I have many coffee cups in a cupboard above Mr Coffee in the kitchen. A couple weeks ago, I filled a paper bag with at least a dozen of them gathering dust, to go to Goodwill. I have my favorite mug that I use most every day. I will fish it out of the dishwasher still dirty for my morning brew. A couple months ago, I was changing the front axle bearings on the wife's Focus when I managed to knock my favorite cup off the flat under the hood and onto the ce-ment pad. The coffee splashed and the china bounced! Clearly, this is a special cup. It holds two cups with half an inch of rim to spare.
Some ten years ago, I was at the apex of my career moving metal out of the public lands on Eugene District. There was a sizable backlog of abandoned vehicles throughout the woods of Eugene District. I removed all the ones near the roads and kept up with the ones freshly dumped but every once in a while someone would report a "residual," a heap that had been out in the woods--out of sight, out of mind--for years.
I had heard tell about a Chevy van that had been dumped in a doug fir plantation near the Siuslaw River, left sitting for at least a decade. I finally got a recent report accompanied by a map with a red X where the junker reputedly occupied space. I waited until I had forestry business in the neighborhood and reconned the site.
It didn't take long to locate the derelict in a 20 year old stand of reprod that had somehow escaped thinning. There it sat in all its glory. A 70s Chevy van that was the main feature of a campsite complete with an ancient fire ring and ragged remnants of blue plastic tarps. Judging by the scattered trash, the camp had been occupied for a full summer. Likely when the rains came the campers decided they had had enough of the back to nature scene and the van wouldn't start so they left it and rejoined civilization.
The license plates were gone. I found a decades old New York vehicle inspection sticker on the green windshield. The front wheels had been removed but the back tires hadn't been worth the bother. The van reeked of mold and pack rats. Nasty sleeping bags and clothes were heaped in the interior. There were half a dozen 30 caliber holes in the sheet metal. Most likely aggravation rounds from a disgruntled hunter at the end of the day.
I could see the old skid trail the van had driven in on its worn tires. The trees had grown to the point where their branches now crossed each other in the middle of the road. It was late summer and the first serious rain would make extricating the derelict impossible. I was due for a new Ford Expedition so it made sense to scratch up the old one before I got rid of it. The planets had aligned for me to haul this heap.
A few days later, I was on site with the Emu and my vehicle recovery trailer. The Emu was a black Expedition. It got its name because a temp was driving it out in the woods and discovered a half grown emu in the road. Somehow the temp captured the emu and stuffed it in the back of the rig. Do you know what emus do when you shut them in the back of a vehicle?
I took my brush hook and commenced to limbing the firs on either side of the skid trail. A brush hook is a mediaeval looking weapon on the end of a meter long wooden handle. I gained a lot of experience cutting survey line through the brush for the cadastral crew with one of these. I chopped the mostly dead limbs as high as I could reach and let them carpet the skid trail. I got to brush out close to 500 feet until I reached the little junction where the old van had been backed off the main spur.
I moved the Emu and trailer along as I cleared the way. The tires crunched on the dead dry branches. Finally I got the rig past the turn off and began the laborious procedure of backing the trailer the 40 yards to the abandoned van. There wasn't enough room to get the long trailer backed around the angle of the intersection so I had to resort to my famous winch assisted turn around. This consists of chaining a good sized snatch block to one of the industrial strength D rings mounted on the sides of the trailer. Then you feed the main line of the rear facing trailer winch through the snatch block and bend it off as close to a 90 degree angle as you can get and chain it to a handy tree as high as you can reach so as to supply a little lift.
Leaving the rig running, you then activate the winch and it reels in the cable. The trailer slides sideways like the blade of a jack knife relative to the prime mover. The tires make popping sounds as they scuff sideways on the dried clay. Eventually the trailer was pointed at the bumper of the van and it took a minimum of back and forth to tap its grill with the loading ramps at the end of the 18 foot tilt bed.
I had planned ahead and had brought with me two Chevy wheels from Mount Goodyear out behind the office with tires that held air. Using the handy man jack, I put them on the front end of the dead van. I had to borrow two lug nuts off each rear wheel. The mainline hook fit perfectly around a tie rod and the winch took in the slack. I disconnected the shifter under the hood and put the transmission out of park. By an amazing fluke, the front wheels pointed straight ahead. Sometimes they are locked hard right or left but regardless, we always get our car.
The trailer bed tilted and the wreck rolled docilely on board until it passed the C of G and the deck clanged level. I got out the jack again and removed all the tires and threw them inside the van. The old red wreck rested on its hubs on the scarred steel deck. I got garbage bags out of the back of the Expedition and started in on all the animal scattered trash. I looked down and saw a colorful coffee cup lying on its side. It had a polychrome panorama starting from one side of the handle and ending on the other.
Starting from the left side of the handle, a jaguar peers out of the bushes across a waterfall at a monkey hanging by his tail in a tree. Next to the monkey are three grass huts, then two giant blue butterflies and then a toucan with another waterfall by the handle. The entire background is composed of leaves and flowers and fruit. It was just the right size cup and so I carefully stowed it in the Emu and went back to picking up junk.
After collecting half a dozen bags of trash and throwing them in the van, I chained down my load and put the Emu in 4 low and drove over all the crackly limbs back to the gravel. I paused on the four inch minus to allow the Emu to shift electrically back into 2 high just as it started to rain. At the office, after passing in review through the parking lot, I stopped at the dumpster to offload my trash and then pulled around back to throw the tires back on Mount Goodyear and prep the heap for the steel yard.
As the name implies, Mount Goodyear is a pile of tires from my vehicle dismantling operation. I would let them go until there were at least a hundred or two and then haul
them to Big B's Tire in Glenwood for disposal.
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