It's kind of a black hole of people's histories, your neighborhood garbage truck.

Into its gaping jaws enter scraps of meals, decrepit furniture, forgotten toys, and, every now and then, a spectrum of illegal paraphernalia that individuals need to lose quick.

Roger Saterfiel has seen, smelled and almost been killed by it all.

After nearly 40 years of organizing other people's refuse, the director of Kootenai County Solid Waste has accrued an arsenal of nose wriggling, spine tickling and yeah, heart wrenching anecdotes about garbage.

It's hardly surprising. Our garbage, after all, is the final measure of ourselves, the good sides and the nasty.

"I've been in the business a long time," Saterfiel said. "My stomach can take a lot, and so can my nerves."

And he's eager to share.

Reflecting on the department's most interesting finds over the years, Saterfiel immediately gravitates toward the negative.

Staff at the Ramsey Transfer Station, trained to keep a sharp eye for anything that could threaten a limb or help a police investigation, have found quite an array of dangerous objects, he said.

There have been grenades, World War II mortar shells, a number of firearms that had to be handed over to the police.

And not just recently, he added.

"About 15 to 20 years ago, one of my employees walked into my office with a duffel bag, set it on my desk and said 'What do you think these are?'" he recalled. "I opened it up, and they were pipe bombs. We had to get the bomb squad out of Spokane to detonate them."

There was a period about five years back when meth labs were quite the headache, he added.

Lab components and leftovers, sometimes abandoned labs themselves, ended up strewn in garbage.

Loaders lit on fire a number of times, he said, after running over a lawn bag of match books used for meth cooking.

"I'd say once a week we'd have a fire out here caused by those labs," Saterfiel estimated, adding that he's going to start up annual training again on looking for warning signs of lab materials.

Encountering hazardous chemicals is almost routine, he said.

He still mulls over his own rite of passage 25 years ago, when he jumped to hose down something smoking from the back of a garbage truck.

"The next thing I knew, I was in a vehicle headed for the hospital," he said, adding that doctors never determined what he had been exposed to. "What was really scary, when you're at the hospital and they don't know how to treat you, because they don't know what affected you. You just sit and wonder, 'Jesus, is my skin going to peel off?'"

The worst he has seen isn't common anymore, he said.

But it used to happen once a month, maybe 15 years ago, that truck drivers would see plastic bags moving in the garbage.

"People will take live kittens or puppies in bags and throw them away alive," he said. "My people will run over part of the bag and see a dead or dying animal."

But garbage isn't all bad.

There have been a lot of sentimental finds, too. If customers call up quick enough, staff is totally committed to rifling through a truck's worth of muck to find a valuable accidentally tossed away.

They have found diamond rings, wallets, iPods, cell phones, keys, purses, Christmas gifts tossed with the wrapping. An antique mantel clock with gold numbers and mother-of-pearl inlay.

"One of my most memorable things is we got a call from a lady that had accidentally thrown out some rosary beads blessed by the pope," Saterfiel said. "Luckily she called us right away. When the garbage truck came in, and we all know some garbage isn't pleasant, my folks dug through it and found those beads for her."

Back before the county took over the agency in the mid '80s, Saterfiel added, employees were even allowed to take home anything they found.

He took advantage, remodeling an entire house with materials he found.

"Screen doors, lumber, insulation, paint," Saterfiel said. "It was when I was making $5 an hour, so that was the only way I could do it."

His favorite story is perhaps the unlikeliest. A kitten that was thrown away survived the transfer trailer ride to the Fighting Creek landfill.

It was run over by a dozer, saved and forgotten by the driver, then found again three days later. Landfill employees took up a donation for a visit to the vet.

Baptized Dozer, the kitten became the landfill mascot, nailing mice and learning how to moonwalk.

"Dozer is still alive," Saterfiel said, adding that an employee eventually took him home.

The Solid Waste director's only moral to these tales, he said, is to watch what you throw away, and call up the department if something needs to be saved.

Bottomline, he said, "Just be nice to your garbage man or woman."