Roadside Bonanza
Down at the South End recycling centers we have a tradition of setting our unwanted possessions out beside the highway, no need for even a FREE placard, and by late afternoon or the next morning, whatever was offered to the motoring public will be gone, hauled away, recycled, possibly resold. Couches, TV sets, patio furniture, broken chairs, doesn’t matter, the stuff gets snapped right up.
I like to think our carbon footprint is so small, Trump’s hands would fit inside the tracks out there on the Great Camano Rift. But … it does get me to wondering, where does all this cast-off, broken down, beat up stuff go? And who is hauling it home? Free is always tempting, free is generally preferable to cheap, free is most of the time hard to resist. My neighbor who is moving lock stock and gun barrel to Arizona has been dragging everything from umbrella stands to step ladders out in front of our driveway. He asked me if I wanted to take first grab, but I said, geez, I just cleaned out my shack and the last thing I need to do is fill it back up with new crap. There’s enough Sisyphean ordeal in my life, no point driving to the dump and the Goodwill five times a week.
But someone is snatching up these goodies. I see a pickup stop, back up, pull over to the shoulder, then next thing I know he’s loading up the ladders, maybe the small table, all in a hurry as if the absence of the FREE sign means it’s maybe not. By the time he’s peeled out, along comes a sedan, up pops the trunk, in goes the little screen TV working order or not. The neighbors poke through the roadside displays, but most of it looks like what they got already or have thrown out last week.
Maybe the folks who mow the yards and maintain the lawns of the more well-heeled South Enders, maybe they’re the ones who see these roadside garage sales as an off-season Feliz Navidad. I mean, there are plenty of us South End natives who are poor down here, but we’re talking about the last two miles of a long skinny island, not a huge population of indigents, lately not even percentage wise.
It’s a mystery to me, but I decided I’m okay with that. Saves the neighbors hauling stuff to the dump and saves somebody some money grabbing free goodies. Win-win, as we like to say down here. Beats buying that junk new. Even if some of us apparently did.
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