We woke up at 5:30 to what sounded like fireworks out back. The cats who sleep at the foot of our bed had their heads pointing in the direction of the road down below us. The sun was not quite up and I couldn’t see any trees in the road in front of our property so I went back to bed. I hadn’t fallen back to sleep when I heard sirens. So I got up again and noticed a car with its headlights on stopped near our neighbor’s property. I opened the garage and got my chainsaw out and headed down the hill. I was standing under our sagging power lines when the firemen showed up. One of them had a magic wand like thing that he waved at the downed lines that were stretched across the road under this huge branch. “These are live,” he said, “get out of here. We’re calling RG&E”. So I headed up the hill and went back to sleep.
We had just sat down with some coffee when our neighbor came to the door. He thought we should grab the wood that RG&E had stacked up down there but his pick up truck was full of scrap metal pipes from the repair job we did on one of the of our drains. (We didn’t find this out until we moved in but we own our short street and so we pitch in to keep it up.) We headed off to Krieger’s, the junk yard on Portland, to recycle the scrap. But first we stopped at our big footprint neighbors where we picked up the steel tubing from their old trampoline.
Krieger’s (now renamed Metalico) was a trip. If I was half awake I would have had my camera with me. It looked like the final scene from Road Warrriors where the whole world was a junk heap. People were lined up at the scales in overloaded pickup trucks with refrigerators and bycylcles and anything metal. A guy in a bright green suit held a magnet up to the stuff in our truck and then waved us on. We stopped in the office on the way out and waited in line with the sorts of people that do this thing for a living. We watched some junkies unloading their car trunk with a microwave and all sorts of appliances. We got forty seven dollars cash for our load and we didn’t get a flat tire in there.
2 Comments