Lounging against his truck, a sinister looking tow truck driver with a shaved head stares at Mike Barnes.
“Alright, Brother,” says Barnes.
“I’m not your brother,” says the tow truck driver.
Barnes shrugs.
Outdoors, under a distant and warmth-less November sun, Barnes and I walk over the spider-webbed asphalt, worn down to mud in places, and read the rows of destroyed vehicles like pages in a catalog.
Sun-swept steel and fiberglass, detached fenders jammed inside seatless passenger vans. Melted and warped radiator fans in the grass now frozen into plastic sculpture. A windshield that looks like it’s been crushed by a cannonball. Serpentine belts twisted in pools of water.
As we pass, grasshoppers leap up and fly, startled out from the weeds underneath the wrecks.
“I wonder if insect legs feel cold,” Mike Barnes murmurs out loud. “through their exoskeleton.”
There’s a wind high up in a locust tree that rattles the dry, brown flower pods but it’s as quiet as a church otherwise. The crunching of gravel under our shoes only intensifies the silence.
It’s Barnes’ fault we’re out here at all, come across the Hudson River into Dutchess County to Matt’s Auto Parts, a 14-acre open air automobile salvage yard set back inland in Hyde Park. Barnes is looking to replace a length of exhaust attaching to the muffler on a Jeep Cherokee built at the end of the last century. The weld where the muffler joined to the resonator pipe had rusted so badly that the muffler broke away. Now when Barnes drives there’s that loud, low, noise that makes it hard to think or listen to music or do anything else but listen to that sound.
Rather than pay top dollar for an original equipment manufacturer replacement (OEM), Barnes figures he can climb down under one of these wrecks with a battery powered reciprocating saw and solve his problem for less than 50 dollars.
Like a still-life traffic jam of idling cars destroyed while they were heading to the sea, there’s about 800 vehicles here, in rows upon rows in just this one vast tree surrounded lot.
Abandoned, wrecked, malfunctioned or just sold-off junkers, all manner of makes and models, each have been lifted up like badly injured insects, carried along on the forklift blades of a bright yellow wheel loader and then deposited together with kin – trucks with trucks, jeeps with jeeps, to wait for the scavengers.
Barnes finds what he’s looking for. A ‘97 Cherokee hobbled on its front wheels missing an engine hood. The open mouth of the transmission bell housing is just visible. Where the inline-six should be, dead crowded sprays of fleabane grow up out of the empty engine compartment instead. Barnes grips his saw now in both hands and he wriggles half way into position between the hardened mud and the undercarriage. Just south of the catalytic converter, he depresses the trigger and a short, metal-cutting blade jigsaws back and forth. From the cut Barnes makes in the exhaust pipe, sparks bounce down and around like crazy fire crickets in the dirt.
Garages and mechanic’s bays, wheel loaders coming and going, the main office behind the tall brown fences of the compound, this is the nerve center of this sprawling 14-acre multi lot expanse, the auto parts supply née salvage née scrapyard kingdom. The present owner, Matt Ticcony bought it from Chuck Molt eight years ago. He recalls the Molt name with reverence.
“His family started the business,” says Ticcony, “and then he ran it for a lot of years. And then he, you know, wanted to retire. He sold it to my wife and I.”
The business model is this. Vehicles that for one reason or another that have reached the end of their useful lives out in the polite world of the consumer driver and his or her paid mechanic – anything from a persistent and disqualifying check engine light to a harrowing, adrenaline soaked, high speed accident – the vehicles end up here for a second life.
“We sell almost anything,,” Ticcony says, “from seat belts to seats, gauges, radios, rims, tires. headlights, taillights bumpers. Anything. The body parts are also very good. You have less chance of a failure.”
Ominous words those. For those cars, where tons of metal have met tons of metal suddenly and each multiplied their forces by collision, the result here is the definition of haunted scrap metal.
“A lot of times we don’t fool around with stuff like that, you know, just get rid of them. Yeah, you might move them along quicker.”
Crush them up into bales of scrap and sell them. Pray they are melted down and reborn with their history erased.
Two guys are digging around in the engine compartment of a shortbus. A snatch of conversation overheard, while one relates an experience:
“That guy called me sketchy, why am I sketchy? Cause I don’t wear a suit?”
For Barnes it was the combination of 4-wheel drive with a manual transmission and a lifted suspension, standard among off-roading enthusiasts, which initially attracted him to the dream of vehicle ownership when he was 15. Fate however brought him a Chrysler Town & Country station wagon. It was his escape from the small Kentucky town in which he grew up.
“It had the wood panels which were cool but really I was just moving it from one friend’s garage to the another,” says Barnes. “It was broken down for months at a time. But when it worked, I’d be off.”
East to Richmond. North-west to Chicago, Barnes thought nothing of putting hundreds of miles on the odometer. Sometimes thousands.
“Driving for me is freedom,” says Barnes. “Plain and simple.”
Perhaps because of the station wagon, Barnes notices the plurality of Subaru’s he sees throughout Ulster County. Forresters. Crosstreks. Outbacks.
“Subaru should be the county bird,” he jokes, then says seriously: “Four independent wheel shafts is what they have that can spin at different torques simultaneously, so they distribute the force to grip the road more creatively, which is a bonus in snow and rain. Only thing is they all eventually rust through their rocker panels and wheel wells. And they’re all 4-cylinders, which is candy store.” He means it’s for children.
Ticcony the salvage yard owner acknowledges that he too has owned a number of Subarus over the years.
“Most of the time they go wherever you gotta go,” he says, “until the snow comes up over the hood.”
But Ticcony says that druthers or not, he prefers Dodge Darts and Plymouth Barracudas, from the 60’s and 70’s.
“Muscle car stuff,” he says. “Yes sir.”
Presently there are 166,800 auto workers in the automobile assembly plants of Michigan. 108,200 in Indiana. 86,000 in Ohio. The livelihoods of the workers and their assembly lines don’t interest Barnes any more than the states they live in. At the mention of Detroit, he does show a momentary spark of enthusiasm, but then it’s gone, misfired like a fouled spark plug.
For Mike Barnes’s purposes, mass production of automobiles might as well have halted in 2001, the last year his preferred model vehicle was made.
“Some Kraut from Mercedes Benz ended its production,” says Barnes. “Called it bland. Obviously he lacked vision.”
Of the 1.1 billion cars estimated to be in the world presently, Barnes has narrowed it down to what remains out of a pool of only 1.2 million to choose from, which is the total number of Jeep Cherokees assembled over a 6-year window, from 1996 and to 2001. Barnes has specialized in these years because he feels relatively safe that the other models before and after his own are close enough in design that he can swap out parts that will match.
But the truth is that Barnes can’t afford what the car companies are putting out even if he wanted to. And he says he doesn’t want to. His aversion to mechanical progress over the last two decades is almost superstitious in its intensity. Engines with too many computer chips dissuade him. To many sensors with wires dangling. He fears he will no longer be able to work on his own car.
Whether his fears are justified or not hardly matters. For now, with even the prices of used cars out of reach, Barnes is stuck with what he’s got.
After the pandemic, the price tags rocketed away like top fuel dragsters over the salt flats, and anyone without earning power or a credit card was left behind coughing sand.
Pertinent side note – the stock of not just Barnes’ idealized Jeep, but the stock of every other model of vehicle in America out on the road up to 2008 could have remained much increased, had not a government program bent on stimulating a lagging national economy poached an estimated 700,000 vehicles from the road.
The Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), aka Cash for Clunkers, came online in June of 2009 and lasted just two months, dangling up to $4,500 for American drivers if only they would surrender their older car and spend the seed money on newer, more fuel-efficient models.
It’s no joke that cars built this century are more fuel-efficient but it was a joke that concerns for miles-per-gallon had anything to do with the cash offer.
A year previous, in 2008, a recession had kicked off, caused by the implosion of the housing market. Two of the Detroit “Big Three” automakers, General Motors and Chrysler, had broadcasted their impending bankruptcy. President at the time George W. announced a $17.4 billion bailout to save their operations. The third big three automaker, Ford, said they weren’t in danger of bankruptcy but they took the money anyway.
After that bailout, CARS was the Obama-presidency policy to buttress up America’s auto sector. When it was over, nearly $3 billion had been handed out. A bribe and switch if you will, over a decade ago, which still figures into the present scarcity of used automobiles on the road and the resultant prices boxing in consumers like Barnes.
For his part Barnes is sanguine about the dimensions of his box. Even if he can’t find them original, he says there’ll still be plenty of cheap aftermarket sway bars and end links, control arms and tie rod ends. What he calls “cheap Chinese trash” will do the trick in a pinch.
(Opinions among local Kingston mechanics queried for this article are unified that Chinese-made aftermarket car parts are scorned because of the composition of the metals found in the overseas product as well as the basement-level wages that are paid to Chinese workers. This allows the American-made market, which boasts higher quality composition and higher pay for workers, to be undercut by a flood of cheaper products.)
Wheels for grinding, wheels for cutting, wrenches that ratchet with the help of compressed air or the added leverage afforded from a cheater bar, Barnes is proud of his manual dexterity and enjoys the greasy fruits of his labor. He washes his hands with a mechanic’s soap made from volcanic pumice.
Responding to the idea that driving gasoline-powered vehicles contributes to global warming, Barnes just laughs.
“Come to me when the trucking companies switch to electric,” says Barnes. “And the container ships in the ocean. Come to me when the airlines stop using jet fuel. Total up all the miles they drive and fly every day, compare it to what I drive in ten years, then ask me that question again with a straight face.”
Barnes adds, “Anyone who orders something off of Amazon, just think about their carbon footprint.”
Everything that has already happened already predicts the end, says the amateur mechanic, and there’s nothing driving a few miles less will do about it. Barnes says for any meaningful change it’s got to be dealt with on an industrial-sized scale.
Barnes’ deterministic philosophy comes into focus when he shares that like Ulster County billionaire Peter Buffet, he also awaits the collapse of capitalism. Computers will die, posits Barnes. The satellites will go deaf. Lights of the modern age will go blind. Too many people, not enough resources, sooner or later the balance will tip. And when the moment comes the value of understanding how something works again becomes valuable in itself, overnight. Specialized mechanical knowledge is the ticket.
“But maybe I just wish the dominos would fall,” concedes Barnes. “I was raised right out of the book of Revelations. You know, born again-Christians. Wormwood and a third of the oceans turnt to blood. ‘The end is nigh’ and ‘let’s get it on’ and all that.”
Barnes has cut his length of exhaust pipe down and we walk to the office to pay the man.
Pick a strut up off a patch of grass, white miniature moths scatter up flying clouds. Amongst the springs and coil overs the scrap yard might be a good place to sleep in the summer. Build a hammock out of crisscrossed serpentine belts up in a hidden patch of woods behind a stand of trees up the hill where it’s cool in the shade. But not now. The clouds look like snow.
We pass a man tanned a nut brown, sporting a black mustache and faded blue ball cap. He’s got the hood of a Mercedes up. He gives his name as Victor. Victor says he’s looking here for a distributor cap and ignition cables.
Victor’s donor model E 320 Mercedes isn’t a diesel engine, which would ignite the fuel through compression – that is, intense pressure combined with a warming of the fuel chamber through the use of glow plugs.
Gasoline has a lower flash point, so in a gasoline engine, a spark is all that’s required to begin combustion. Victor’s engine is a V6 with dual spark plugs – that is, his engine has two ignition cables wherever one could do.
“I don’t know why there are two for each one,” he admits. “Maybe it makes sure the fuel burns? German efficiency?”
See in the mind’s eye the sunny day where future beings wander through the graveyards of cyborgs digging up the dead with shovels, hunting for good knees, elbows and strong jaw bones – reciprocating saws and pliers held at the ready.
“There’s an interesting angle to the scrap yard because you know, everyone talks about recycling,” says Barnes. “Again, people coming in to get parts from things that have already been created.”
Scavengers and scavenging is of course the old-world word for recycling. Rejecting the concept of planned obsolescence outright as criminal negligence and those who embrace disposability as touched. Buy secondhand, third-hand and fifth-hand. Picking through the rubble to find the part that will fit. This is responsible stewardship in existence – valuing the crumbs as if they were seeds to plant and grow into something new.
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