Pig Pen #13992

The Story

Here’s a very rough and thoroughly trashed Dodge pickup truck interior. It’s a 1952 model truck sitting in a summer junkyard that’s been partly picked over for parts. Half the windshield is missing and so are the door trim and handles, probably sold to someone restoring one of these old trucks. Looks like the headliner is long gone, too.

Plenty of the dashboard has been ransacked for parts, leaving open holes for the wind to blow through. There is no speedometer left, nor radio. The brake and clutch pedals remain, but this pickup truck is going nowhere at all without that missing crucial gas pedal.

And what’s that on the seat? It’s a time marker from an era a few decades before: it’s a cassette tape. Yep, it’s Memorex. Enlarging the image in Photoshop allowed me to see that, but not much else. Is it the Bay City Rollers or Humble Pie? Who knows what the junkyard spooks like to listen to?

To create this picture, I opened the creaking door of the cab and set up the camera with a wide-angle lens. Everything held steady on the tripod. Being there in the baking August heat, the smell inside was one of baking metal and the hot, old funk of slow and prolonged decay. That’s the smell of death in a junkyard interior. The very light breeze on the outside also carried the sweeter scent of the hot summer grassland.

Popping up like a surprise, the steering wheel seen through the far open window is part of another old pickup stranded alongside this one. Over time, it’s been stripped down to the frame with the cab and all sold off for parts. Only the frame remained topped by that naked steering wheel that stuck out above the mechanical skeleton. By comparison, this mostly still-together Dodge pickup truck can see how good it has it, even down here in these junkyard slums set in the grassy fields.

Location: very rural Kandiyohi County, Minnesota. Picture and story © Andrew Dierks