Yesterday I drove the 60 miles to my buddy Kenney's place. He'd told me to bring my hip waders. Being a city - well suburban - guy, I didn't have any, so I brought my old boots, some clean socks, and a towel. We were going to check out a '48 Ford wrecker and some other stuff he'd bought from "a place he knew about."
Kenney's neighbor Joe came along. We drove through back roads of rural Arkansas for a while until I was thoroughly lost. Finally we came to a chained gate. End of the road. Past the gate, bits of blacktop, mostly trees and brush. No real road going down there.
We pushed through a gap in the fence and walked down the hill. After about fifty yards I spotted several old buildings, a couple collapsed, one leaning dangerously, one block building with all the windows and doors missing. Piles of trash here and there. The buildings were full of trash. Kenney said we'd check them out later. We continued downhill, hung a left, and ran out of path. We had to clear brush as the ground turned to knee-deep muck; Joe forged ahead to watch for cottonmouths and other wildlife. I watched for quicksand. Quickmud, maybe. We're mostly slogging through water; think of one of the bayou scenes from 'Deliverance.'
A shape to the right, covered with vines. A '41 Ford panel truck, sitting in a small lake. Kenney slogged out to check it out. The main body wasn't bent, but it needed a whole front cap. He pushed on one of the sides. It was awfully thin. Swamp air.
We continued, dodging vines and creepers. There was a Hudson, and part of a Studebaker pickup, a couple of '40s Plymouths, a 35 Ford pickup, a '49?, maybe. The '49 was in bad shape, but it had the 332 inch big block flathead. Someone had swiped the generator, but it still had the carburetor. We spent some time unbolting it so it would be ready to pull. There was an 8" or so diameter tree growing between the bumper and fender; most of the cars were fixed into position like that.
Further down was the '46 wrecker. Rough, but serviceable - and it still had the big block. It was going to take some heavy duty chainsaw work to get down in there to recover it.
We took a different route out. Found a straight '55 Cadillac two door on a rise, hardly any rust. Well, maybe not that straight. The trees had encroached, and had put tree-shaped dents in the body panels over the decades. Found a '60 or so Imperial, - this was the late model stuff. A '63 Fairlane two door, wedged in between a big Olds and a Pontiac. Another lake, shallow. Out in the middle was a flathead Ford motor. Kenney was going to pass on it, citing rust and probable freeze damage. I pointed out the rods were probably still good, if nothing else. Parts is parts, and they don't make them any more... I was leaning against an old Buick, flipped up on its roof. Looked down between the A-arms and saw the motor and trans were loose, not quite touching the ground. Holy shit, a 215 aluminum V8, complete. Mine, MINE! I practically danced. Dunno what I'll do with it, but who could pass it up? When they recover the flathead they'll flip the Buick over and extract the motor and trans.
"What if it's froze up and busted?" Kenney asked.
"Then I'll polish it up like a mirror and use it as a mailbox," I said.
Back up the hill, through the first of the old buildings. Kenney tells me the story of the place, how the old guy who ran it died in 1969, and it all just sort of sat there, a big target for vandals. Maybe four good-sized buildings. Vandals had turned the shelves over, stolen anything that looked like a tool, and destroyed what was left, mostly. There were hundreds of clutch linings hanging in one building, where they'd had equipment to reline clutches. Another building had piles of brake linings. There were still barrels of grease for the chassis luber, the remains of headlight aiming equipment, what was left of a huge battery charger... we were climbing on two feet of stuff, no telling what was in there if you were to dig for it. And inventory... they must've had thousands of 1960s dollars of inventory. I found new spark plugs, bearings, rings, gasket sets, carburetor kits... Kenney will offer the owner a price for all of it, and then we'll go back to pick out the good stuff. I found box after box of main bearings, wristpin bushings... who could just *leave* this stuff there? Plants were growing inside the windowless buildings. I found a rotary dial telephone, still plugged into its 4-prong jack. Nearby was a city business license, fragile as spiderweb, taped to the wall. The writing had faded too much to make out the date, but the calendar nearby told us it was March 1969... I felt like I was inside one of those after-the-apocalypse movies. It was dead silent out in the swamp, not even birds. It probably wasn't swamp in 1969.
Right there by the door, hanging from a nail... about a dozen flathead Ford head gaskets. Ruined by 35 years of exposure to the elements. Kenney was rooting around in back, under where the roof had fallen in. He picked up a small cardboard box. It disintegrated when he tried to open it. He unwound the twist of waxed paper inside and there was a valve; strange looking, with the end of the stem bigger than the shank. "Hey, look at this. How do they get that through the guide?" he mused.
"That's a flathead Ford valve; they used a two piece guide and stuck the thing in as an assembly with a retainer clip," I replied.
"You're kidding me?"
"Nope."
"A flathead Ford valve. Brand new! Well, I'll be..." Kenney was lost in contemplation of the synchronicity of it all. I pointed at a sagging shelf with age-grimed boxes of bearings.
"Those are mostly flathead Ford main and rod bearings, too."
We poked around some more, then trudged back up the hill. Kenny kept the valve, bearing it like a talisman. Next weekend, we'll be back with the chainsaw and a front-loader, and boxes for the treasures...
[email protected]========================DoD#978======= can you help me...help me get out of this place?...slow sedation... ain't my style, ain't my pace...giving me a number...NINE, SEVEN, EIGHT ==5.0 RX7 -> Tyrannosaurus RX! == SAE '82 == Denizens of Doom M/C '92==
PS: Kenney tried to get the panel truck several times, with a chainsaw, a bulldozer, and a front-loader. There were too many trees for the chainsaw and the ground was too soft for the heavy equipment, so he gave up temporarily. In the meantime, someone else apparently figured out how to do it - when Kenney came back a fourth time with more help and a 4wd pickup, there was just an empty spot where the '46 had been.
PPS: Nov 01 2000: finally got the Buick! It was nose-to-nose with a Hudson Terraplane. We jacked it up, dragged the engine and trans out, removed the trans, strapped the engine to a two-wheeler and made it through the swamp just as the first rain began to fall.
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