The smell was sour and overpowering, but the sights were fascinating to my four-year-old eyes - ice-boxes without doors, tables with missing legs, splintered wooden doors in a rainbow of colors, bedsprings, radios with broken tubes. I wondered who had used these things and then thrown them away. I asked Ernie if we could take an ice-box home and repair it. He said, "This is junk. There's nothing worth fixing."

Ten years later my friends and I rode our bicycles in search of the dump. Instead we found a gray sea. A dredging machine pumped sand from the bottom of Crystal Lake spreading it over decades of refuse. The stairs were gone, the dump manager with his cane was gone, the gulls were gone and the smell was almost gone. I wondered why anyone would take away the fascinating collection of castoffs and replace it with dull, gray mud.

A year later, my parents built a home overlooking the reclaimed dump. Truckloads of black dirt concealed gray sand while carpenters raised the walls of our new home. We moved in that winter and in the spring, the dump was magically transformed into a meadow.

Today, mothers park their mini-vans where the dump manager would begin his long descent to Ernie's truck. Four-year-olds frolic on monkey bars, slides and merry-go-rounds. Children on T-ball leagues learn to swing bats. Neighbors pitch horseshoes. Young men challenge each other to one-on-one basketball games. Families have picnics sheltered from sun and rain under a pavilion. In winter, aspiring skaters do school figures and slap hockey pucks. Canadian geese fly in formation over the park making their approach to the lake. No one imagines the piles of refuse entombed below.

The squawking of gulls has given way to the whine of sirens on emergency vehicles on nearby highways and the roar of airliners climbing over Robbinsdale. The families enjoying Sanborn Park don't notice.

The sounds of the city seem far away.