Some people like it: You walk up to the counter, your fingers clean and your nails intact. You describe what you need, let’s say a, “throw-out fork for a ’71, CJ-5 Jeep.” They argue with you for a few minutes about whether your vehicle exists. Then they argue with you on whether it has ever existed. Then they argue with you on whether it ever could exist.
This might sound like this: “They didn’t run a 258 straight six in ’71. They didn’t drop the 258 in until AMC bought Jeep in ’73.” Be careful not to yawn. Yawning drives the price up.
From the back a voice with no face shouts, “It was’ 74, the change-over year, and yeah they did offer it but only with the adapter kit and only as a you-install option.”
“If it’s you-install, then they didn’t offer it, did they?” says the half-gorilla/half cashier in the front. And the real beauty of it all, is that regardless of the fact that none of what they are saying is accurate, despite that the part you want is on the transmission and not the engine, and forgetting that you, the customer, did not in fact build the car, they discuss all of this in a tone like it is your fault, and obviously your fault. Good fun at the parts store, indeed.
After the verbal dressing down, you are briefly ridiculed by an entirely different idiot who if he had any actual expertise would have become an actual mechanic years ago and not the parts guy at a used parts place. Next, a vacuum canister is dispatched, or a call is placed, or a mouse is clicked, or a teenager hanging around is kicked in the groin and sent sprinting “Out Back,” a magical place next to Oz, that you can never see.
Then, an hour later, after you drop four quarters on a melted Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup from the 70s, a used-car part that might fit but likely won’t arrives at the counter and you decide if it is worth the amount they intend to gouge you. God bless America.
There is one little problem with all this. This is not a junkyard. This is a used-car-parts store, and kids need to learn there is a difference.
A junkyard is hands on. A junkyard is refilled with the mostly intact, and then purged of the mostly drained. In a junkyard you pull your own parts. Proper junkyards sprawl like a middle aged man’s beer gut, or a plump barfly in her come-hither repose, unabashed and all consuming.
And there is a higher purpose to spreading out the junk, an almost holy rite. It is not simply a pile of parts; it is an encyclopedia full of all things automotive.
Now, these days, automotive technicians learn their skill-set at re-education camps designed to drain them of creativity and will, sometimes referred to as “Automotive Technician Schools” –I believe most are located just outside Wichita with satellite campuses in sunny New Daytona Beach.
Whereas automotive technician schools make automotive technicians, junkyards do not in fact make junk. They make mechanics. This is because the junkyard is a mechanical schematic of every car ever made written in a most-user-friendly scale of 1:1. All the information ever needed is out there somewhere, maybe leeching past a rust-stain-in-the-shape-of-a-car, but it’s out there . You just have to go find it and read it, like a tracker tasting dung. If you are willing, the knowledge can be gained. This is how mechanics are made: junkyards, blood and time. Mix these three in any combination, any proportion, and sooner or later you will have a mechanic.
So the true junkyard is an endangered species (like the true mechanic). In part due to insurance providers unwilling to insure customers roaming past precarious stacks of cars and crawling under punky Chryslers, and in part due to the arrival of two forces at the modern junkyard: the computer and something called business acumen. Junk dealers realized they could maximize profit by increasing part output by controlling the demolition of their inventory by not letting just anyone out in the magical land of “Out Back,” (just next to Oz), and by creating a computer inventory.
As a result, true junkyards have gone the way of the Oldsmobile.
So what? Yet one more ancient American institution dies of those twin killers, corporate avarice and consumer indifference and the question remains, why should we here in Vermont care?
Because we have Gates, and it’s just down the road, and you can’t understand what a treasure it is without understanding the rapidity with which we are losing our nation’s junkyards.
Gates Salvage, In Hardwick, in Vermont, is the closest thing to heaven a mechanic beneath a Chevy will ever know without that Chevy actually fixing itself while paying its own bill or falling off the stands and dropping on him, quickly, mercifully, just before the Snap-on truck pulls in for the week.
Time sails up, and time sails down the mighty Lamoille River, but time at Gates sits right put, right where you left it the last time you were there. Time there is defanged and leashed on a one inch chain, obediently guarding the annals of American Petroliana.
Gates distinguishes itself from most yards through its devotion to a dying religion: Gates doesn’t crush.Okay, yes they do, quite a bit in fact. But only the junk, stuff like an 89 Honda Accord with rotting strut towers or late model BMWs with automatic parking. Just crap like that.
The good stuff is…you guessed it….Out Back, just next to Oz.
To be allowed Out Back you need a quasi-valid excuse. “I’m always looking for parts for my 1958 International Harvester Travelall,” I tell the woman guarding the kingdom on a recent Saturday.
“Who isn’t?” she quips. I like this lady. How could you not? “You ever been here?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, then git,” she said, so I got.
Gates looms. It towers above you as you enter the yard, an old farm jammed beside a river that had the good sense to drag itself just beyond the reach of the spring floods back before they were cancelled. The property seems to hold a mountain against the sky to the West and a river in its bed to the east. The part of the yard that acts as the foyer fades quickly. A Quonset hut here. An old milking parlor there. Rows of school buses usher you into the open yard ahead, the junkyard proper finally opens itself and the beauty of it all is overwhelming. This is where dreams come to languish, then die.
Now, the first junkyard was invented at some point in time between when the first gnawed bone was flung over a shoulder and when the skinny guy next to him with the bad leg realized there was still meat on the bone. In all that time there has never been anything in a junkyard as perfectly suited as what is lodged in one ancient tree at Gates Salvage. It is a 1975 Gran Torino that looks for all the world like Starsky himself rammed it into the tree. (Yes, it’s red with the white strip. Yes, it has the 351 Windsor, and yes it is actually the exact same car Starsky and Hutch drove).
There is a row of Rovers, not Land Rovers, or Range Rovers, but Rovers. Gates has Fiats, Jaguars, late 40s Hudsons, Studebakers, and Ramblers. The vintage section covers a few acres, and Gates never crushes.
The Junkyard is a sacred time capsule within the American Myth, like the mechanic, and though some folks seem hell-bent on making some preposterous distinction between “pull-your-own” and “already-pulled” junkyards, there is no distinction. The former is a junkyard and the latter is several steps along the path to a future with easy-chair/toilet/fridges and laptop/boss/banks.
To the rest of you, let’s go to Gates Salvage, last of the once great wrecking yards, where America rots in her own sweet time.
