Field of Junk

I took a fieldtrip at lunchtime the other day with a fellow artist to visit a metal recycling facility in Hartford. We were there to source materials to use in some upcoming 3-D projects that we each are working on. The facility is located in an old manufacturing area adjacent to the landmark Colt building, with its distinctive blue onion dome.

The workers and clients on site were of surprisingly mellow disposition. Even the junkyard dog patrolling the site, an old pit bull, scampering about with an odd gait, seemed fairly relaxed. With all his experience it was easy for him to sort out the good and the bad from all the men going about their business. His head was about a third the size of his entire body. We found the manager, with the dog, sitting on a stool next to a massive wood burning stove, itself converted and repurposed from a boiler from some bygone era. This was the place to relax a bit and warm up next to a prodigious stack of firewood, food at hand and dog bowls at foot. A quiet man, he looked at us a bit perplexed, and when we said what we were there for, he said, of course we could look around everywhere, all the while hanging on to the dog’s collar. My buddy said that the dog probably slept there at night, and somewhere there would be a small dog door where he could come and go to meet uninvited nighttime visitors.

It was quite an interesting experience to tour the snowy, muddy, icy, wet grounds, inspecting bins chock full of manufacturing waste, quantities of miscellaneous metal parts, and countless old oil-ridden automobile engines, post infarction, some broken in half, relegated to the afterlife. Inside the barn-like structure, itself a relic from a previous era, we found scores of bins full of metal junk carefully sorted with copper here, brass there, lead, and so on. We were surprised to see some small elegant pieces. With the economy in the sorry state it is in, it makes you wonder where this stuff came from, and where it is going. There was a relaxed but steady stream of buying and selling taking place. We learned that six tractor trailer loads had recently been removed, all timed relative to an advantageous market price for the metal.

Our trip was exploratory, and perhaps we will return to pick up materials in the future.