Cart nearly lays waste to recycler

Everybody dies. I’m not so vain as to think my dashing charm and great looks will earn me a pass from passing away.

I just hope that when it is my turn to kick the bucket it won’t be large and green and full of foliage.

That was nearly my fate last Tuesday when I suffered a horrifying brush – with yard waste.

The mishap left me sprawled stomach down on my front lawn trying to extricate my throbbing head from the weedy bowels of my toppled green recycling cart.

In dark times of desperation, prayer seems like the right thing to do.

“Oh, Lord,” I muttered. “Please don’t let the neighbors see this.”

Go ahead. Laugh at my humiliation. I can’t blame you.

I, too, was once an unsuspecting Spokane homeowner. It never crossed my mind that those wheeled plastic recycling bins the city uses to collect our annual 45,000 tons of clean/green refuse were actually rolling death traps.

I know better now. And I will not rest until each and every bin is equipped with front and side airbags. At the very least the municipal helmet laws should apply to anyone daring to operate one of these instruments of doom.

Granted, the bins already come with a “Do Not Move With Lid Open” warning stuck inside the lids.

But come on. You show me a man who takes warning labels seriously, and I’ll show you a salad-eating jellyfish.

Besides, it was 7 a.m. on garbage day. I didn’t have time to read. I had to get my yard cart to the curb.

The seeds of my undoing were actually planted a few days earlier. My lovely wife, Sherry, cut a few maple saplings that were crowding our driveway. She stuck the cuttings in the bin, which was already weighted down with about six acres of roots, weeds and grass.

And there the cart waited for a victim to come along.

My 3-point post-accident analysis should explain what went wrong.

Fact 1 – The lid wouldn’t close because of one long limb jutting up from the bin.

Fact 2 – With a flopping lid, a loaded bin is almost impossible to move.

Fact 3 – Fact 2 wasn’t about to stop this he-man.

I stood behind the cart. I grabbed onto the handle. I levered it backward to get all the weight on the wheels.

Then I hit it like a lineman hitting a tackling sled. That really got it moving until …

I stepped on the lip of the dangling lid.

This unleashed the laws of physics known by scientists as the 3 M’s:

Mass, Momentum – and Moron.

My face and the yard cart were suddenly careening toward each other like Rosie O’Donnell and a forkful of cake. Turning my head saved me from facial branch impalement, which was good. But it also rammed the edge of the oncoming cart behind my right ear.

Not good.

Seeing stars, I plummeted faster than Carrot Top’s career. The thud of me pancaking the ground registered 8 on the Richter scale.

They say scenes from your life pass before your eyes as you prepare to die.

All I could see was a headline in the next newspaper:

“Columnist Takes Fatal Dumpster Dive!”

I spent much of Tuesday popping pain pills and holding an ice pack to my deflated self-esteem. When I returned to work, telling the story of my close call evoked the unsympathetic reaction I should have expected from cynics who peddle doom and gloom for a living.

“He died like he lived – without dignity,” said an editor, composing my faux obituary between guffaws.

A call to the city’s garbage gatherers confirmed that I am not the first idiot to take a header into a yard waste cart.

Can anyone say “class-action lawsuit”?

At least I came to my senses in time to crawl out of the bin before the recycling truck hauled me away for composting.

I wonder … Would my corpse qualify as clean?

Or green?