Country
Auction, 2012
(Click on images to see larger)
Sometimes
when I don’t have a specific photographic destination in mind, I look at a map
and pick the name of some small town I don’t know anything about and head in
its direction. The actual town isn’t important. I might take pictures there or now.
It’s merely a random starting point for the day.
The
name I drew this past Saturday while out in the Roanoke Valley was Hardy,
Virginia. On the map it appears to be a small village in rural Franklin County.
In reality, it’s barely a “wide place in the road,” as we say in our family.
There’s no village to speak of, but there is an old steel bridge across the Roanoke
River with boat launch sites on both ends.
I
hung around the public boat landing long enough to determine that there wasn’t
much to see there and then took off to see what else Franklin County had to
offer. I drove along country roads that twist and turn and rise and fall along river
bluffs in the Blue Ridge foothills and it was in doing this that I came across
the auction shown above.
I
didn’t want to stop at first. I immediately saw the photographic potential of
this gathering of country folk. But I was wary of being the unknown guy who
walks into the crowd with nothing more than a smile and a camera. So I drove
on. It bugged me, though, that I’d let the opportunity pass, so much so that after
meandering ten or fifteen more miles down the road I turned around and made my
way back to the auction.
I
was still a little wary. I didn’t want to be the guy who was mining the
photographic potential of some farming family’s misfortune. But it turned out
that the field of debris—and that’s about all the credit you could give most of
it—had belonged to a recently deceased man. He’d lived with his wife in the
little hardscrabble bungalow just off the road. She’s still there.
Country
Auction, 2012
The
deceased was one of those guys who didn’t buy just one of a thing when he could
buy a whole case of it. The side yard where the auction took place was full of
cartons of oil, transmission fluid, plastic irrigation nozzles, furniture, tools
of all kinds (dozens of each, most never used), tillers, old pumps, a tractor, feed
tubs, lumber, two automobiles completely covered in vegetation and a pickup
truck camper shell that looked like it had most recently been occupied by a
pack of badgers. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
I
can’t imagine the auction brought much to the widow other than the joy of getting
rid of a lot of stuff she’d probably been after her husband for decades to take
to the dump. Much of it was too worn to
use or rotted from never have been used. Most of the lots sold for just a few
dollars.
Checking Out the Merch, 2012
Perhaps
most perplexing in this field of debris was the collection of saddles, bridle
hardware and other horse supplies, most of them in brand new condition. There
was no barn on the property and no sign of horses. One of the neighbors explained,
“He didn’t have no property to speak of, and he only had two horses in his
whole lifetime. One died of a broken neck. He got another it took a virus. He
was so heartbroke after that he just couldn’t part with none of that stuff.”
A Good Deal on a Crown Vic, 2012
So don't leave us hanging...how were you received? As the gawking outlander mocking the yokels? Or did you fit right in?
ReplyDeleteWow--you really captured these folks. I could really imagine all this from your photos and descriptions. Reminds me of living in the Shenandoah Valley, and brings back fond memories.
ReplyDelete