Back when I had a smelly old double garage and 2.57 acres, I never threw anything away.
I had a stack of long steel bars, for instance, great for prying lids off septic tanks or bashing weasels. There were old wooden boards, a pile of flat metal scrap, a basement full of quart jars, coffee cans full of nails and screws, oars, a chicken hook, ice tongs, broken bricks, used crankcase oil (good for preserving wooden handles on old tools), four dozen partly-filled cans of house paint, hell, I could go on forever. You want to talk automotive? I had used tires, five jacks, steel ramps, old carburetors (and nothing they would fit on), tubing, clamps–boy, did I have clamps–knobs, wiring, bulbs, almost empty cans of brake fluid… The list is almost endless, but not quite: I didn’t have an extra taillight for my ’87 Ford F-150 pickup truck.
You will remember that some lowlife stole my taillight. In olden times, I would have ventured out to my favorite junkyard, located another old Ford truck, and simply come home with the goods.
There was a wonderful junkyard outside of Chestertown, MD when I lived there. Maybe it still exists. I’d drive up to the office with wrenches sticking out of my pockets, let them know I was there, and then wander around several acres of wrecked vehicles, dead tractors, and weird industrial junk laid out in the weeds underneath tall trees. It was something like heaven, especially if they had the car I was looking for and I could get the part off. (I always owned weird cars like an old V-4 Saab or VW buses, so I had to get parts from the scrap yard.) When I had the part in hand, I’d walk back to the office and ask the head man in greasy coveralls, “Whaddaya ya want for this?” He’d look me over, rub his chin, and usually say, “Two dollars,” and that’s what made the world go ’round.
But I have no place like that to visit now. What I do have is the Internet. After filling out a form at a used parts site, I received about a dozen emails from various outfits wanting to sell me the taillight assembly. Amazingly, I discovered that one could easily buy brand new ’87 Ford F-150 Styleside taillights, and I immediately ordered one. Made in Taiwan, nice and shiny. But it didn’t have the bulb sockets, which in my case had been yanked out of my poor old truck. I tried another supplier, after receiving assurances that their product was “the complete assembly,” but it wasn’t: also made in Taiwan, but just the plastic lens and no sockets.
Finally I sent an email to the respondent who’d cited the highest price, and that for a salvaged taillight. His reply sounded promising, but I needed to hear the words myself. I left two voicemails at the junkyard in darkest Pennsylvania, and finally a “fine young man” called me back. Not only did he have a taillight, but the sockets were included, and he’d even make sure to leave six to eight inches of wiring attached, so I’d be able to splice the color-coded wires without going insane from days of trial and error.
Ahhhh. The Ford will live to fight again. And there will come a day when all of us should be so lucky as to find the thing we need so easily. It pays to make things that last. It’s good to have respect for tools and objects. I need a garage again. A barn. A few acres to store stuff.
May there always be junkyards, somewhere, if I can’t have my own. And may there always be fine young dudes to help old hippies get their stupid ancient trucks back on the road!
(Thanks, man.)
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That piece was a beauty, my friend. I dub you the Norman Rockwell of junkyards. I remember an enormous one outside Coleman, Texas – a vast acreage of crumpled metal and sun-crazed glass. My uncle, who had a used car business as a sideline to his main occupation of country surveying, liked rambling around this place and admiring the goods of a Sunday afternoon. I would tag along. Never mind the wealth under the hoods of these derelicts. It was also a rare chance to sit behind the wheels of Cadillacs and Lincolns, no matter how battle-scarred. (Now it would be more fun to sit behind the wheels of Studebakers and DeSotos.)
Too bad you can’t do that sort of thing anymore, but then that was long ago before tort lawyers roamed the earth.
Thank you. And I agree with all the automotive observations.
We all dream of the life not lived. We all remember things that will never come again. Remembering and imagining are almost as good as experiencing – maybe better. I may never again visit a junkyard in real time, and if I did it wouldn’t be anything like that long-lost one, but that’s fine with me.
You will always carry Maryland in your bones, John, since it’s part of your family history and your own personal history. You also carry bits of Texas, Long Island, Virginia and God knows what else. Some day you might leave New Mexico, and then you would carry New Mexico. You might even experience it more intensely if you were no longer actually in the middle of it. We human beings are funny in that way. We’re always looking toward the future – but the truest things are the things finished and done with. We can’t live in the future entirely, nor in the past entirely, though we need them both. The present is where we want to live, but we can’t stay for long there either on account of the dreams and memories that keep breaking in. Maybe I’ll figure this thing out some day, but likely that’ll be the day that I die.
The thing is–I know now–it’s not about the region. It really isn’t. I don’t want to go back to Maryland, I just want to be able to do what I could do there and haven’t done for the last 10 years!