Johnny Cash wrote a song called “One Piece At A Time”, (Click if you want to hear the song) where he brought one piece of a Cadillac home from the factory each
day in his lunch box and assembled them all into a Frankenstein Cadillac based
on a number of models and years. Walking along the roadways here in the city, I
think the same thing is happening in reverse, with cars slowly falling apart
“One Piece at a Time”.
I started noticing car parts along the
sides of the road as I walked, and one day I took my camera and started taking
photos of all the bits and pieces I saw.
Some items you see are pretty obvious, such
as the assortment of hubcaps. It was the hubcaps that first got me looking at
the side of the roads. Alisha had complained of loosing
one of her hubcaps and I
found a perfectly good Toyota hubcap sitting leaning against a guardrail. I
picked it up, brought it home and sent a photo to Alisha to see if it matched
her car. She felt it might, so I actually took it all the way to Ottawa with me
only to discover that it did not fit. I’m still looking for a match for her car
. . . .
One day I found an obviously newly
deposited large bolt sitting on the sidewalk in the freshly plowed snow. It was
shiny and new, so I picked it up and put it in my pocket (Never know when you
might need a good bolt to MacGyver something). I had to give that nice find up
as I found a tractor up the street clearing the sidewalk and the operator
quickly switched the machine off to check where it belonged when I showed it to
him.
Some of the other stuff I have found has
obviously fallen of cars speeding by with their drivers oblivious to the slow
dismantling of their vehicles. Body panels, trim pieces, exhaust parts, and
even brake pads. Perhaps after years of doing my own auto maintenance I’m more
aware of the health of my cars, but I have to wonder if they even noticed the
feel of the brakes change when the whole disk brake pad fell out. As well it is
amazing how many large nuts and bolts you can see lying on the side of the
road. You would think that a large bolt was probably
holding something
important together. I have even seen the entire plastic front body section of a
car sitting beside the highway, obviously the result of an accident, and the
easiest way to get the car home was just to remove the damaged parts – haven’t
these people ever heard of Duct-Tape?
I’m still on the look-out for Alisha’s
hub-cap . . . .
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