Theme Week 5

Floyd Albertsen daydreamed. He dreamed of fishing in his stream and he dreamed of the far away hunt. All this while he gently bounced his giant yellow Caterpillar loader straight down the broad main artery of his City of Junk. Plumes of dust billowed from the tires settling on every chrome and colorful painted part of the host of cars he presided over. The Albertsen parcel sat between two streams that each followed their own paths to the sea. On that part of the Washington County coast there exist many short streams that never organized into deep systems of tributaries, instead having short runs from low inland hillocks directly flowing to the bay. Beady Stream bordered one side below a sandy ridge that followed the stream for three miles. Between the ridge and the stream was low bog and on the other side other side of the ridge was broad, undulating ground covered with forest and the City of Junk. Creaky Stream flowed down past the junkyard, then through the collection of houses and trailers known to the sheriff’s department as Albertsenville, then into the bay. Floyd Albertsen always let his buddies and family fish the Beady Stream but not the Creaky Stream. No fish ran back up Creaky Stream and no clamming was allowed near the mouth of the stream. Floyd generally let it be known that the lack of wildlife there was due to all those relatives piping their poop down the brook, ignoring the putrid contribution from his junk collection further upstream.

Floyd was a pack rat but an organized one. The sandy roads drained well and he dutifully filled the potholes so he could scream around the yard on his articulated loader with the two long pipes sticking out the front like two lances carried by twin knights into battle. Right now he swung the loader around, put the twin lances trough the open windows of a 1994 Riviera and lifted it up on the top of Five-car-high pile of Buicks. Cars were piled by make and sometimes by model. The straight roads were laid out on a nearly perfect grid and in between the roads were nearly square plots dedicated to a given make and the case of really popular cars, whole blocks of one model. The squares were as long as three station wagons or four compact foreign cars lined up end to end. He usually had cars piled up four, five, even six high and stacked in rows of seven or eight across. Sometimes there was room on a block to make an end cap of cars on one or both ends. He liked to use real old cars for end caps so he could admire them as he whizzed around the streets of the City of Junk. . There were a couple of extended blocks of metal where he had been lucky enough to get a hulk of a 1962 Douglas Stratoliner, wings and all. That took up two city-of-junk blocks.

He figured he had enough 1980’s vintage Chevrolet station wagons alone to afford three years worth of chartered fishing trips and big-game hunting expeditions. As he whizzed past the Cavaliers and he thought of running over the savanna in a guided Landrover, head out the sunroof 30-oo-6 loaded in hand scanning the horizon for lions. Or maybe this year it would be helicopter ride into the high Canadian Rockies for mountain goat. He would just have to get the crushing company in here for one last big push. There was just the small matter in his mind of the town ordinance enforcement officer. But what could she really do? Only make him fix his fence or make the piles of cars a little lower so the neighbor Chester Howard could not see the cars in the winter after the leaves turned red and fell from the swamp maples. Six years ago when Floyd last crunched a lot of cars his neighbor had complained of noise and dust and finally got him to stop when he claimed to smell oil running down the ditch from the city down onto the Howard estate. Trouble was he got the state environmental cops down here with the sheriff’s department and they scared away the crushing company. None had dared to come back, until now.

Floyd heard through the recycled auto parts grapevine that there was a rough and tumble crushing outfit just this side of outlaw. They did not care one bit for the environmental enforcement, the cops or the district attorneys. Word was they had their own pack of politically connected lawyers and used them to hold environmental authorities at bay while they plundered the treasure trove of vintage cars accumulating for nearly a decade of strict supervision of car crushing operations. He knew the rebel crushers would not be around forever. They would run out of overstuffed yards and the profits would eventually be too small to justify the legal smokescreen so they would disappear into the warm and sunny places of the world with their loot. Floyd imagined all the happy and rich recycled auto parts dealer they would leave behind, the ones who were quick enough to recognize the opportunity and pounce. He stopped the loader and decided to make his daydreams into realities. His big thumb on the tiny cell phone keys dialed the crusher’s number as smiled his big silver-toothed grin.