the embers and return to his lair. You had to give him credit; he was pretty good at this maneuver. However, his hands were always covered with plasters, where he’d stuck himself with his cigarette-butt-retrieval-needle. In the evening, he would sit down with his stash of half-smoked cigarette butts, meticulously strip them and roll them into thin new cigarettes. Sometimes, there was enough for quite a few of his recycled hand-rolled smokes. He figured five normal sized American butts equaled one new cigarette. He never shared with anyone and guarded his stash jealously.

My older brother, also a heavy smoker, had a different method of recycling cigarettes. He persuaded me to be his gofer in his battle with Herr Spiess over supremacy in the cigarette-butt-retrieval war. Whenever anyone showed up who smoked, it was my job to hover unobtrusively nearby and retrieve their leftovers. I was very good at this task, picking up butts, emptying ashtrays and shadowing the Americans to beat Herr Spiess to the prize. Several times Herr Spiess threatened me with severe consequences, if I didn’t cease and desist. I laughed at him, because I knew he was afraid of my brother, who had told him that if he so much as laid a finger on me, he would put a large hole in him.

On rare occasions, some GI would carelessly leave a half smoked pack of Lucky Strikes or Camels laying around, giving me the opportunity to sneak in under the radar and swipe them. These were like gold to my brother, because you could trade them for whatever you needed, whether it was food or booze or gasoline or nylons. American cigarettes were the unofficial currency of Germany in the years after the end of the war and would buy you just about anything.

My brother stretched these pickings I brought him with an assorted mix of boysenberry leaves and elephant ear, also called hoof lettuce, a giant-leafed, horseshoe-shaped, hairy weed which grew in moist ditches along roadways all around our village. These leaves were carefully spread out to dry on the floor of our attic and then meticulously cut and mixed with the stripped tobacco I had collected and rolled into new cigarettes. My brother used whatever paper was handy, including newsprint, for rolling papers.

My brother could roll cigarettes with one hand. He could also light matches with one hand. Obviously, his three-year war experience had been good for something. He always carried a handful of cigarettes loose in his pocket. He never threw a cigarette away, but smoked it down to the last crumb of tobacco. His fingertips and the cup of his right hand were stained dark brown. He had the soldier’s habit of cupping his smokes in his hand to avoid giving himself away to the enemy or superiors.

He told me that this mixture of his tasted better than the cheap Russian makhorkas he had smoked during the war. And, he added, you didn’t have to hold them up vertically to keep the tobacco from falling out, as you apparently had to with the Russian smokes, because that tobacco was dry and stale, loosely packed and full of sweepings. As any real smoker knows, dried out tobacco can be a bitch and can interfere with the enjoyment of the act of smoking. You had to hold them awkwardly and if you weren’t careful, you burned your fingers.

By relating this story, I don’t want to entice anybody to pick up smoking or praise the filthy habit in any way. It is simply an example of re-use, driven by necessity, in another time entirely. But all the same, the next time you espy an abandoned cigarette butt under foot, you’ll know what to do. Waste not, want not. Nowadays, the problem, of course, is what to do with the filters. I’m working on that.

In future issues, I will endeavor to familiarize you with ways to overcome a total lack of toilet paper, how to extend the lifespan of paper towels and give you an example of how the creative use of a wool sock can dissuade trespassers from your property.