I picked Wyatt up from the first day of seventh grade and his cleats were full of little black pellets that smelled like the back of a U-Haul. He shook one out onto the floor mat of my Subaru and Garrett — Garrett — said, “oh that’s just the new turf, don’t worry about it.” Reader, I worried about it.
Asheville Middle spent the entire summer installing what the principal’s email called “a state-of-the-art athletic surface” and what an actual invoice posted to the PTA Facebook page calls 40,000 pounds of “post-consumer recycled crumb rubber infill.” I clicked the supplier’s product page. It is shredded car tires. They took forty thousand pounds of old tires, ran them through what I can only describe as a giant pepper grinder, and spread them across the field where my twelve-year-old is doing up-downs on Thursday.
I posted in Crumb Rubber Mamas (8,400 members, very active, pinned post is a periodic table with the tire-relevant elements circled in pink) and within ninety minutes I had screenshots of a 2019 EPA letter, three separate state attorney general suits, and a PDF from a high school coach in Ohio who keeps a Geiger counter in his truck. One mom in Toledo said her son came home from August conditioning with a pellet stuck behind his eyelid for nine days. Nine. Days.
My sister-in-law Janelle, who works the front desk at a pediatric office and has therefore seen things, says the boys come in after football week with what she calls “tire chin” — a low rash from breathing whatever the rubber breathes out when it hits 140 degrees in the sun. She said in August they go through aloe like it’s a controlled substance and one kid showed up with a pellet melted into his retainer.
I emailed Coach Reddick. His reply, which I am copying word for word so you understand what we are working with here, was: “Mom — kids will be fine. Make sure he hydrates.” Hydrates. With what, Coach. With the water from the fountain that runs the entire length of the field, where 40,000 pounds of zinc-laced tire dust is currently baking under a 92-degree sun and softly aerosolizing into the bleachers?
Garrett asked me, gently, over dinner, if maybe I was “spinning out a little.” This is the same man who last month sealed our back deck with a product so industrial the can has a literal skull on it, then ate a pulled-pork sandwich directly on top of it. I do not need a tutorial on chemical exposure from someone who voluntarily marinates his own lungs every Memorial Day weekend.
So here is what we are doing. Wyatt has a pair of high-cuff merino socks that I have treated with a beeswax barrier I make in a mason jar with one drop of cedar oil. He has a clean cotton undershirt waiting for him in a Pyrex in the back of the car, and he changes in the parking lot behind the cafeteria before he is allowed in the vehicle. The cleats live in a milk crate in the garage. They do not enter my mudroom. They do not enter Marlene’s mudroom. They do not come within forty feet of the twins, who have already had a year.
I asked the PTA president if we could revisit the surface choice and she told me the bond is locked in for fifteen years. Fifteen years. Wyatt will be twenty-seven. The twins will have been running drills on this field for nearly a decade. By the time anyone replaces it, that infill will have quietly outgassed roughly a full Goodyear’s worth of zinc, lead, and 6PPD into the airways of an entire generation of Asheville kids, and someone in 2040 is going to make a very tasteful four-part podcast about it with acoustic guitar between segments.
I am not telling Wyatt he can’t play. I am telling him to come straight to the car, breathe through his nose on the sideline, drink the lemon water out of the green Yeti and NOT the blue one — the blue one is Garrett’s and it has a bright pink electrolyte powder in it that I am also going to write about — and to trust that his mother is on this. Honestly, that’s all a kid that age needs. A mother on it.
He nodded, said “okay Mom,” and slipped a single rubber pellet into the pocket of his shorts “for later.” I will be retrieving it during the wash cycle, which I am running on cold, separately, with a half-cup of distilled white vinegar and the windows open.