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WASHINGTON, Virginia — All the usual suspects march in the annual Christmas parade in this small village: Santa and Mrs. Claus, the high school cheer squad, local dignitaries, and the horses and hounds from the Rappahannock Hunt.
But in last year's parade, some of the loudest cheers went to a man in the bed of a red pickup truck that was festooned with ... garbage. He wore Christmas pajamas and a skirt, rainbow suspenders, and a large papier-mâché top hat and was surrounded by bags of trash.
A sign on the truck announced: "Mayor of Flatwood" - as in, the Flatwood Refuse and Recycling Center. The man drawing all the cheers was Willie Shanks, the guy who runs the dump.
As the garbage float rolled by in triumph, Keir Whitson, vice chairman of the Rappahannock County Board of Supervisors, was standing on the sidelines with the county administrator, Garrey Curry. "Garrey," he said, "that's one county employee we've got to hang on to forever."
Six years ago, Shanks, a former construction worker, took the decidedly low-prestige job of dump manager: the guy who runs the trash compactor and tells people where to toss their scrap metal. His full-time salary is just $38,000 a year - about half the U.S. average.
But now he is arguably the biggest celebrity in the county, and the most universally adored. At a time when less than a third of American workers feel engaged in their jobs, Shanks has found a way to make the menial meaningful, while turning a smelly chore into a social activity for hundreds of people. In this rural county, where there's no public trash pickup, he has transformed the dump into a community hub where people come to hang out and chat, even when they don't have any trash to drop off.
"We should all have a little Willie Shanks in us," Stanford University organizational psychologist Robert Sutton told me after hearing the tale of the dump.
Shanks has printed, at his own expense, 1,500 T-shirts and hats with the Flatwood name, and he hands out this dump swag to residents, whom he calls his "constituents." He bought an old U-Haul truck and had it painted with pastoral scenes and dump-pride messages: "Let's keep Rappahannock beautiful," and "Flatwood Mall: Where Trash Meets Treasure."
Under the stage name Moe-Moe James, he also produces a video series, "The Flatwood Chronicles," exhibiting trophies he finds at the dump, a.k.a. "Willie's Mall," and encouraging people to come and get 'em. In the videos, he pops out of a trash bin or a dumpster or, in one case, a discarded tanning pod. "Hey, that thing really works," a shirtless Shanks, who is Black, proclaims in the clip.
In others, he gallops with an inflatable pink unicorn that sprays water out of its horn ("We have water games! … Come out and ride!"), shows off a walker with all-terrain tires ("who knew you could go off-roading, geriatric style?") and jumps on a pogo stick ("welcome to another episode of 'Watch out, Willie, before you give yourself a vasectomy'").
He specializes in the edgy, posting videos of a pink purse full of condoms ("too bad these suckers expired in 2019 - somebody hasn't been doing something in a while") and a sex swing ("brought in by an 80-year-old lady who swears it was never used. ... Look at that leopard skin. Ooh!") and one in which he pretends to use a discarded outhouse.
Shanks, who says he has gained 50 pounds on the job because of the "overabundance of cookies" and other delicacies his constituents bring him, sings the Ozempic jingle in one video while posing behind a life-size skeleton cutout somebody dumped. Finding a discarded OB/GYN chair, he puts his feet in the stirrups and clutches his bare belly: "I've been trying to get rid of this growth for way too long."
I spent a recent Sunday shift at the dump with Shanks and watched the mayor of Flatwood greet his constituents, either by name (having lived here for 45 of his 49 years, he knows most people in this county of just 7,400) or with a generic "What's up, wild man?" or "What's goin' on, chief?" or "Hello, darlin'."
He sits on a wooden stool, outside a shed that houses a toilet and refrigerator, next to a table he decorated with bottle caps. To get to the compactors and the recycling bins, everybody must drive past Shanks, where they roll down their windows and prepare to banter - particularly if they share his off-color sensibilities.
Lawyer David Konick pulled in. He frequently feuds with the county government, but he loves Shanks. He opened with a fat joke, asking when Shanks was expecting to give birth.
"As soon as you admit that you're the father," Shanks instantly replied.
At another point, a teenager pulled up in a pickup. "So when are you going to start paying my mom her child support?" asked the kid.
"Ow! I left my checkbook at home," Shanks rejoined, in the latest recitation of their long-running gag.
It invariably ended with laughter all around - the daily soundtrack of the dump. "Some days I can't believe this is an actual job," Shanks told me. "I wake up in the morning, the wife's like, 'Oh, I'm so sorry you got to go to work.' I'm like, 'What are you sorry for? For the next 12 hours, I'm going to be laughing. I'm going to be enjoying myself.'"
He loves his job in part because he sees the joy he spreads. "Nothing - nothing - tugs at the heartstrings more than a smile coming from someone's face who you've just helped," he said.
Right on cue, a first-timer pulled into the dump in a brand-new Volvo.
"How we doin' today, chief?"
"Doing well," the newcomer replied. "How are you?"
"Fine as wine," Shanks said.
The man smiled.
"That right there - you see it?" Shanks said of the man's smile. "Nothing else matters after that."
He also takes pride in his self-assigned mission of protector of the county's beauty. "This is home," he said. "If I have the friendly face and the friendly attitude and people don't mind coming here to dump their trash, that's less trash that they're going to be likely to throw out of their window."
And he is well-compensated - not in dollars but in devotion. He gets mobbed by admirers wherever he goes, and sometimes gets visits from people who don't even live here but saw his videos. It gives him, he said, "a sense of accomplishment."
"It's amazing how he's taken that job and really turned it into a way to connect with people and make people feel good," marveled Whitson. "It brings so much joy to so many people for a task that most people dread doing." Whitson, who does his election-season politicking at the dump, knows he wouldn't stand a chance if Shanks opposed him: "Fortunately, he resides in a different voting district."
People who feel that their work is meaningful tend to have higher overall levels of well-being, and Michael Steger, a Colorado State University psychologist who developed a "Work and Meaning Inventory," told me that Shanks appears to be driven by what's called the greater-good motivation. The feeling that "I'm doing something at work that makes the world a better place really does seem to be a huge part of what pushes work into the meaningful zone," Steger said.
Shanks's work also lifts the rest of the community, because he has turned the dump into a "third space" - much like a church, park or coffee shop - where people gather to socialize and, in this case, to laugh. Such places have been disappearing in the virtual age, making us feel isolated. But Shanks re-creates that neighborly contact. "It says maybe we're not actually so damaged from this time we're living in," Steger said.
Shanks has considerable autonomy in his job. It's not typically recommended, for example, that you post a video on social media in which you impersonate your boss while wearing pineapple sunglasses and holding a bottle of vodka - as Shanks did to Curry, the county administrator.
But even if you work for, say, the federal government, or the many other employers who treat their workers with indifference or abuse, "in almost any job, there's opportunities to expand the role and to make it more interesting and to increase your prestige," Stanford's Sutton argued. "Many of us do have more agency than we think. ... We do things mindlessly and don't think of opportunities."
Officially, Shanks's job has him turning the key to run the compactor every 15 minutes or so. Unofficially, he gives out eggs and apples and does public service videos for local businesses, for the Parent Teacher Organization and for special events such as "community shred day." ("Bring me the alimony checks you don't want nobody to know about.")
He also dispenses relationship advice and takes confessions. On the day I spent at the dump, one man confided that he planned to break up with his girlfriend. After chatting with another man, Shanks told me: "Hit a guy with a flashlight; killed him dead as a doornail." And after another resident delivered a long and indecipherable story, Shanks lamented: "If he would just stop drinking. He used to be a supervisor."
He sees the full cross-section of the county: weekenders in their BMWs and Rivians with D.C. plates, farmers in their F-250s and F-350s with "Don't Tread on Me" plates, some with Trump and "Guns Save Lives" bumper stickers, others with Harris-Walz stickers, and the occasional laborers speaking Spanish.
He greeted a man driving a Mercedes as "you old junkyard dog" - then identified him as Jim Miller, a former Reagan White House official who sometimes browses the dump's Free Share Shed, packed with secondhand clothes and furniture.
This "free shack," as it's informally called, was crowded all day when I was there, a manifestation of the poverty often hidden from view in rural places. Outside the shed, Shanks was trying to find new homes for larger cast-off items. "Hey, Molly, see that buffet?" he called out to one older woman. He matched one man with some batteries, another with a discarded ladder and a third with a dusty vacuum ("It works!").
The most unusual items that appear at the dump get mentioned in "The Flatwood Chronicles": squirrel underpants, a cow that wandered in and a chicken with a broken leg. When somebody dumped a mannequin, Shanks did a tango with it: "It's never too late for dancing lessons," he says in the video. "Come see me!"
In my time at the dump, Shanks talked football, family, church, fishing, real estate and weather. But when a stonemason with a large knife on his belt started to rant about Joe Biden, Shanks went silent. "It's just way too dicey out here to get into politics," he said, "to put myself on one side or another. I like the camaraderie I keep with everyone."
I witnessed a couple of altercations. An excavator backed his truck into a car, and another guy claimed that somebody shouldn't dump trash here because his truck was from the D.C. area. Shanks tried to defuse both. His philosophy: "Don't make life any harder than it has to be. This is trash."
He displayed somebody's discarded shoe and leg brace on the table in front of him, and called out greetings to a schoolteacher, a landscaper, a commercial pilot, an engineer, a mandolin player, a guy from the brewery. Somebody slipped him a quart of eggnog. One guy jokingly tossed him a quarter as a tip. A horse breeder pulled up and showed him a 5-month-old miniature horse.
Shanks leaped up to help an elderly couple who came in with a heavy load. Then a veterinarian pulled in with a truck full of trash. Shanks knew the vet had a knee injury, so he got up to help the man's wife unload, laughing and chatting as he hauled heavy oil drums full of waste.
A retired government worker watched the scene from his truck. "There's a guy who loves his job," he said.
"Wholeheartedly," Shanks agreed when he returned to his stool. County officials, he said, "had no idea that I was going to take this place and make it into such a hub, into a social-butterfly place that people want to come to. This is where it happens. This is where it goes down. If it didn't happen in Flatwood, it didn't happen."
Dana Milbank writes a column about reclaiming our humanity and restoring our connections at a time when politics and technology are alienating us from each other.
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Previously:
• How an app for ID-ing nature around you can help find friends and love
• A 6-year research project found a surprisingly simple route to happiness