This past Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) a few intrepid residents managed to make the old burned out VW on upper Higuera “magically” disappear. After a minor hiccup involving parking a pickup truck that was getting low on fuel on an incline, the corpse was loaded onto an open trailer and brought up to the waiting dumpster. It was then promptly cut into more conveniently stackable pieces and loaded into the dumpster.
The only other hiccup was that things were so soggy it was safer to drive our excavator down the road instead of through our south pasture — which is just across from where the car had sat for some fifteen or more years. (That is the source of that rumbling some of you may have heard!)
A few people have asked why we didn’t just take the car to a metal recycler. There were two reasons for this: first and foremost, the dumpster service I contract with will just as easily recycle the metal and, more importantly, handing it over to them keeps them on our good side, so that when we have say some old tires, a manky mattress or some other hard to dispose of item that some person dumped along side our roads, we can place it in a dumpster and they will dispose of it with no questions or extra fees. The second reason is that…well…it was pretty cathartic for some to cut up something so massive that had blighted the landscape for so long.
Here are some images taken three years ago of “car” and then a recent pic showing the graffiti it had been graced with.
And here are some images from the day of the removal service.
One last bit of fun trivia: if you pull up your favorite mapping software and plugin the coordinates 37.339265, -121.764755 you an actually see the old wreck. Of course if you go for a walk along upper Higuera, you would now have no idea it was ever there.