The Car Cemetery

I had never felt so defeated as when walking through the forests by our house, through what I call the car cemetery, a plot of forest marked by the graves of automobiles unwanted and left to rot in the forest. Trees grow through the beds of dead pick-up trucks, ferns spit out of the dashboards, nettles wind their way through old gearshifts and slither out of radios; a huge bag spews dirty syringes with their needles pointed up, bent sideways, twisted and warped, tempting one to get pricked. A huge television set sits on a rise, its tube blown away by a shotgun, leaving a maze of rusted wires; a refrigerator lays open like a coffin, car batteries drip acid through the golden yellow autumn leaves into the black of the forest floor, which is peppered in rainbow colors by the thousands of empty shotgun shells left after target practice, because really, there aren’t any animals left to kill in this forest, except of course, for my dogs, who with their brightly colored scarves, still might meet the errant bullet of a trigger-happy gun maniac. So few are the hunters left, it seems, that still wield their weapons responsibly. When I walk through this section of forest, I am reminded that our most grotesque monsters are not the ones that lurk in the shadows of the wild, but the ones that we create, the by-products of our attempts at civilizing ourselves. Here lies the machinery that helped win the West, left to rot in our own shit. But I reconcile this glimpse of impending doom with the image of the forest swallowing up all the cars and eventually ourselves.