One man’s junk ...
Beauty and irony mix at an area junkyard

A hay barn and car crusher, right, punctuate the skyline at the Hanstedt family's salvage yard, east of Durango, on Tuesday. Owner Lee Hanstedt said that the junkyard "crept up" over the years, with people dropping off discarded goods./Photo by Todd Newcomer.

by Jeff Mannix

"Dreams don't make noise when they die."

-Going Away Party, 1973, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.

Amid the green, rolling hayfields east of Durango, looking north toward the snow-capped San Juans, lies what, at a distance, would seem an unholy intrusion upon nature's grandiloquence. A crop of a different kind is cultivated on those inharmonious 3 acres, one that requires no water or fertilizer to flourish, one that creeps like weeds. There sits a junkyard.

Discord is apparent, and if one is rooted in semblance, this site may stir a call for civic action. But when you reflect on just what a junkyard is and what it represents - and can get past the dog to see its sculptural beauty - there's a mournful reverence and a pathetic testament in every object cluttering the ground. It's a graveyard for lives with no souls.

"It kind of crept up on us," says Lee Hanstedt, the owner of the land and the keeper of the treasure, a man with an easy smile and the bright eyes of contentment and purpose.

"We're pretty used to recycling and keeping our farm equipment and vehicles repaired and running; it just started with that," Hanstedt says with a shrug. "Then folks dropped off an old machines they didn't want, then a car, and another - salvageable things, good for parts to keep other things running."

The salvageable things mount up, Hanstedt discovered over the years. Not everyone has the recycling need or ethic, and there are just so many parts and pieces before the remains are reduced to commodity metals, which Lee and his crew compact and ship to industrial recyclers who turn them into raw material for another generation of products.

But the rusted, dismembered cars loom for the curious as tombstones for Sunday drives, high school proms, visits to grandma, holiday adventures. Once polished and admired with pride of ownership, now they're abandoned in a heap of twisted steel and broken glass, no longer loved, regarded as trash then regarded no more.

But from the carcasses, picked clean of radios, steering wheels, engines and door handles, come the memories of better days. Maybe it's the wind playing among the husks, the sun scorching the metal to unbelievably high temperatures, the settling of car piled upon car or the heaving of the earth pushing back. There seem to be almost audible music and laughter, yelps of kids and dogs, the humming of tires no longer present, honking horns long silent, lamentations of life and purpose no longer valued.

An old Corvair rests among its fellow automobiles./Photo by Todd Newcomer.

But from the carcasses, picked clean of radios, steering wheels, engines and door handles, come the memories of better days. Maybe it's the wind playing among the husks, the sun scorching the metal to unbelievably high temperatures, the settling of car piled upon car or the heaving of the earth pushing back. There seem to be almost audible music and laughter, yelps of kids and dogs, the humming of tires no longer present, honking horns long silent, lamentations of life and purpose no longer valued.

Dano is a member of the junkyard's crew. He knows the business, his calling. "When I go out into the yard to find a part, I have to either drive or ride my bicycle," Dano says with a measure of amusement, "'cause if I'm on foot, I spot so many things I want to look at or I've been looking for, that I never get to what I'm after, or I get so busy finding good stuff that I forget what I'm after in the first place."

Just then Dano spotted from the corner of his eye a key in the ignition of the truck he's leaning against, saying, "Look at that, there's a key in that ignition - I'll come take that apart."

The trucks - pickups, bobtails, flatbeds, tankers - point aimlessly, picked over ruthlessly, rusted and battered, looking forlorn with form so hideously divorced from function, they stand ready to haul the tools of trade and the feed of animals. They are a most pathetic lot. Once imbued with a strong work ethic, now ungratefully and dishonorably discharged. Unlike the cars, the trucks have lain fallow too long to take up where they left off: They're out of shape, too old to work, obviously disabled, tired and broken. Their ethic remains intact, however, as if no one has told them it's over, forever.

In the order of all this disorder, fashioned somewhat like a subdivision with avenues and side streets, one comes upon just about every imaginable product of the mining of ore. Besides the cars and trucks that make up something less than half the dead and wounded, there are unidentifiable shapes of heavy iron, wheels of great diameters, thick steel pipes, gadgets with worm gears and levers and valves and gauges, thick and snarled lengths of wire rope, transformers, pumps, bridge girders, circular staircases going to nowhere, blinded satellite dishes, giant chain drives and crushing tracks from enormous earth creepers, storage tanks of every size, disfigured guardrails. There are brand names like Casagrande on a 10-inch thick block of solid cast iron, Gardner Denver on a massive water inlet with five pulleys, Chicago Pneumatic on a stout boiler, Minneapolis-Moline, John Deere, Ruby Premium Diesel, Rex Chain Belt Co., Motomixer, Thermo Lay Hot Asphalt and Sanding, and a hand-painted sign on the side of what must once have been a truck body that says "Everything from Backhoes to Babycribs." The used-up and discarded tools of industry sit ravished but proud upon their own plot, like headstones they eulogize past achievement and fading status.

"Those big wheels came from a uranium mine over by Gallup," Dano says with the pride of a journeyman, "big, heavy, ran cable."

Where are the people who made their living from operating this equipment? Where are the memorials dedicated to the better life these inventions made possible? How many homes were heated and lighted and trussed up from the employment these machines and boilers and transformers made possible? Families were planned, kids were educated, vacations had, food was purchased, shoes were soled, even fortunes were made from the relics standing stoic and silent before the eyes that see only junk.

Down another aisle lies the bric-a-brac of life. You can easily imagine the smiles of excitement on Christmas morning for the small bicycle with the training wheels that's been crushed beneath the big tire of the yard's front loader, wheel spokes poking this way and that, handlebars turning opposite the front wheel, no seat, no use, no future. Snowmobiles, motorbikes, lawn mowers, a canoe languish on the hayfield waiting to be shredded for raw material. Tons and tons of metal objects just sit and wait, inert but poised to resume their functions, incapable but not unwilling. "Where are these things supposed to go?" asks Hanstedt, "they've got to go someplace, so some of it comes here, and we fix it or use parts of it and save it from landfills."

The junk flows in as new models are sold and new technology obviates old, as tastes change and symbols of success supplant functional but slower or more labor-intensive tools or pleasures. The cycle is ceaseless and now more than ever unbalanced by the incoming, as consumption gives no thought to where the castoffs go.

As Bob Wills sang in his 1973 song entitled "Going Away Party:" It's just a sad going away party for a dream I'm telling goodbye.

A large, unidentifiable piece of discarded machinery rusts in the open air and harsh sun at the junkyard earlier this week./Photo by Todd Newcomer