Junk

"One man's trash is another man's treasure

is a third man's raw materials for their

planet-buster earthquake machine."

-- Seanan McGuire, Deadline

Rusted Chevrolet hood 10-5-14

"To invent, you need a good imagination

and a pile of junk."

-- Thomas A. Edison

Rusted Chevrolet hood 10-5-14

In my travels hither and thither, I see lots of interesting shit that might be classified as junk.

But to my eye, old junk is often a whole lot more interesting than shiny new, pristine perfection.

Every day I ride my bike past this house that sits alone on a road with nothing else going on but corn and soybeans growing in fields.

There is always something intriguing sitting in the driveway or the front yard of this house -- bits and pieces of dismembered cars, motorcycles, trucks.

But it's not trash.

Whoever lives at this house is a wiz at re-configuring the dismembered members into one-of-a kind hot rods and choppers.

The house is surrounded by huge containers and a couple of out-buildings covered in old rusty fuel station signs and Coke advertisements.

But it's no junkyard. The place is meticulously kept. The yard recently mowed.

This old Chevrolet car hood has been catching my eye for the last little while. So yesterday after my bike ride, I drove back out with my camera.

Not wanting to trespass or draw the attention of the two dogs I've seen rambling around the place, I stayed in the road at the end of the driveway. A few clicks later, a bearded, gruff, not-too friendly sounding guy busted out the back screen door and shouted at me "Hey! Waddaya doin'?"

Aw, shit.

It was really windy, so what I said back got lost in the breeze. I cautiously walked closer and repeated that I was just a curious photographer appreciating the look of this really cool, welded hunk of metal.

He liked that.

After I complimented the piece, I could see the gruffness and suspicion yield. I was no longer a potential intruder, or trespasser. I was a fellow artist. We were on common ground.

Me: I've been admiring this hood for a while and wanted to photograph it.

Him: Yeah?

Me: Yeah. I tried the other day but the shadows were too harsh. The lighting today is perfect. I hope you don't mind.

Him: No. No. That's fine. Take all the pictures you want. You wanna see the rest of it?

Me: Absolutely.

He pulled a tangle of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door to a garage full of carcasses in various stages of dis-assembly and completion. There were tools and parts and signs and dirty calendars with naked girls, the atmosphere suffused with that heady combination of rust and oil and dirt and sweat.

It was the kind of place those two guys on "American Pickers" would jizz themselves over.

The "rest of" the car that went with the hood out front was a low-slung vehicular sculpture-in-progress made from a melange of Chevrolet, Ford and Cadillac parts.

I say sculpture, because I've seen the guys' finished work out in the front yard. He's not just a mechanic or a hobbyist. This guy is an artist who happens to work with fins and fenders and hoods and chassis.

He talked to me about a few of the pieces he was working on, including a truck he'd recently convinced a reluctant seller to sell. He said he'd been trying to buy it since he was 12 years old, which had to be about 40 years' of persuading.

These weren't just cars, they were his soul. And I could see and hear in how he talked about them how much he loves what he does.

We were two strangers, but we were talking like old friends. Art will do that.

As he locked up, we shook hands I thanked him and introduced myself.

Me: I'm Erin, by the way.

Him: I'm Beaver.

And we weren't strangers anymore.

He was Beaver and I was me and we both knew a good thing when we saw one.

Clearing Away The Rust

"If you find the mirror of the heart dull,

the rust has not been cleared from its face."

-- Rumi

Rust, Old Woman Creek 4-19-14

"Negligence is the rust of the soul,

that corrodes through all her best resolves."

-- Owen Feltham

Rust (2), Old Woman Creek 4-19-14

"And I was standing over there,

rusting for the longest time."

-- Tin Woodsman, The Wizard of Oz

Rust (3), Old Woman Creek 4-19-14

I took my new camera out for a walk at the Old Woman Creek nature reserve yesterday.

Inside the woods, away from the wind, it felt like being inside an incubator -- warm and sheltered and gentle and protected -- teeming with new life.

Thick patches of moss were turning lush and luminous. A little spider was spinning a silky shroud to encase a winter-dried thistle. A bee worked industriously to harvest what pollen it could from the few tiny, early wildflowers pressing bravely through the humus. A pair of raccoon tracks sank deep into the mud near the creek, its shallow stream no longer locked up in ice, but flowing freely.

At every turn, it seemed, there was evidence of the old was making way for the new.

Except around the final bend of the trail.

For all the years we've been exploring Old Woman Creek, the same jumble of ancient, rusted farm implements has sat in the exact same spot, slowly and continuously disintegrating into the ground. While the rest of the woods and marsh comes alive all around it, the heap of twisted, rusting iron just decays a little further -- crumbling to bits, day after day, year after year --sharp, jagged, broken, hard, rough.

I'll resist the urge to go all deep-and-meaningful about it. You can do that on your own time. It's just that the contrast seemed particularly stark to me on this late April afternoon, when rebirth seemed to be the theme of the day.

I exited the woods with a camera full of photographs, evidence of both the old and the new, of birth and death, of what was and what might be. I liked the other photographs too, but for today, on the tender front paws of Spring, it seemed like a good thing to clear away the rust.