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and since they were buying these hulks by the ton for the metal they contained, he was not going to have his company paying for non-productive weight. Evidently it would not be cost effective for the sellers to remove those materials. I assumed that his estimate was based on experience and not just a figure he plucked from the sky. I just shrugged and he wrote it down on the scale ticket. I had the luxury of this nonchalance because my employer is only due the transportation charge and has no interest in the sale of the commodity.

Then when I was waiting for the unloading to be completed, the operator of the clamshell machine stopped and yelled out the window to me that he was going to make another deduction for full gas tanks! What had been an asset to the previous owner of these "automobiles" was now a liability to the present owner-not to mention a hazard to the truck driver. It had never occurred to me that the tanks might still contain fuel.

But of course! The end of useful life for some of these vehicles came in a blinding moment of violence-a wreck on the highway that left the vehicle a wadded waste. Some kid on a Saturday night date may have put several of his few dollars into that tank, never suspecting he might use only a pint of the fuel before the end came; possibly for him as well as for the car.

The great mill that grinds these hulks into pulp reusable for smelting makes an awful racket. It produced the inorganic equivalent of chewing, masticating, belching, and otherwise expelling flatulence.

The man who operates the unloading machine is capable at once of brute like force and an amazing finesse. As I watched, he clamped onto a car only to find as he lifted it that it had become enmeshed with the one below it but probably not securely enough to hold until it reached the pile. So he would drop it with a crash and immediately grab it again with the great iron claws. Usually this was sufficient to separate the two from their imposed embrace.

So practiced were his movements that he could boom around to the pile and release a load and as it crashed to the heap below, and the big iron fist swung pendulum-like on its tether, he would deftly tug it with the boom to guide it back to the stack for the next load. I watched until the trailer was empty except for two pistons with connecting rods attached that had fallen out of the hulks. I suppose as an encore to his demonstration of skill, he carefully dropped the steel hand within inches of the deck and slightly opened the great claws just a bit and grasped the piston and took it away to the pile and returned for the other. But he was not done showing off. He boomed around and grabbed a clump of wadded wire mesh. This he used as a broom to sweep the driveway of debris. I obediently marveled. When he was done, I had nothing to do but sweep off the deck of the trailer.

On leaving the scrap yard, I wondered if I might ever see, or perhaps even purchase one of the reincarnations of this process. Round and round it goes.

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