4:27 p.m. - 2001-05-10
sunland
150 days out of the year, if you stare north when you're driving through the Valley, your view of the San Gabriel Mountains is obscured by a dirty brown smog-veil. I used to think that these vapors were dispersed equally across the city, and that only when viewed across a great distance and against an appropriate backdrop did they acquire this quality of noxious opacity. But that's not the case. As anyone who's ventured into the industrial nether regions of the north Valley can attest, the air actually is thicker and dirtier and more oppressive out there in the foothills...and, come to think of it, so are the people. But anyway, this place is called Sunland, and what draws us out to it is its abundance of auto salvage yards.
I was out there Tuesday, pulling some hoses and a PCV valve for my new (well...new to me anyway) van out at U-Pick A Part and...I've always felt like there's something "holy" about Pick A Part. The little camp of weird vendors in the parking lot with the signs hand painted in Spanish, the strange array of junky metal folk art that the Pick A Part People use to advertise their lot...and once you're within the walls, shit. Rows and rows and rows (at least three football fields worth) of smashed cars on blocks. The whole yard baking in a hundred degree heat. Every square inch covered in concrete. 60 ft minarets of painted steel pipe jutting skyward, demarcating which region of the lot is devoted to which make of vehicle. And, like I said, it all feels strangely holy. On Tuesday I think I kinda got why.
Basically, a lot of people died in these cars.
And certainly others were badly injured. Scared, hurt, people may have evoked higher powers in these cars. Petitioning the most benevolent savior of their choice- "Hey! Higher power! Why are you letting me bleed to death like a dog here on the freeway?". Endless silent rows of implicit human suffering. So it's with a certain intuitive solemnity that my fellow scavengers and I go about dismantling these vehicles. Quietly dripping sweat under metric tons of hundred degree smog. Participating in our violent little ecology.
Also, in the center of the Pick-A-Part lot, surrounded by mangled autos and hot concrete, is a canopy for shade. Under that canopy they've spread some hay and erected a fence and two Brahma bulls live there. And I don't even know what to say about that.
