Maine - Junk Cars

High on the ridge behind my house in Maine, just where our ski touring trail crosses the locals' snowmobiling circuit, are the remains of a very old pickup truck. There's not much left of the Chevy Apache. The price of scrap has been pretty good in recent years.

There remains, however, the bare suggestion of the cab, a bit of firewall and dashboard and a tatter of seat. The odometer, which stopped at 42,106, is the only real reminder of the derelict's original function.

The Chevy up on the ridge is one of the last wrecks on my land. Almost ten years ago, when I bought the thirty acres and the sad, drooping Cape, it was one of many. I had laid claim to a veritable outdoor museum of American automotive memorabilia, the existence of which I knew figured in the low price I paid for the property.

Back in the spring of 1974 the junkers didn't excite my imagination the way the Chevy Apache has on much more recent winter afternoons. In fact, I hated the sight of them. I wanted them gone. And that is why I had a problem with Charlie.

Charlie is a native and he is my neighbor. He is a medium-sized bull of a man with a thick neck, thick arms and thick, graying hair cropped short and flat. He doesn't wear down parkas or Bean boots and he doesn't say very much. Charlie is not exactly a menacing man but I would never want to trifle with him.

Charlie is also the man who sold me my piece of Maine countryside and the 29 (I counted them dolefully) junk cars and trucks that were thrown in. The bleak February afternoon Charlie first showed me around the place, he mentioned that at one time he had had more than 100 wrecks out back. The hint of pride in his voice suggested he remembered those days fondly. Inwardly, I shuddered.

I'm not sure how I knew I just couldn't tell Charlie right out that the junkers had to go. I just couldn't say, "You know, Mr. Pratt (I called him Mister for at least two years), those goddamn wrecks are a perfect symbol of what I wanted to shove out of my life when I decided to move into the country." Instead of telling Charlie man to man that the

junkers had to go, I cravenly wrote a provision to that effect in the sales agreement. The wrecks were to be removed by September, six months after the signing, or the contract was void. Charlie read the provision and signed without comment. He needed the money to finance the mobile home he was going to put in a couple of hundred yards down the road. I don't think the plans had formed in his mind yet for the auto body shop.

Slowly during the course of the summer, the wrecks began to disappear. Once or twice a week, one of Charlie's relatives would show up in a pickup truck and spend the morning cutting up a wasted Bonneville or Fairlane into marketable scrap. But the progress was slow and along towards fall I was getting impatient.

a certain kind of newcomer to Maine and are surrounded by xenophobic natives. They don't have to (and seldom do) say anything, but if general disapproval and a certain disdain can be exuded, they exude it. They tend to distrust people from away, especially if those people exhibit the strange behavior of former city dwellers or (even worse)

It appears that a lot of natives figure if you drive a small foreign car you are somehow un-American. Or if you own down jackets and boots with Vibram soles, you've got more money than you need. Or if you have a long beard and long hair, you're a pinko. Or if you jog after work, the work you did all day wasn't worth doing in the first place.

Native Charlie pretty much had me on all counts when I moved into his dld house, and he moved into his new trailer. My old Peugeot sure was foreign enough. I had an orange down ski parka and a nifty pair of boots with Vibram soles I bought from a German boot maker with a shop on Colfax Avenue in Denver. My beard was long and

scraggy and my hair was probably thirty times longer than Charlie's butch. Regularly in the evenings I'd don my pair of New Balance running shoes and shuffle on down the road past Charlie's new abode. And I was even pretty sure Charlie knew I listened to "funny"

So when September finally rolled around, it was with considerable ambivalence (call it fear if you want to) that I approached Charlie to remind him that all the wrecks hadn't been removed and the deadline was near. Charlie didn't tell me to go to hell in so many words. He just gave me a bulldog look in the eye and growled real low: “I'll

Charlie pretty much kept his word. He did get to them when he got to them. Through the fall one of Charlie's brothers or sons or nephews (but never Charlie himself) occasionally would show up with their torches and reduce another wreck. They never got them all, but I never summoned up the courage to bring up the subject again. I've still

Got the Chevy Apache up on the ridge and the green bed to a dismembered Ford and dozens of rusted gas tanks littered around in the woods. My land hasn't been returned to anything like a pristine state. But it does look much better now, at least to me. I imagine Charlie thinks it looks pretty naked.

Every spring, when I turn over the half acre of ground I claimed for a garden, I find subterranean reminders of the junkyard I took over in 1974. There is still some pretty choice stuff buried shallowly in the ground. I've got a nice little collection of radiator caps, fan belts and hub caps. The first few springs I unearthed such things, they

made me as mad as had their parent eyesores. I'd dig up a tailpipe or radiator hose, mutter something damning about the "native mentality" and heave the part into the growing heap behind a stone wall.

In recent years, however, the detritus I've collected from Charlie's junkers has bothered me less for some reason. In fact, when I dig up another part (I found a distributor cap just last month), I sometimes find myself thinking about Charlie more than the Industrial Age run amuck. Charlie and his wrecks have begun to connect. I'm beginning to find in the offal of Detroit a means through which I can understand my native neighbor a little better. He was here first, after all.

Charlie and I, it has slowly dawned on me, literally don't see the same thing when we look at a junk car or truck. I see a provoking symbol. Charlie sees a resource and a promise in part fulfilled. To Charlie, the wrecks represent mobility and hardwon freedom from the legacy of living in a hard, poor land. They are his chunk of the American dream. No better part of it ever showed up in Charlie's part of Maine.

Sure, the totaled sedans and pickups aren't worth much in themselves, but Charlie can take parts of them to make some other vehicle function again. He's able to drive and sell patched and rebuilt vehicles, and that fact alone has whisked him into a semblance of the Modern Age. He doesn't have to walk anymore or be drawn by a beast like he did when he was a kid. Charlie has surpassed his ancestors.

So what right did I, an overindulged college kid from an affluent suburb of Chicago, have to tell Charlie that his junkers were not aesthetic? For that matter, what did I know, what would I ever know, about the hard necessity of heating with wood and growing one's own food and walking winter miles to rude schools without gymnasiums or hot lunch programs?

Tearing up Charlie's house has, with time, produced some other revelations, too. When I bought it, I hated everything in it at first sight. I spent the first six months carting loads of linoleum and sundry other floor, wall and chimney coverings to the dump. Charlie and the native dwellers who preceded him successfully had covered up every

coveted wooden walls and floors and bare brick chimneys, Charlie had wanted to banish all that from sight. All that natural stuff reminded him of just one thing: earlier times, harder times, times when rough wood and raw brick were all people had to build their rude homes. When things like linoleum and enamel paint in many colors came on

the market, they looked pretty damned good to Charlie. They were colorful and easy to clean and they covered up the past. Charlie had wanted such things badly. And that took a person like me a little time to begin to understand. But I think I have begun to understand.

Charlie and I get along fairly well now. I think the episode with the junkers is almost forgotten. We'll probably never be real friends. There's too little common ground for that. But we can talk about the weather and taxes and how much wood we're burning.

I sense that, at the very least, Charlie doesn't mind me anymore. I have learned to keep my mouth shut. That was important. And over the years, Charlie's seen me build up a garden and cut my winter's wood a year ahead just like you're supposed to do it. Charlie is like a lot of natives. He doesn't give a damn what you say, but he'll watch what you do and note how long you hang in there doing it. He'll form an opinion very slowly.

A few summers ago, Charlie and his wife showed up one evening to ask if I minded very much if they cut some shrub roots so they could transplant them around their trailer. It gave me a very curious kind of pleasure to say, "Yes, please go right ahead."

That same summer, I started bringing Charlie a little produce from the garden after he changed a couple of tires for me and never charged me for the service. He liked new potatoes and beets and tried buttercrunch lettuce for the first time in his life.

Two winters ago, Charlie plowed out my driveway after the first storm. He's been plowing it regularly ever since. He never asked if I wanted him to do it and has never asked for any money. By then I knew better than to be very effusive in my thanks, so I just got into the habit of bringing him over a beer once in a while.

Last Christmas, I dropped off a half case of Old Milwaukee down at Charlie's trailer. He'd already plowed me out several times. Charlie and his wife were just sitting down to their holiday dinner of boiled lobster when I knocked at the door. Charlie asked me if I wanted to come in for a beer, but I'm pretty sure he was relieved when I said I had to get right back home. I doubt I'll ever be invited to Charlie's house for dinner. I also doubt I'll ever invite him to mine.

I never said anything when Charlie built his auto body shop replete with a mercury vapor light directly across the road from my house. It's a real eyesore and a constant source of flatulent noises. But I've learned to live with it.

For his part, Charlie never said anything when I turned in the old Peugeot for a slightly less old Volvo. Sometimes, he even waves to me when I'm grinding out the last yards of a long run in my New Balance running shoes. But then I don't run nearly as much as I did when I moved in eight years ago. I'm pretty sure Charlie has noticed