No Passing Zone #14188

The Story

In an old junkyard, here lie two old 1956 Mercury junk cars under a deep blanket of pine needles and fallen leaves. The tall Georgia pines with their huge trunks drop thousands of foot-long needles and the mixed hardwood trees follow suit with their leaves. The woods here are deep and dark. Even on a sunny day, only bits of dappled light can make it through the high, thick overhead canopy, as seen here.

This place wasn’t always wooded. This old school junkyard full of relics was started in the 1930s and was probably an old farm field to begin with. So much time has passed since these old Mercs came to rest here that the woods grew up around them…and sometimes even through some of the relic cars and trucks here.

Many cars in this old junkyard are covered in the same way. In fact, those yearly layers of pine needles and leaves have composted to moist dirt underneath and many of the roofs and hoods of these old cars are beginning to rust through. As the saying goes relating to a natural truth: you can’t stop Mother Nature.

It was interesting to see how these 1956 Mercury cars ended up sitting so close to one another going opposite directions. That easily gave the image a title, and I liked the chance to show front and back detail all at once. In a glass-less windshield, stylish white steering wheel shows above the piled leaves and a rearview mirror looks backward. If you look closely, one car was two-tone blue and black and the other was pink and black in true 1950s fashion.

Note how Ford used aluminum to make the cowling above the headlight, an area prone to rust through. Nowadays, it’s the only metal on these cars that remains truly solid even if all the paint has fallen off.

As with all places like this, there was lots of rust, bubbled paint, and pockmarked chrome all through this place in the deep woods. But as with most of the old junk cars here, I’m sure these formerly stylish 1956 Mercury cars must have been something to see brand new on the shiny showroom floor. It’s a long way from new in 1956 to a car graveyard today, here at final rest in this place of mechanical eternity in the outback.

Location: rural Bartow County, Georgia. Picture and story © Andrew Dierks