One of my recent story ideas has to do with my weird affinity for the junkyard. It has more to do with writing than it has to do with me being a gear head or grease monkey or…another odd pseudonym for someone who enjoys working on vehicles.
There are a million stories in the junkyard if you pay attention. You can see a small reflection of whatever the vehicle’s last owner was going through at the time of the vehicle’s demise in all the crap left behind in the backseat or the trunk or the floorboards. You can tell what kind of life the car or truck lived by what its interior looks like, whether it was a family car with happy meal boxes and broken toys left behind or a work truck with receipts from finished jobs and notes on upcoming estimates.
You can tell what kind of owner drove it by the meticulous vehicle logs tracking gas mileage and oil changes left in the glove box or the complete chaos of old junk food rappers, books, broken cassette tapes, clothes, and whatever else could possibly pile up in a backseat.
And you can see some pretty gruesome stories to be told, too. Spider web-shaped shatters in windshields right where someone’s head would hit if they weren’t wearing a seatbelt during the head-on collision that caved in the front end of the car. Cars with their roofs crushed in to the point that they are touching the seats from when the car rolled over and over and you know there was no chance someone walked away from the accident. A lot of these stories you know ended in tears and funerals. These aren’t the stories I want to see or enjoy seeing, but sometimes, they cry out to be told. I’m not so morbid that these stories are what keep me want to come back to the junkyard. They are just hard to ignore.
What does make me want to come back is the slice out of life a lot of these junked vehicles represent. What was so pressing about getting that van to the junkyard before anyone bothered to get the DP weight set out of the back? Why on earth is the back seat of that Honda filled with plastic water cooler bottles? How did that pick-up manage to end up with an almost perfectly round two foot hole punched completely through the bed? What happened to C&E Contractors that they ended up with three work trucks all in the same lot? It’s the same reason I love second-hand shops and yard sales. All these things that were once important enough to shell out some cash for, now tossed away…what happened in-between to change that thing’s importance?
These are questions I’ll start answering with what I guess might have happened. I usually leave with one story trumping the rest, stealing my attention away from the others I ran across.
This new story is a little different though. It doesn’t come from a story I ran across in a junkyard. It comes directly from my odd interest in the junkyard.
I noticed a junkyard in my town that I had never seen before. By the looks of it, it’s been around forever, but it’s tucked away in a residential neighborhood, so I just never took notice of it. It made me wonder about when it first came to the neighborhood, how up in arms the neighbors must have been. I can imagine people would put up a pretty decent fight against letting the zoning board or whoever allow the business to move in.
So in my wondering, my main character became the main adversary and eventually, the main supporter of the yard. It’s probably a safe bet that his obsession with the stories behind the cars leads to his change of heart.
