$16.50 The Hard Way

Scrap Metal Yard - Recycling at it's Most Basic

After eggnog season I had a few days off.

I had piles of rusted, tangled barbed wire coiled in heaps around the yard. I managed to jam all that wire into the bed of my Toyota pick-up, and on Thursday morning I headed to a surplus metal buyer in Orland. First I drove into the yard, where  two men unloading material informed me I had to go get my truck weighed first. No big deal, I reversed the truck on out and waited for the scale to clear.

I parked on a metal plate and went into the office where a  young woman adjusted a series of metal plates and weights to determine how much the truck weighed. She said I was good and off I went, into the yard, to unload my scrap.

I was eager to help and I'd brought my gloves with me. The wire was all in a tangled mess that I felt uneasy about. I started wrenching and pulling the metal out. I had really rammed it in there – my strategy was pure laziness: instead of having to tie the load down, I'd let the wire do the work; and so I'd stomped it down into the truck to make sure it wouldn't pop free. It was tough, but I was making progress, pulling out the chain link fencing one roll at a time. Then I got to a pocket of barbed wire. It was tangled and interconnected with some hogwire and some more barbed wire. I was pulling hard, and it wasn't budging. I gave it a real powerful tug, and then I glanced something flashing by, and then there was a feeling of pulling on my nose.

A loose end of the barbed wire had shot free from the truck bed and whipped into my face, in such a way that a barb entered into my nostril, pierced the nostril's inside wall, and then the end of it poked out through the fleshy end of the septum. I was effectively hooked.

There was almost no pain; but there was blood, and I couldn't figure out how to get the wire out of my nose. My initial reaction was to pull, but that was wrong, because the barb was pointing down. I had to figure out from which direction the wire had entered, and then push it back that way. It took me a while to figure this out. I removed my glove to free my fingers. Slightly panicky, I tried pulling on the wire a couple more times, straight down. I felt my nose stretching, but the wire was not even close to pulling through. The attendant in the yard was getting concerned, and he called to his colleague, but then I got the wire moving in the right direction and was freed. A few thick droplets of blood ran down over my lips and mouth, and then onto my jacket.

“Man, I hope your day gets better.” The attendant told me sincerely.

madbob@madbob.com