Junkyards

Posted 3/27/19

Note: This story comes from The Last Sunday Drive—Vanishing Southland, due out fall 2019.

Sunday drives carried us past junkyards. There they were, wrecks by the score open to the sun and open …

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Junkyards

Posted

Note: This story comes from The Last Sunday Drive—Vanishing Southland, due out fall 2019.
Sunday drives carried us past junkyards. There they were, wrecks by the score open to the sun and open to my little boy eyes. Wrecks that scared me, that fascinated me with all their colors and randomly parked carcasses, parked seemingly forever. Did I know any children left to grieve their parents, seemingly forever? No, but the day came when I knew a young girl who left grieving parents behind. 
Junkyards scared me because of my first contact with a wreck. When I was seven, a speeding car lost control in a curve about a mile from home killing a local girl. I rode the school bus with this dark-haired beauty. The wreck was in a friend’s driveway. Dad drove me to the scene. Shattered glass glittered and littered the road like sequins. The car had gashed open the ground and car parts lay scattered like the bones of a luckless dog. I slipped a round, black knob with one word in white set into it, “Heater,” into my pocket. Why? I still do not know. Days later, the brutality that knob participated in got to me. I threw it as hard as I could into the pines, never to be seen again. Thus, did it escape the junkyard. 
Years passed and I began to see iron bone yards of abandonment as a museum. Among the peeling paint, missing hoods and doors, cracked windshields, shattered headlights, and hubcaps, I’d spot old Fords and Chevies, chrome-shining beauties become queens ravaged by time, gravity, and sunlight. I’d spot a car with huge fins, a prehistoric shark sent to devour Volkswagon Beetles crushed at the intersection of bad luck and destiny. I spotted wrecks no mortal could live through, a junkyard’s dark side. 
You just can’t see car morgues liked you once did. Lady Bird Johnson’s Highway Beautification Act required that screens conceal junkyards. Some vanished to parts unknown, but I find strange beauty in multicolored crushed, twisted, smashed cars and trucks. Seeing the old Plymouths reminds me of Dad’s devotion to Chrysler products and King Richard. I’m sure many a classic ’57 Chevy has been cannibalized and reassembled as a restored beauty. And how many mechanics found cheap parts in the chain link kingdom where tires dry rot. A trip to a junkyard was like mining for gold.
Now rises an image of junkyards as an old folks home, vehicles heaped together in a final resting place. If each wreck could speak, it would recall favorite trips, a favorite place to park beneath a chinaberry, perhaps, and the people it ferried across Mother Earth. Perhaps it would reveal its fate... blown engine, head-on collision, obsolescence, or a cancer called rust.
James Dickey’s “parking lot of the dead” was Steve Goodman’s “graveyards of rusted automobiles” in the “The City of New Orleans.” As for me, all the collisions and carnage foretell a dark future for some. Death synchronized with their car’s demise. Others will ride off into the sunset like some scene from an old Western. Either way, all roads lead to junkyards. Just ask Janisse Ray. She knows all too well that junkyards will never empty, and she’s right.

junkyards, tom poland, down south, junkyard

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