Vehicular ecocide

It's truly amazing the lengths to which people will go to dispose of auto parts. At Lake Blue my biggest project was cleaning up the debris that generations of ne'er-do-wells had bestowed upon the property. But there's one chore that stands out among them. It was the dismantling of the pickup truck bed. I began taking it apart in early October 2003. According to my journal, I didn't finish taking it apart and hauling it out until a month later (Nov. 8, 2003). I took it apart using a small sledge hammer and a pair of bolt cutters so I could cut it into pieces small enough to manually haul out about a quarter mile down a fire lane. It was quite a workout, I'll tell you.
The irony was that the largest piece of debris I ever encountered was the farthest away from the entrance where I had to haul it.

Happily, there was a secondary benefit to the truck bed removal. It uncovered the only patch of Cinnamon Fern in the preserve and allowed that species to thrive.

Three years later I'm still finding auto debris, but not as much. I found a car bumper in November 2006 and another tire in October. Tires are the most common discard. I've found more than 100 of them here, including one tire from a semi, which was a chore to haul to my trash pile.