Jeremiah Junkyard

... an off-white wood house all dilapidated and sagging with age and sorrow, yellowish water stains on the siding, surrounded by dead aspen trees and a field bejeweled with scrap metal, old trucks, car parts, railroad ties, washing machines, farm equipment, gutted boxcars, and there he is, the junkyard man himself -- exactly like i would picture a guy living in a plot of land like this -- big sloppy belly covered in a grimy green sweatshirt, thick Jeremiah Johnson beard and Davy Jones wool cap -- walking around his junk heap with a small cigar in his fat jowls, piling junk in certain stacks -- there's an order to it! All this time I thought these junkyard hounds just threw shit in piles and let them rot, but now it seems that junkyard man, Jeremiah Junkyard they call him, has a method... oh, to know this method, to hear his thoughts beside Interstate 70 and the cross-country railroad tracks, wedged between the two arteries of long-haulers and living in a world his own -- a man living out on the edge of it all, off the grid, smoking a Backwoods cigar and pondering at a small camp trailer he's been looking at the past few minutes. Spits onto the ground, stamps his feet, wearing old work books, and hitches up his pants with a Civil War-esque light gray stripe running up the vertical side of the leg -- pacing up and down the trailer, checking out the front, the ball hitch, kicking the tires, a yapping dog at his heels, stamps his feet again and kicks at the old scraggy mutt as the conductor puts us into GO and Jeremiah Junkyard, my junkyard prophet, my dirt farmer in the sun, I'll see you again perhaps -- Lord of the Junkyard -- and now he's gone... just a snapshot. My snapshot.

-- From Wanderlost, by Ben Olson.