Like many desolate, oddly peaceful corners of Baltimore, it looks like the setting for a Mad Max movie, or a zombie apocalypse.

But the Quarantine Road Landfill has some extra touches:  You’ve got seagulls circling overhead, old bulldozers dotting the landscape like discarded toys and a spectacular view of Baltimore’s harbor and downtown skyline.

From there, atop one of the highest spots in the city, you can watch truck after truck creep up a steep hill, overflowing with society’s detritus.

For a certain kind of person, perhaps a Buddhist keen to meditate on impermanence, it would be a lovely wedding spot.

“This your first time?” asks a city employee in an orange jumpsuit, walking up to the driver’s side window. “You’re in for a treat!”

It’s a treat that many city residents never enjoy – it’s so far “below” downtown that it hardly seems like it’s in Baltimore at all. But you have made it. You have arrived at the city dump.

Immigrants and a Dead Whale

The dump is at 6100 Quarantine Road, just off Hawkins Point Road in Curtis Bay. It’s so named because it’s where they took immigrants for health exams when they arrived by ship in Locust Point.

In the 1800s, historians say, Baltimore’s Locust Point was second only to New York’s Ellis Island as a port of entry for immigrants coming to America.

If a traveler passed the health exam, he or she was allowed to enter the country. If they failed, the inspectors put a large X on their forehead and cast them out like so much refuse.

Now it’s a modern-day version of Baltimore’s social and geographic margins – the town dump.

It’s made the news since then for the sometimes odd items dumped there. In 1990, for instance, the carcass of a 16-ton fin whale, found floating in the Patapsco River, was dumped at the landfill to be studied by mammalogists from the National Aquarium.

Over the last year, there’s been more than a whiff of scandal wafting around the facility.

Prosecutors uncovered a long-running scheme by city employees and haulers to defraud the city of millions of dollars through bribery and free disposal of solid waste. So far, a supervisor and three ex-Department of Public Works employees have pleaded guilty to the charges.

Turned Away from Sisson

My dump day came when my friend AJ had a pile of construction debris he wanted to dispose of. I have a pickup truck and offered to help him get rid of the debris.

We filled the bed of the pickup truck and took it to the “Citizens’ Convenience Center” on Sisson Street, the refuse station closest to us. But the site attendant took one look at the lumber and chunks of plaster and turned us away.

“You can’t bring that in here,” she said. She handed us a flier with directions to the Quarantine Road landfill. “They’ll take it.”

So off we went, through South Baltimore, past Middle Branch and Cherry Hill, and down through Brooklyn and Curtis Bay.

The people at Quarantine Road turned out to be very pleasant. We drove up to a prefab office building with a side window for the clerk-cashier. She told us to drive on the scale and get weighed.

It was our first chance to look around. I didn’t know what to expect.

I had read the stories about employees taking bribes that turned a low-wage job into big bucks. I wondered if there was an employee parking lot filled with Maseratis. If so, I didn’t see it.

Up Trash Mountain, Backwards

Driving where they pointed, we headed up a hill that looks like the mountain Richard Dreyfus made with mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The road spirals up around the outside of the mountain, clockwise. Every time we went over a speed bump, we heard the contents settle in the back of the pickup.

At a fork in the road, one sign said: “Citizens.” The other said: “Haulers.” A city employee told us to head farther up the hill to the hauler’s line.

Once we got to the top, the guy in the orange jumpsuit told us to turn the truck around and get in a line of trucks that were all backing up. From then on, we continued inching to the final dumping spot, but doing it backwards.

That took some concentration, but there was a reward: we had come to the top of the man-made mountain, with panoramic views in all directions. There are no trees. You can see the Inner Harbor to the west, and the Outer Harbor to the east.

But my immediate surroundings had me worried. Would the truck get stuck in the mud?  The pickup was running low on gas, would we run out?

I decided to relax, look around and enjoy the view.

On one side of our backup line was a row of yellow earth-movers, seemingly frozen in time. On the other was the treeless tundra where the sea gulls hang out. Occasionally they would take to the air, like a scene from The Birds.

Perhaps this is the kind of scene that entranced Baltimore filmmaker John Waters, who said in Shock Value that  going to the dump with his mother was his “happiest childhood memory.”

Ditching 400 Pounds

After nearly an hour of creeping backward, we got close enough to see the dumping area. The smaller trucks have to head down a little incline and pull into one of four parking spaces where the drivers can park and empty their load.

I thought uneasily about the man killed at Quarantine earlier this month when, according to police, he was crushed between his vehicle and another vehicle.

We made it backwards down the incline safely, got out and started throwing stuff out of the back of the pickup. Everything we were throwing went on top of what everyone before us had been throwing – an old leather chair, cabinets, bags of garbage, a lone shoe here and there. It’s surprisingly cathartic.

When the truck was empty, we got back in and drove up the short incline to the top of the mountain, and then started heading down the way we came. We got one last view of the seagulls and the bulldozers.

We retraced our path back down the spiral to the weighing station. The woman in the booth gave us a ticket with the new weight.

It turns out we had dumped about 400 pounds worth of stuff. She said there was no charge. We drove off before she could change her mind.

The whole trip took about three hours. We found our way back to civilization and looked for a gas station, trying to remember what just happened.

“You’re in for a treat,” the guy in the jumpsuit had said. He was right. Like the truck, I felt quite a bit lighter, while discovering an unexpectedly beautiful way to see Baltimore.