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SENSUALITY IN THE SCRAP YARD

Each day is different for a truck driver and one day last week I had a load of crushed auto bodies consigned to a metals recycling yard. It was my first time to visit a place where these are processed into the stuff from which other products are made.

It was an experience, which inspired multiple emotions that I am still sorting out, and trying to synthesize.

I stopped behind another truck and began to work vigorously, removing the chains and binders from my load while the truck ahead was being unloaded. This left me free to watch the unloading process when it came my turn.

The machine that does the unloading is a variation of the clamshell, so called because it consists of a power plant and boom on a swivel base which uses cables to manipulate a bucket made of hinged halves which pinch together to pick up its load. Instead of a bucket, this thing has a giant steel fist with four formidable fingers which spread open as a star several feet across and this the operator drops on the stack and causes it to make a fist thus clamping onto a car body. Then, he hoists it and swivels around to drop it either onto a pile of like materials or onto a conveyor belt, which carries it into the maw of a mill, which "digests" it.

If there is anything in our American society that creates a haven for hype, it's the advertisement of new automobiles. They are said to be sexy. They are said to be fashion statements. They are considered status symbols and all this in addition to their more obvious claims of dependability, comfort, convenience, and safety. But by the time these former vehicles have reached the stage of their existence in which I saw them this day, their glory has departed. Whereas before, the exquisite shape of their sheet metal was central to their appeal; now they have attained a nearly uniform shape-flat. Their power trains and most other heavy metal parts had been stripped, leaving only the bodies and chassis. Their present owners couldn't care less about their successes in the marketplace, their performance records, or their previous price tags.

This inversion of values expresses itself in amusingly contradictory ways. On the way in, I stopped the truck on the scale and went into the scale house to get instructions on where to take the stuff. The operator examined the load and told me that he was going to deduct 1500 pounds for "seats." Evidently, even in their flattened state, he could see that the seats and upholstery had not been removed

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