You’d never know it to look outside, but winter is coming, or so the calendar says. There is snow in the forecast for next week. So I’ve spent some time trying to get things arranged for winter. The utility vehicle I use for work all summer needs to move into deep storage so the tractor with the snow blower can occupy that spot in the garage. It’s kind of a Rubik’s Cube exercise: trying to get six vehicles into a four-tractor shed.
In the process of moving, stacking, and moving things again, I came across a surprising accumulation of strange items picked up through the summer. Ever since I can remember, when I’ve come across an unusual rock, bottle, or scrap of iron on a walk, it’s gotten packed home. This summer was a banner year. This summer’s haul included a couple of McPolin soda-pop bottles, a funny, squatty proportioned beer bottle, and a Wink bottle. Wink was a grapefruit flavored soda that competed with Squirt. I don’t think either one is made any more, but they were pretty popular 40 years ago.
Finding old pop bottles isn’t all that unusual. They got lost in the back of the barn, or left in a shed someplace. The little metal scraps bits of broken hay mowers, mostly are also common. They usually aren’t very interesting, but I always get them out of the fields because it doesn’t take much extraneous metal to really mess up an expensive piece of machinery.
The strangest item of the summer was a hubcap off a Kaiser Henry J. Hubcaps are common roadside litter. Maybe it’s a reflection of the condition of Utah’s highways that people tend to lose them at a rate of a couple a month along the road past my house. Most of them are cheap plastic junk, like the ones on my car. But it’s unusual to find a hubcap a half mile back from the highway. With the flooding we had this spring, all kinds of odd things showed up in unexpected places.
It is a pretty cheap aluminum hubcap. The center is a deep burgundy, with a white letter “K” in the middle. I dragged it home both to get it out of the field and because it piqued my curiosity. I had no idea what it was from. I couldn’t think of any car that started with K. A couple of days later, I was at an antique machinery show in Wallsburg, and a guy was selling similar hubcaps, and he told me it was off a Kaiser. I don’t think I’ve seen an actual Kaiser on the road in my entire life. They stopped production about the time I was born, and appealed to a small and somewhat eccentric market. But for a week this summer, I’m literally tripping over Kaiser hubcaps.
The best artifact of the summer was the door off a Model A Ford. Years before we moved here, one of the ranch foremen owned a Model A. For unknown reasons, the body was removed from the chassis, and left to rot in the willows in a pasture. I have no idea what became of the frame, engine, and wheels. That may have been converted to some kind of farm vehicle. But the body from the firewall back just became part of the landscape as it rusted into the meadow. As a kid, I spent hours playing in it, pretending it was everything from a race car to a space ship, all while risking tetanus and bee stings in the rusty carcass.
While doing some fence repairs, I stumbled across it again after close to 50 years. It took me a couple of battery charges with the cordless Sawzall to cut the hinges off, but in the end I got the door cut off and hauled it home. The bottom couple of inches are completely dissolved. After a complete de-earwigging, it was declared art and hung on the wall.
It’s surprising what is lurking in the back of the barns. Just the other day, I found a little piece of your mortgage. It had been sliced up and stirred into the securitized mortgage gumbo that is making it difficult for banks to prove they are entitled to foreclose on property. After the mortgages got ground up into financial sausage, they were splattered all over the country. I’m not sure how a tranche of your securitized loan got in the back of my barn, but there it is.
If the guy missing one hubcap off his Kaiser Henry J shows up, I’ll certainly give this one back to complete his set. If Bank of America comes looking for a missing piece of a mortgage they’ve misplaced, I’m not sure.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs on Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.