Wanted: 1 homegrown
convertible Chrysler
One day a guy I know came home driving a 1970s Chrysler someone
sold him for $250. It was a love machine. It was a convertible
because someone cut the roof off.
Wanted: 1 homegrown
convertible Chrysler
One day a guy I know came home driving a 1970s Chrysler someone sold him for $250. It was a love machine. It was a convertible because someone cut the roof off.
It’s true. A previous owner somehow cut the roof off. It looked like a blowtorch and crowbar were used. The Chrysler was all soul, and a few working parts. Five of us and a dog drove around Aromas in it. The muffler fell off; it had been secured with bailing wire.
  We were hoping to drive the Chrysler love machine in the Aromas Day parade, but it broke down. We proposed transforming it into a planter box, or artwork, but haven’t gotten around to it. Now it sits next to a wood shed, accompanied by weeds and the skeletons of two motorcycles.
  I like seeing vehicles in yards. The older the better. San Benito County is a terrific place to spot vehicle skeletons. The farmlands and rural areas are like museums.
Yes, this is wrong. Nuisance vehicles are bad for the environment. When people abandon vehicles near roadways it is costly to have them removed. Good people don’t let their cars die in the weeds.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say these dead-car situations drive down property values. The very notion of “property values” in the current real estate situation is irrelevant. There are no values.
So it is wrong. I should not see dead cars and say “cool old Dodge under
that tree.” But in the Universe of Wrongs, it’s not a big deal. It’s not like I’m injecting
my wife with Human Growth Hormone or selling jumbo home loans or driving Britney Spears to Starbucks. It is wrong but I enjoy it anyway.
And like I said, San Benito County is chock full of interesting dead vehicles. Driving to work I see cool stuff. At the end of my road there is a field, and back in the trees are two early 1950s Chevy truck hulks. Next to one of the trucks is the skeleton of a Baja Bug. Remember those, from the 1960s and 70s? No fenders, balloon tires on the rear. Down the road, lonely on a hillside, are the remains of a 1940s Dodge.
If I cut through farmlands on the way to work there are swell hunks of Americana lying around. Tractors. Trucks. Trailers. Cars. Buses. Equipment. Piles of ancient fence. One farmer actually did make a planter out of an old tractor. In spring the rusted thing blooms.
By far the most impressive cemetery of vehicles on my way to work is a grouping that features a line of buses, trucks, sedans, and even the hulk of a Porsche. There is a cultural diversity not normally associated with American dead vehicle landscapes.
If Norman Rockwell were alive I’d ask him to paint this scene. I get all nostalgic about it.
A friend of mine works on a ranch and while visiting her one day I saw a tractor. It was parked on a bluff, overlooking a valley. It was like a John Deere gargoyle atop a big-city building.
“What’s with the dead tractor?” I asked.
“We couldn’t get it to stop until it got to the top of this pile, so we decided to leave it here until we get it fixed,” she said.
  I’m thinking it will never be fixed. I’m thinking this is how vehicle afterlife begins. You’re driving an aging hunk of metal when a key organ fails. You say to yourself “I’ll just park it here until I can get the part it needs.” Since the part has to be shipped from China, the vehicle rests in peace.
Someone is always saying that when humans exterminate life on the planet, cockroaches will remain. They are wrong. When Martians arrive to landlord the planet they will survey the landscape and say “Look, a 1975 Chrysler with the roof cut off. That’s cool. ”
