DILLINGHAM -- This is a place where vehicles come to die.
One local mechanic, noting the high cost of purchasing a vehicle and barging or flying it into town, recently estimated that fewer than 5 percent of the cars and trucks that arrive here ever leave.
The rest remain, apparently forever, some on life support, others in scattered, unmarked graves.
Some of these vehicles -- when their drivers tire of them or desire more dependable rides -- are sold, often at whatever exorbitant cost the market can bear. They are advertised by word of mouth, bulletin-board fliers at the Alaska Commercial Co. or via the online Dillingham Trading Post, and then are resold -- and resold and resold. Like zombies of the automotive world, they rise repeatedly from the dead, their sometimes battered, rusting hulks latching onto new hosts, who attempt to squeeze out of them the last vestiges of energy and motion.
Other elapsed vehicles can be found lying where they perished, their engines sputtering final, convulsive asthmatic breaths, their wheels spinning just long enough to reach a convenient ditch.
And still others are abandoned in front or back yards along our meager local road system. Some such yards, with cemetery precision, are lined with the fallen -- cars, trucks and vans -- and usually boats and shipping containers, as if the owners were scrap dealers laying out their wares for public display.
Tangled, clumsy embraces
In these yards, over multiple hard winters, vehicles and environment unite. Old tires develop deepening fissures and release their supplies of air until the steel rims draw earthward and sink almost imperceptibly into the soil. Lichens attach themselves to undercarriages and make unhurried but deliberate migrations onto body panels, doors and fenders. The elemental quartet of sun and wind and rain and frost fade and discolor, then blister and peel, paint from hoods and roofs to welcome a greater incursion of rust and vegetation.
Vandals smash out windows, taillights and headlights. Leaves and other windblown debris plummet into interiors, creating topsoil, and moss grows in sagging upholstery, eager to release its oxidizing springs. In these crumbling environs, nimble spiders roam. Wasps build grey paper nests. Beetles burrow. Small birds flitter by for stray seeds or an occasional bug. Squirrels duck in to nibble spruce seeds and leave behind a midden of cone fragments. Finally, saplings spiral through openings to seek the sky. Grass and fireweed, willows and alders, envelop vehicles in tangled, clumsy embraces.
A few of these vehicles are hauled to distant gravel pits, such as the first turnout on Snake Lake Road, where they become the objects of target practice, their side panels riddled with bullet holes a la "The Godfather" or "Bonnie and Clyde." Occasionally, these vehicles may even fall victim to powerful homemade explosives -- Molotov cocktails, for instance, or a plastic milk jug sloshing with gasoline, hurled into a smoldering auto interior.
The problem so many vehicle owners face in Dillingham, besides the difficulty and expense involved in maintenance and replacement parts, is the high cost of proper disposal. Residents here pay thousands of dollars to barge or air-freight cars and trucks into Dillingham. For many, then, it makes more sense to sell them or give them away, to abandon them or simply drive them into the trees behind their homes, rather than fork over thousands more to send them somewhere they can be disposed of properly. Consequently, the city dump is laden with vehicles in mangled, disorderly piles, crumbling rust and leaking fluids -- as unrecyclable in Bristol Bay as the large appliances and piles of scrap metal with which they are entombed.
Spare parts galore
And I expect this "car-tastrophe" is just as dire in other remote Alaska communities, especially those with just enough roads to warrant large modes of transportation. It costs so much to deliver cars and trucks to such destinations in the first place that it makes more economic, albeit not environmental, sense to simply pile them somewhere and allow nature to take its course.
On the other hand, it must be said that many vehicles in Southwest Alaska, snowmobiles and four-wheelers included, live very full lives before toppling into the grave. Arctic Cats and Ski-Doos from the early 1990s are given a spit-shine and a tune-up before being decked out with For Sale signs. Dented '80s-era pickups — rear windows reconstructed from Visqueen and duct tape, engine hoses bound in place with baling wire, beds still encrusted with years of firewood detritus — occasionally appear as online "bargains," to be snapped up by area newbies or by desperate locals hoping to avoid purchasing anything off a showroom floor.
The sheer volume of old vehicles also creates a spare parts market. Junk to an Anchorage resident may be treasure to a Dillinghammer. Need a carburetor for a '73 Volkswagen van? No problem, if you know the right people and are willing to pay the price. Like crypt robbers of the past, sextons of the automobile graveyards wander with spades and lanterns drawn in search of the part necessary to keep your transportation in motion for at least another day.
That said, a massive cleanup of our deceased vehicles would be beneficial, at least along the coastlines, where a tugboat could guide an immense scow into ports of call where giant crane could laden it with heaps of jumbled relics before the giant scrap pile was barged to Seattle for recycling.
Our old rides could take one last ride, so to speak, supplying some Washington state entrepreneur with scrap metal and hundreds of Dillinghammers with more room for another generation or two of clunkers.
Clark Fair, a Kenai Peninsula resident for more than 50 years, is a lifetime Alaskan now living in Dillingham.