One Of Those Days #14586

The Story

I’m sure you’ve had one. One of those days when nothing works out right until your karma feels smashed to pieces. It’s enough to simply be relieved it’s over at the end of the day. Even worse, one of those days when everything crashes to the ground. Kaput, just as seen here. This picture is a good visual example of such things.

With no hope of recovery, here lies an airplane engine with broken props in a wooded junkyard. Better that it died here and not up in the stratosphere somewhere. It’s a radial engine with its days of work done, just like the other airplane parts and junk cars in this yard. I think that’s an old Packard car sitting back there as a junk-mate, among others.

Permanently gelded, this propeller has lost its blades. One was apparently sawed off; another was seemingly torched off. The stub end of the third blade couldn’t be seen.

An airplane engine is a complex piece of equipment and I was fascinated to see one laid open like this, especially right on the leafy ground. Looking it over, I could make a little sense of it with fuel lines and exhaust, cylinder heads and manifold. There’s a lot that goes into one of these, much of it I’ll never understand without the book. Hmm…just like a modern camera manual.

A junkyard is a place of stalled or frozen karma if you think about it. Being where all the stories have ended, they are where fortune and fate have dead-ended and stopped. Everything else in this world has gone past the things left behind in a junkyard. That is, except for a photographer who has backtracked to make artwork out of those old mechanical bones.

If you’re curious, having a look around nearby in this junkyard neighborhood -slash- airplane graveyard would land you at Planely Unusual #14945 and Amelia’s Pit Stop #14948. Or, take the grand tour of the unusual sights of this place and visit the entire Airplane Graveyard gallery.

Try this picture as a digital jigsaw puzzle!

Location: near Atco, Camden County, New Jersey. Picture and story © Andrew Dierks