Have You Seen My Keys?

It's taken me an extra day to post this week due to some unforeseen circumstances, mainly involving the job I worked yesterday with Ron Pitts, NFL commentator and former Buffalo Bill and Green Bay Packer. I'm told that these are sports teams of some variety, though I am unaware of their significance because I find sports about as riveting as watching the paint dry on an accountant's house. You wanna talk sports, J.J. is your guy.

Ron hosts a show for the Discovery Channel called Destroyed in Seconds. He walks through a junk yard saying things like "the residents of Trenton, New Jersey were enjoying a beautiful summer day, when all of a sudden their lives were changed forever as things were DESTROYED IN SECONDS." Then they cut to a clip of a cruise ship engulfed in fire, falling from the sky and landing on top of an elementary school. I personally feel the show should deal with WHY the cruise ship wasn't firmly attached to the whatever it fell from, HOW it caught fire, and WHO really cares about anything involving New Jersey?

I digress. We spent four hours in a junk yard just north of Burbank, a fantastic place for any fan of true destruction. As Ron described the horror of a tank filled with 35 million gallons of fuel exploding, the crew became distracted as a crushing machine on the other side of the yard obliterated a 40-foot Winnebago in all of about eight seconds. Next to the machine, a tractor with giant prongs attached itself to the engine of a school bus. Ever so gently, the operator hit the "annihilate" button and proceeded to rip the engine out so fast it actually lifted the school bus off of the ground. Bolts, wires and shards of metal careened through the air like shrapnel. The bus windows shattered as it crashed back to the ground. If you listened closely enough, you could hear the faint screams of school children. God bless America.

I must say I've never spent any decent amount of time in a wrecking yard, but I plan to make it a regular visit. Piles of radiators litter one corner of the property. Detached cabs from trucks of all shapes and sizes lie on the ground in another corner, apparently thrown there in such a fashion that it's easy to imagine God using them to build a fort only to get bored halfway through and running off to use his Legos or play Dance Dance Revolution or create an alternate universe just to mess with the weirdos at NASA.

I imagine every car, truck and random vehicle on the lot has a story to tell. Who knows where the Winnebago had been, or what memories it was a part of? Who can imagine what lifelong friendships were formed over the course of a year's worth of rides on that school bus? One can only imagine how many drug deals were completed in the back of that mini van, or how many oranges were sold from the trunk of that Nissan confiscated by the INS and discarded in this place due to its lack of apparent "value."

Of course those are the good times, the favored memories, the cars and trucks that simply got too old and were taken to this metal grave yard, possibly having been bid a fond farewell by their tearful owners as they were towed down the street and out of sight. Wandering through the yard between setups yesterday, I was also greeted with plenty of stories of certain death and dismemberment. The Civic missing a roof and compressed into the size of a Rubix Cube, the Caravan that had been severed cleanly in half, the F-15O that was so charred in looked like it had been recovered at the bottom of Mount St. Helens. It was an uplifting experience.

Quite a fitting place for a show about destruction. If it's totaled, that's where it goes. If it's still in perfect working order and simply hasn't met a suitable owner, they'll go right on ahead and total it for you. Years of planning, design and testing. Countless hours of labor and building. Decades of memories. Destroyed in seconds.