Holly Peterson carries on her late husband’s legacy with yard waste recycling.
Back in the day, Ray Peterson’s bonfires were a sight to behold.
A few times each year, from the belly of his gravel pit on Miller Road, the flames would climb a couple stories high, feasting for two or three days at a time on fallen boughs, superfluous sticker bushes and other leafy refuse unearthed or gathered from island yards over the preceding months.
Inevitably, drivers would slow as they passed the orange-glazed horizon. Some stopped to watch. A few even made it a point to visit on bonfire days.
Then a burn ban stamped out the flames for good.
“We called up all the old-timers and told them to come down for the ceremonial last burn,” said Holly Peterson, Ray’s widow. “It was kind of sad in a way, but on the other hand, look at what it turned into.”
She gestured to a mound of mulch, visible through the dusty pane of her trailer office.
A year in the making, the mound was born of yard waste that once would have fueled her late husband’s massive bonfires. Now, instead of being tossed on the flames, it will be tossed on flower beds around the island, to temper weeds and assist the sprouting of plants and flowers.
Its transformation, like the transformation of Ray Peterson Bulldozing from a gravel pit and clearing business to a recycling facility, happened organically.
After decades of bulldozing and burning, the business is now a fixture in the island’s recycling mix. It accepts wood debris, brush, grass and branches at its Miller Road headquarters. The yard waste is then turned into organic dirt and mulch that Peterson sells back to island landscapers and gardeners.
The dump fee is $8 a yard. Mulch and dirt prices vary based on type and on whether customers require delivery.
The Peterson name has deep roots on Miller Road, where the massive iconic shovel purchased by Ray’s father, Robert, in 1945, still unfurls its solitary tusk toward the winding roadway. Attached to it is a sign bearing the company’s name.
Just up the road, at the entrance to the driveway, sits a long-retired International truck, purchased the same year.
A young Ray first began peeping over the top of its steering wheel at the age of six or seven as he learned to drive on the farm owned by his family since the 1930s, Holly said.
Robert owned the island’s first bulldozer, and used it to clear strawberry fields for neighboring farmers before the start of World War II.
The four-acres of land on the east side of the road – the family at one time owned land across the street as well – soon became the site of the Peterson’s pit-run gravel operation. The rest of the land was eventually sold. At the business’ current site, Robert and Ray mined the substance that would later cover many island roadbeds.
Though both men had long plied the island aboard heavy machinery, the operation didn’t officially become Ray Peterson Bulldozing until the early 1960s, after which Robert retired.
Ray continued using his equipment to clear lots around the island, burning debris on-site when possible and hauling the rest back to the gravel pit. When the pile reached capacity – about 100 feet in diameter, Holly said – Ray would set it ablaze.
“Everyone would be here,” she said. “They liked to watch. There wasn’t much smoke because Ray knew how to build the fire to keep the smoke down.”
Everyone was there, that is, except her, at least in the early days of the bonfires.
Like Ray, Holly grew up on the island, but the two didn’t meet until 1982 when she began doing some of his bookkeeping.
She’d had a lot of other jobs. She’d been a bookkeeper at Lumberman’s Building Center, and had worked in the deli and produce departments at Town & Country.
But she didn’t tame a back-hoe until she met Ray.
“I never would have dreamed of doing anything like this,” she said.
Still, machine by machine, she began to learn her husband’s trade.
“I’m not as good as Ray,” she said. “But he taught me how to drive the dump truck and the excavator and the back-hoe and the bulldozer.”
Then, in 2005, Ray passed away.
The facility already had ceased to be a gravel pit, Holly said, with the last load of gravel rumbling out of the driveway four years ago. But at the time of Ray’s death, it had only just begun its transformation into a recycling facility.
“Ray would be flabbergasted to see that it’s developed into something like this,” she said. “I’m just trying to make him proud.”
Much of the island’s yard waste – about 82 percent, or 2,300 tons in 2006, according to Bainbridge Disposal – is hauled off-island to North Mason Fiber in Belfair.
But Holly said there’s plenty of local business on green-conscious Bainbridge to go around. Like a lot of her island neighbors, she’s smitten with recycling, so much so that many the plants and flowers at the business were recovered from the dump pile.
Better to have them blooming in a flower-bed by the entrance, she said, than rotting in a pile out back.
Then again, it all ends up back in the ground.
“I get so much great feedback,” she said. “This is 100 percent recycling. People keep telling me how much the island needs a place like this. And that makes me feel good.”
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Mulch ado
Ray Peterson Bulldozing is located at 12112 Miller Road. The business accepts various kinds of yard waste, including wood debris, brush, grass and branches. It does not accept railroad ties, garbage, plastic, scrap metal, tires, any household hazardous waste, pallets, pressure-treated wood, creosote wood, stumps, concrete, asphalt or rocks. Call 842-4045.
