"The Curator"
The Account and photos which follow, chronicle a 2600 mile trip from
Eugene Oregon to a desolate junkyard in the middle of nowhere arizona,
and back. The trip was an effort to assist a fellow rover enthusiast move
a portion of his collection of accumulated rover debris from a wrecking
yard in rural arizona to his home in Oregon. I agreed to help along with
a friend in exchange for certain needed compnents which I required for
a few of my ongoing projects. The planned operation was a 4 day trip in
3 diesel pickups towing 3 trailers from Oregon to Azizona loading as many
items as possible and making the return trip in one long weekend. The
trip that followed was a series of long days full of mishaps, clusterfucks
and grueling work of the dirtiest kind.
Some background on Mark is probably in order.A self described "junk
man" Mark ran a business selling land rovers and components through
the 80s and mid 90s buying and selling some 500 rovers and inumerble components
durring that period. The leftovers from that business cover some 6 acres
on his rural oregon property and several more in the arizona desert. Mark
is a fascinating study in compulsion. His obsessive collecting has allowed
him to amass an amazing quantity of interesting items. However, his employment
as a ship's engineer has left him with little time to maintain or preserve
it all. The result being that in the last dozen years it has all collected
dust, rust, moss, dents from falling branches and been made home to all
manner of insects, rodents, and small reptiles. The combination of his
enthusiasm for everything interesting or obscure and his depression era
mentality toward throwing things out, has resulted in what can only be
called hoarding. Personable, well studied, practical in the extreme Mark
remains a great person to converse with and tackle a project. Some quotes
which represent Mark most accurately are: "I can have that running
in an hour" , "This used to be in good shape", "put
that over there in the bushes", "this ran when I parked it"
, "wow, its not seized!", and "I buy my socks at swap meets"
The vehicles on which we relied can only be described as aging. Between
them there was one set of good tires which we were constantly scrutinizing
due to their diverse swellings, delaminations, cracks, cuts, and severe
cuppings. Luckily we brought 7 or 8 spares which occupied almost the entirity
of one truck bed. I think all of them were pressed in to service at one
stage or another. One truck in particular used some oil. It consumed more
than 5 gallons of oil on the trip, sometimes burning as much as 2 quarts
every hundred miles. Among our three vehicles some 750,000 miles had been
covered by their engines prior to our trip. Bowed but unbroken we had
no serious failures (unless you count brakes), only the numerous, normal
plague of small problems to which older vehicles are prone and which accounted
for some 14 hours of delays during the trip.
The trailers comprised a second set of delays unto themselves. Lets just
say the flickering lights, and "exciting tires" kept our minds
off the rotted decking, cracking welds and parts which were inexplicably
gone at each successive rest area or truck stop. One trailer in particular
was prone to producing showers of sparks as first the ramp assembly, and
then later the support for the ramp, and finaly the bracket for the support
fell onto the highway and were dragged along.
The trip by the numbers:
-5: gallons of oil used by one vehicle
-7: times we stopped for items falling off or being dragged
-2600: miles covered
-11: tons of rover parts moved
-30: a speed which was unattainable up many of the grades
-69: hours of driving over 4.5 days
-16: hours sleep
-13: hours loading land rover parts
-1: shower each from a hose at the junkyard
-14: number of hours spent working on either trucks or trailers
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