JUNKYARD LIFE
CHRONICLES (at the bottom)
Bamboo
Bicycles and the Flatbed
Fish Guts
Gypsies and Jet Engines
The Legend of Uncle Pumpkin
Squirrels
Where There's Smoke
117 Bristol Road: A Retrospective
THE GALLERY
Bamboo
It all started innocently enough—a handful of bamboo sprouts, waist-high, planted on our “front lawn”, meaning the 10-foot stretch of lumpy grass between Bristol Road and the fence that our neighbors made us erect due to whatever the legal equivalence of unsightliness is. That was around 1995. Today a 3-story tall bamboo forest dominates the landscape—Crouching Tiger Hidden Junkyard.
I’ll never forget the way the canopy swayed during Superstorm Sandy; tip-to-tip, one individual plant covered the area of our house. The bamboo took out entire sections of our fence…but why have a fence when you can have an impenetrable living wall? Amazingly each plant stayed firmly rooted despite the strength of one of the greatest storms the east coast has seen in living memory. This is because, I’ve come to learn, that there really aren’t any individual bamboo plants, but rather the plants are a network joined entirely by the same root structure. In other words, a bamboo forest is really one big super-plant. This is what lends the green bamboo hulk its strength and tenacity. It’s what allows a shoot to grow so rapidly—up to 3 feet per day in fact. The energy captured by the leaves of one shoot can be transferred through the roots to a sprout quite far away. Bamboo is like the Borg from Star Trek—strength through connectivity and numbers.
On the surface, there are hundreds and hundreds of shoots on our property. And they’ve become quite the nuisance. Trying to maintain the bamboo is a full-time job. I say trying because it can’t really be maintained by conventional means. There is only one really effective final solution for bamboo and that is to call in the helicopters with napalm. But if you can’t afford Agent Orange, you can attempt to at least contain its tentacles from spreading. The way to do this is to dig a trench, 2 feet deep, entirely surrounding the bamboo beast and then fill the trench with rocks or concrete.
If you don’t do that, you may win a battle every now and then but you will never win the war. The organism has breached through our fence and begun to take over our actual front lawn. Despite our attempts to maintain it, its tendrils sprout from the ground like the heads of the Hydra. I’ve seen it pierce through a high-density plastic traffic cone, and one even penetrated the belly of our upside-down fiberglass rowboat, proving that a sprout doesn’t need light to grow due to the energy transfer previously discussed.
Yes, the war on bamboo is a losing proposition, but we try anyway. Our standard operating procedure involves lopping the shoots, loading up our pickup truck Old Black Betty, and schlepping and off-loading behind the garden out back. Then we wait until summer. By then the shoots will have dried out and it won’t take much for a spark to turn into a furious blaze. Internally, a bamboo shoot consists of hollowed out chambers. When put to the torch, the heat causes the air trapped inside to expand, and the pressure makes the chambers explode! To prevent flashbacks of Vietnam from the neighbors—or preemptive Fourth of July celebrations—a controlled burn is recommended.
Even so, once a bamboo shoot is decapitated, and its body burned, the stem stays firmly rooted in the ground, a carbon-fiber sword pointing straight up to the sky. Lop off the heads of a few dozen shoots and now you have a zombie army functioning as a skirt wall, defending its living cousins.
I’ll never forget what happened once during a standard-issue blizzard during the winter of 2011. Right smack in the middle of it, we got a knock on the door—an unusual occurrence considering the circumstance. It was a police officer. He told us that our bamboo was blocking Bristol Road and that we had to take care of it so that the snow plows could do their job. Sure enough, the 30-foot-tall bamboo had slouched entirely across the thoroughfare under the weight of a few thick feet of white powder. So, following direct orders, I grabbed the loppers and got to lopping for about an hour as snow poured down from the heavens. While performing this vital function for the benefit of Bucks County, I remember how quiet and peaceful it was with the rest of society tucked comfortably away in their dwellings. I also remember my internal combustion engine working full steam and taking off a layer with the snow pouring down. Even in the middle of winter, when most flora take a good long vacation, the bamboo was putting me to work.
I have nothing but respect and admiration for this venerable creation of Mother Nature.
Bicycles and the Flatbed
For over a decade, a pile of bicycles grew around a 20-foot-long, 8-wheeled faded matte-green sleeping giant flatbed truck that served as a background set piece on the junkyard stage. When Superstorm Sandy came to visit, aluminum cans and other debris flew around like flocks of sparrows. The two-story-tall bamboo forest rocked violently in every which direction, its tips nearly touching the ground—amazingly not breaking or de-rooting to join the Wrath of God—taking out entire sections of our front fence… while the dormant flatbed snored stoically like an ancient Olmec grounded in a thousand years of overgrowth.
This wasn’t always the case, so I’ve been told. This relic-to-me had its glory days well before my lifetime, schlepping two-digit tons of this and that, here to there, there to here, then and then again. The legends quickly fade, but let it be known that the flatbed hauled ass before it went out to pasture.
One day, I returned home from college break to find a dark void left in the flatbed’s wake. There must have been some salvageable parts under its hood, and the old man sold it to a guy for “more than scrap”. But not to worry. In a moon’s turn, the junk tides washed over the blank space, footprints on the beach filled with a new froth of shells, seaweed, and other junky detritus.
We picked the bicycles out of peoples’ curbside trash collections and tacked them around the truck like tartar on a tooth. Some of them could actually be ridden for a few yards, and they all had at least one or two working parts, but generally they were pretty bent out of shape. I figured they would end up in an outgoing light iron container and that would be the end of it, but instead they just kept cropping up over the years like barnacles on a blue whale.
I was in middle school when September 11th happened. The terror years that followed included a resurgence of “militarized operations” with Iraq — as well as the associated wall of conservatism and curtain of paranoia which veiled my formative years. Believe it or not, these global forces determined the destinies of our bicycles when my high school put on a bicycle donation drive to support war-torn children in the Middle East.
The old man blew his bugle horn and my brother and I filled the truck up with a pile of bicycles higher than the twin towers themselves, a mountainous gnarl of steel and aluminum, spokes and handlebars and pedals and frames and cables and forks and gears jutting out every which way, tied down with amateur-knotted ropes.
Upon arrival to the high school parking lot with the first load of bicycles, we were greeted as heroes. Other families donated one, two, maybe three bicycles at most. It was like bringing a watermelon to a grape party. Little did they know that we would be returning another hour later, and on the second trip, people didn’t know what to think. What sort of people keep such a large inventory of dilapidated bicycles in stock? But alas, the third time around, we were surely up to no good. Derelicts? Thieves? Pacifists? Enemies of the State?
It is nice to think that those bikes that we rescued from the garbage trucks made it across the Atlantic and provided a mode of transportation for children in a “third world” quite difficult to imagine. What I can certainly recall from memory—and this is satisfaction enough—was seeing the looks on those peoples’ faces, right then and there in the parking lot of Central Bucks High School East (Go Patriots!), each time the Wechsler boys rolled up in their pickup truck with a load of bicycles that blotted out the sun.
Fish Guts
Towards the beginning of summer, we would pull up our white 1982 Ford F250 towards the loading area behind Heller’s Seafood Market, just off of route 611 (one of the two crossroads of my hometown). Two grimy, good-spirited men shoveled fish guts into the truck bed until it was full, and we drove home.
The operation proceeded as such: first, my brother Sam and I dug about 8 ditches in our garden, each a few feet deep and a few wide, maybe 30 feet long. Then, we would put a wheelbarrow next to the lowered tailgate, from where the old man transferred the load via rake and shovel. Once the wheelbarrow was full, Sam and I would take turns pushing it towards the ditches while the other assisted over roots, divots, and generally sodden turf. We then emptied the contents into the ditch until the truck was depleted. After a few trips back and forth from Heller’s, once the ditches were full with fish guts, we would then drive to Cheltenham to receive a free load of mulch delivered breezily by a front-end loader. We then essentially repeated the previous process, covering the ditches with the mulch. Compared to the smell of the fish guts, the mulch’s aroma was that of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Indeed, the fishy smell lingered on our persons after days of vigorous scrubbing, and it never truly dissipated from the truck even until its dying days.
Boy, Sam and I hated that work. It was hard work, particularly for pre-pubescents. The Pennsylvania summer heat is a heavy bake that flirts with triple digits and fills with humidity to the brink of torrential downpour. Subtropics indeed. I remember the wide-eyed blank stares of the hundreds of fishes gazing into the world beyond and thinking how they looked the same dead as they do alive. Saturated in sweat, I envied those dead fish for their rest. In retrospect, I appreciate the discipline and grit that our old man instilled in us. It was certainly the exception to the rule in our quaint upper-middle class rural suburbia. Plus, our garden produced behemoth crops including watermelons, pumpkins, butternut squash, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, potatoes, onions, okra, eggplant, rhubarb, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries. We’d also place various shells around our plum and quince trees as a provision of calcium, and those trees produced bountifully as well, sourcing our made-from-scratch pies.
We would set aside a few drums of fish guts and schlep them down to Long Beach Island, New Jersey, reeking acridly for the two-hour drive sans air conditioning (again, more character building). Every morning we would lay a few crab traps, and by evening they were filled like clockwork. We’d pull in the traps and dad would get boiling. My small hands could deftly navigate the inner ventricles of those rock crabs, and with age I could produce more torque to break the shells. Every now and then, our hands got cut by the ancient crustacean’s natural defense system, effective even in the afterlife, and the metallic taste of blood washed down the salty buttery taste when I licked my fingers. We basically survived off of crab for summers on end; we were crab people through and through.
I have a traumatic memory of trying to reel in a crab trap by myself only to be overcome by its weight being pulled by the tide and flung off the dock, screaming and scraping helplessly against the slimy wooden pillars until the old man came running, lending a hand. I remember emptying the crabs into buckets for transport into the kitchen, and every now and then a maverick crab would get loose; this was always exciting, as Sam and I would attempt to corral it into a bucket, facing off in a precarious miniature-sized bullfight. The crab escaped about half the time, plunging over the dock in a one-yard, one-second plunge to survival that was epic from an eight-year-old’s perspective, let alone the crab’s.
And the circle of life continued, all thanks to the fish guts.
Gypsies and Jet Engines
Growing up in the junkyard, things would come and go. The jet engines were a main attraction for a while until the gypsies came around. [2024 footnote: the word “gypsies”, which refers to the Romani people, was taught to me with no insinuation of prejudice and is not geared toward offense]. Each was roughly twenty feet long and three feet in diameter, chock full of aluminum, high temp alloys, and possibly even some titanium (so said the old man). They shone brilliantly in the sun, smooth rounded points at each end, while veins and switches traced out a circumference worthy of the Millennium Falcon. They sat there rather stoically, moving every few years depending on the ebbs and flows of the yard.
A few decades passed until the gypsies rolled up unannounced in a spotless white Dodge Ram, with their black hair slicked back and gold chains around their necks. And who would you guess was right behind them in an unwashed 1988 Cadillac sedan? Why, it was old Perry of Temple Enterprises, all the way up from Port Richmond (North Philly) to broker the deal. My father emerged unto the porch, and the two old Jews began to dance.
This was art. Baryshnikov, Bobby Fischer, and George Gershwin rolled into one act. It was dialogue that only 100+ years of combined haggling experience could produce. Bellies spilling over belts like silverback gorillas that could easily cut back on a banana or two. Unkempt salt and pepper hair, three-day-old stubble, and cavernous wrinkles served as résumés, each with an executive summary headlining “last of a dying breed”. I had the pleasure to witness the show for free. And by the end of the week, the jet engines were gone.
Like every deal we’ve ever done with Perry, he later claimed it to have been a loss for Temple. That didn’t stop him from continuing to do business with us of course. I do know this: my old man bought those jet engines from the government for twenty bucks (plus $200 shipping) and sold them for $3,000. Taking inflation into account, it can still be said with certainty that it wasn’t a loss for us.
But those jet engines were one of our showcase pieces… not to mention a fun playground. I feel blessed now, thinking back on it, to have witnessed their culminating hoorah. Bravo!
The Legend of Uncle Pumpkin
Uncle Pumpkin showed up to our property once or twice a year throughout the early 1990’s. Uncle Pumpkin was a hero. Dad never told us that he we coming—as that was the old man’s general style of in-the-moment living—but when my brother and I recognized the waistline of Uncle Pumpkin, which was impressively robust in circumference, the trumpets blazed. Uncle Pumpkin was the king video-gamer and he would beat the hardest levels of Super Mario World, relieving days of fraternal tension and angst. These memories form most of my recollection of Uncle Pumpkin, as he died of a heart attack somewhere in the mid 90’s. It was the first death of someone that I personally knew and cared about.
As years ticked by, I learned more about Uncle Pumpkin. For one thing, his name was Dave Dorner. Dave Dorner operated a used electronics store on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan. Every now and then, he would escape the heat of the big city and visit us country folk. One landmark on our property was an Oldsmobile station wagon that was propped up about a yard by a tree trunk that was growing through its hood. One day I asked Dad where the station wagon came from, and he responded without missing a beat, “Your Uncle Pumpkin dropped it off here for a weekend. That was 20 years ago”. The car was scrapped in a light iron container around 2011.
The legend grew posthumously. For one thing, my mother’s engagement ring was acquired through a trade with Uncle Pumpkin in the back of a limousine in New York City. Uncle Pumpkin had a briefcase with a selection of diamond rings, and my mother had the pick of the litter. In exchange, Uncle Pumpkin received an ice cream truck, which, oddly enough, he never picked up, as it is still sitting on our property to this day.
All of this makes more sense when it is revealed that Uncle Pumpkin was loosely “connected”. In other words, he had “friends”. One of his friends was Carlo Zilli. Carlo sold Dad loads of secondary iron re-bar back in the day. Part of the deal included cases of wine imported directly from Italy. I’ve heard that Dad would show up to parties with an entire case. My Uncle Bob reports that it wasn’t exactly of the highest quality, but nobody cared, and everybody drank it.
There is little doubt in my mind now that both the station wagon and the engagement ring were “hot commodities”. I see the ring as an appropriate symbol for my parents’ union. My mother wore it on her right hand for many years and then had it made into a necklace. Now it is a ring again and belongs to my wife, Natalie.
Growing up, when the fall harvest came, my father gave my brother and I pumpkins from our garden. The pumpkins had our names sketched out in tan ALL-CAPS protruding out of the orange surface. Now I know that my father had previously carved out the names a few weeks in advance, and the pus of the pumpkin naturally emerged and hardened. At the time though, when we asked how on Earth this could happen, he explained that it occurred by magic, and, being the time Before Google (B.G.), we were forced to accept this explanation with wonderment and glee. A similar feeling is now aroused when I think about Uncle Pumpkin and the age-old way that certain deals and relationships were conducted before the digital age reigned in an era of transparency. Stories emerge from a seedy, pulpy core and harden over the surface of time. I accept these stories with reverence and I’ll admit, a bit of jealousy.
Squirrels
As the “Justice for Peanut” movement rages, I’m compelled to write about the squirrels of the junkyard. One time, we went out for an errand and upon returning an hour later, Dad spotted some fresh roadkill near our property. It was a squirrel. He grabbed it, brought it home, skinned it, and we ate it for dinner. There was a handful of times I can remember when we ate dinner, Dad asked us how we liked the meat, and then revealed that it was squirrel or some other locally harvested bounty such as rabbit or groundhog. When I was in kindergarten, Dad skinned and gutted a groundhog out back and showed us its beating heart. Brother Sam describes this memory as “a bit traumatizing, disgusting, and also educational”.
On another occasion, my elementary school friend Sam Sfirri was over. This is the jazz pianist/finger-boarder Sam, not to be confused with other Sams of significance such as Harrington, Jones, or brother Sam. Anyway, Sfirri always had a proclivity for healthy snacks such as fruits and vegetables (I can’t relate) so he opened the bottom produce drawer of the refrigerator to see what we had in stock. The thing is, that drawer had been broken for years. It popped loose and its contents spilled out onto the dirty ass floor, including (you guessed it) a skinned squirrel. There was a lot of blood.
I have a memory of being very young and stepping out from the threshold of the porch down the stairs and this one squirrel up in the tree went absolutely berserk barking at me. I don’t know if it was protecting its nest or swearing vengeance upon my soul but it scared the shit out of me and I retreated back into the house. Again, I was very young.
Dad used a .22 Springfield rifle to defend his garden. Besides the fireplace, the other spot he sat for hours on end was the chair at the top of the stairs, watching the birds, observing nature, and looking out for enemy intruders. I remember more than once turning the corner to see Dad with the rifle pointed out the window—at which point he gave me the universal “shh” sign. Other times, Sam and I would be watching Ren & Stimpy and get jolted by the sound of a gunfire blast. Then we’d rush upstairs excitedly to see what happened. It was usually groundhogs and rabbits, sometimes deer. I don’t remember him ever shooting squirrels; they didn’t mess with the garden. Sometimes Dad used a slingshot, which was pretty badass and had the benefit of being silent. It’s funny, with all the complaints from the neighbors over the years (see below, 117 Bristol Road: A Retrospective) there were none about the gun shots, which were certainly illegal. But that’s how I learned how to shoot. In the later years, Dad kept the .22 under his bed—loaded.
There was one famous squirrel I called “P-Squirrel”, although recently it came to my attention that brother Sam was calling it “Peace Squirrel” all those years (after the song “Peace Frog” by The Doors). There’s a photo above of P-Squirrel sleeping on a steeply sloped birdhouse on the side of the walnut tree. Eventually P-Squirrel was murdered and eaten by a red-tailed hawk (also pictured above). RIP P-Squirrel/Peace Squirrel.
During the college years, a family of squirrels moved into our attic. It was difficult to sleep past 8:00AM because that’s when they awakened; the rapid-fire pit pattering of their movement was like a disjointed, super annoying alarm clock. We set up traps baited with chunky peanut butter. Every now and then we’d catch one and I would release it at Peace Valley Park, where at least they had a non-zero chance of survival. Eventually they got smart to it, however, and so we lived for many years with a two-state solution in place.
The peace was broken in 2012 when a squirrel fell through a hole in the ceiling of the office/bedroom (don’t ask). Dad told me to take care of it and handed me a pitchfork, a pole-net used for crabbing, and some hornet spray (!) After a brief half-hearted attempt, I threw in the towel. Yes, the little guy was cute, but he also had incredible speed, agility, and reflexes. Watch Mark Rober’s Ninja Warrior Squirrel Course for proof. It's funny when my dog Kelce chases squirrels because she has a 0% chance of catching them. Anyway, after calling me a pussy, Dad said “fine, I’ll do”, and there was quite a scuffle upstairs for the next ten minutes. But eventually Dad gave up, too. In the morning, I opened the door and the poor little guy was lying in the middle of the floor, petrified in the fetal position, dead. I’m still not sure exactly what killed it—probably the hornet spray effectively fumigated the room overnight—but I scooped it up with the crab net and buried it out back.
Speaking of trauma and the fetal position, one time I inadvertently disturbed a nest of baby squirrels while cutting the bamboo. They looked like tiny pink fetuses, alien and gross but also innocent and heartwarming at the same time. I tried to return them to safety but I fear that they met their end soon thereafter.
Thus concludes the history (of mainly violence) between the squirrels and the Wechsler’s. With that said, as George W. Bush might say, “I do believe that the human being and the squirrel can coexist peacefully”. To end on a good note: part of my job at Urban Ore included pest control and wildlife management. Fortunately, I had some experience. Besides the rats and pigeons, I caught mainly racoons and possums. The adult critters I released at Tilden Park in Berkeley. The younger critters I took to Yggdrasil Urban Wildlife Rescue, a non-profit enterprise on Potrero Hill, San Francisco, run by a very nice and quirky woman named Lila. I delivered baby possums to Lila’s funky Victorian home/sanctuary; picture Ace Ventura’s apartment on steroids. There she introduced me to a variety of creatures, including an 87-year-old California Desert Tortoise named Anthony. One time, I was sitting on the couch with Lila for a few minutes, shooting the breeze, when all of a sudden she pulled out of her blouse not one but two baby squirrels (!) and started making these guttural grunting noises, which she believed provided maternal comfort for them. Lila told me she sometimes took them to the supermarket. I pictured her there, shopping in the frozen section, getting funny looks from strangers as she grunted at her own bosom—which appeared to be undulating. That’s San Francisco for you. Anyway, I ended up granting hundreds of dollars in store credit to Yggdrasil. So there you go—I’m a friend of the squirrel and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Where There's Smoke
Stevie Wonder could tell if I’ve been home recently. This is because a fire burns in our fireplace almost every day, and everything inside the house, including articles of clothing, gets saturated with smoke such that the scent is carried for some time. No matter how many times we paint over the fireplace mantel, it is always scorched black from the billows of smoke that pour into the living room. Forget about smoke detectors in our house.
Also forget about garbage trucks; they’ve never come. Any discarded paper goes straight into the fireplace, organic material is composted, and metal is recycled. The plastic we generate is enough to fit into a plastic grocery bag, which is deposited into a public receptacle at the supermarket or gym. The cost savings of declining garbage hauling service has paid for a semester or two of college.
However, having an interior incinerator has had its drawbacks. There was the constant inhalation of particulate matter created from incomplete combustion, but what set us apart is that my old man would burn transformers in order to melt the adhesive that holds together the copper cables and steel bands. Although my brother and I have advised against burning electrical equipment in our fireplace for years, it wasn’t until recently that the practice has ceased. Transformers often contain Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB’s), an odorless chlorine compound, which, if inhaled or ingested, is a potent endocrine disrupter and neurotoxin. Perhaps this is why both Sam and I are experiencing hair loss. It is a convenient explanation for all of our imperfections. On the other hand, burning copper created an extraordinary green blaze. It was beautiful.
Growing up, my father would order my brother and I to schlep and stack logs onto our porch. It was another disciplinary measure, a team-building exercise that we were always glad to be over with. We eventually learned how to split logs. Today, splitting logs is one of my favorite things to do. There is something cathartic about focusing and releasing the totality of one’s energy into a single point—the tip of a sledge hammer. As one’s muscle mass transfers that energy into the wedge, splitting the log, there is a satisfaction comparable to driving a golf ball and landing on the green. Miss the sweet spot and sparks fly. Injuries are also available for free.
A good fire stimulates all of the senses. The light show alone is better than most of cable TV, and the subtleties of the orchestra produced by combustion are unpredictably amazing. The warmth is life itself, and then of course there’s the smell… there’s something ancient about the smell of a burning fire, something that brings me to a familiar, peaceful place. When people ask me what my father is up to, generally speaking, I have some difficulty in explaining that he is perfectly content making a fire and watching it burn for hours on end. He seems to be in a zenned out, holy place. I hope to eventually achieve that state of being, although I don’t currently have the patience for it, and I wonder if modern times will ever allow for it.
I remember a chimney fire we had in the mid-nineties. It was like the fourth of July bursting over our roof in the middle of a dark winter’s night.
What else is there to say about our fireplace? Some people can’t stand smoke. I was a volunteer firefighter in high school and have been acquainted with a variety of burnt smells. Many forms of exhaust are certainly malicious. But whenever I return to California from a trip home and open my suitcase, the smoke wafts into my nostrils and slaps me with specific nostalgic memories blended with the grander sense that all of my ancestors, going back to the caves, have known the smell and its source.
117 Bristol Road: A Retrospective
After Dad died in December 2022, I went to the New Britain Borough office to request access to the property records of the junkyard AKA “Shangri-La” AKA 117 Bristol Road. With a population under 3,000, the office building was cozy, akin to one of those temporary trailer pods we were taught AP Spanish to in a field outside of an overflowing high school before C.B. South was built. The secretary was visibly impressed as she handed me the file, thick as the bible, chock full of records and complaints Dad kept secret spanning back to 1982 when he purchased the property from Don Metzgar. Pandora’s Box was officially open.
A note about Don Metzgar: Metzgar ran a trucking operation on the property before Dad bought it. I went to elementary school with Don’s son, John Metzgar. John was a cool kid and a bit of a bad boy. In sixth grade, I went to their house for his birthday pool party. I remember it as a nice Bucks County mansion, not too big or ostentatious, but there was one thing that stood out, which was this huge rock overhanging the water, like the ceremonial rock in The Lion King. In retrospect, it was some gangster shit, although I didn’t know it at the time. What I learned decades later—and this came from my late great stepfather Phil Eiseman—was that Don (allegedly) ran cocaine on his truck routes. Phil smilingly described Don as a “tough motherfucker”, not somebody to mess with. So there you go.
The first complaint in the file dated back to July 2nd, 1985, from neighbor Tony Fennell at the regular monthly meeting of the New Britain Borough Council. It noted “two tractor trailors (sic) and the general deterioration of the property”. The meeting notes show that in attendance were the mayor, the Council members, and “several interested citizens”. Dad said he would “cooperate with the neighbors and take care of the house and grass”.
Apparently, Dad did not cooperate with the neighbors, and things reached a boiling point on May 17th, 1989, at a hearing by the New Britain Borough Zoning Board of Adjustment, where Dad applied for a special exemption to use the land as a junk yard (under section 405 G9 of the Zoning Ordinance, of course). “Applicant has forthrightly conceded that his use of the subject property is as a junk yard”, the definition of which allows the storage of two or more motor vehicles not having valid inspection stickers. The record shows that since first acquiring the property, Dad “gradually accumulated various items or articles, including but not limited to the following: used building materials such as shower stalls and sinks; tank prisms; restaurant coolers... In addition, Applicant stores finished metal products in four tractor trailers. The trailers are 8 feet in width, 35 feet in length, and 12 feet in height”.
In order to win his case, Dad was to agree to the following conditions: “(A) The proposed use of an area for a junk yard is not detrimental to adjacent land uses; (B) The land area for junk yard purposes is not exposed to public view from any public street or road by virtue of its location”; (C) Such junk yard shall be entirely enclosed by a solid fence or wall, at least eight feet high… Such fence or wall shall be kept in good repair and neatly painted in a uniform color; (D) The contents of such a junk yard shall not be placed or deposited to a height greater than the height of the fence or wall herein prescribed”. Let’s examine these…
Regarding “detrimental” impacts, “applicant testified that there is no burning which occurs at the subject property. One property owner contradicted this, but it was unclear whether the burning on one occasion was done by Applicant or by a trespasser”. In Dad’s defense, he never to my knowledge burned non-organic items outside. He occasionally conducted controlled burn brush fires outside. “In any event,” the record continues, “both the Applicant and the rest of the adjoining land owners agreed that no offensive noise, odor, or dust emanate from the subject property. One adjoining land owner suggested that the materials stored at the subject property might harbor rats, but acknowledged that she had never seen any. Therefore, except for the visual effect of the various articles stored thereon, the present use of the property is not detrimental to adjacent land uses”. So far, so good.
Regarding the unsightliness of the property, let’s join together points (B), (C), and (D). The Board concluded that “the protection of both the public safety and the aesthetics and property values in the neighborhood are all legitimate considerations in zoning cases”. The whole situation is kind of interesting because our property was sandwiched between residential and industrial lots. Dad always told us that it was zoned both residential and industrial, which isn’t exactly true; officially, it was zoned Light Industrial but it included an allowance of a single dwelling, which is pretty unusual as far as I know. Like, who lives on an industrial property?
Ultimately, “Applicant has indicated that he will comply by erecting a fence and the Board has imposed more stringent conditions regarding the height of the fence and the shrubbery screening”. Here’s the final verdict: “The Board concludes that a special exception should be granted to Applicant to conduct a junk yard containing the general types of articles which he presently stores, subject to the conditions stated:
1. The lunch truck is forthwith removed.
2. A solid fence or wall at least 10 feet high is promptly constructed of plank boards, brick, cinder blocks, or concrete, with access only through solid gates. Such fence or wall shall be kept in good repair and painted in a uniform color.
3. Screening shrubbery is planted the full length of the outside of the fence along… the outside of the fence facing Bristol Road.
4. No hazardous, explosive, or toxic wastes are stored thereon at any time.”
The bottom line: “Opponents to the application failed to establish by a preponderance of the evidence that the application was contrary to the health, safety, morals, or general welfare of the community at large.” This seems like a win; Dad just needed to complete a few clearly laid-out tasks in order to execute his end of the bargain…
Although point four was observed (within reason), point one never happened. The lunch truck AKA the Navy Exchange Mobile Canteen AKA the ice cream truck (pictured above and see above: The Legend of Uncle Pumpkin) remained on the property until it, along with 100 tons of junk, were liquidated in the process of preparing the property for sale. Point two did happen. I remember the property before the fence went up. The sensation of fresh gravel lingers in memory; I must have been quite young and low to the ground at the time. To say that the fence was kept in good repair would be very generous. Sam and I were given hammers, nails, and ropes to keep the thing from completely collapsing, usually after a hurricane. It was never painted, let alone in a uniform color.
Regarding point three—shrubbery—we must now travel four years into future, on April 23rd, 1993, when the Borough Manager, John K. Wolff, sent a threat reminding Dad to comply with the decision. “I recently have had two complaints concerning the unsightly condition of your property. I have chosen to write to you and ask if you would try and dress up the front of your property. The alternative on which the Council might insist, would be the issuance of a citation at the district court”. The original points/mandates were then re-stated, as well as the relevant (and almost comical) parenthetical in: “that the access to the property have a solid gate (that should be used)”. To drive the message home, the letter ended with, “All these requirements are to protect the neighbors and passers by from seeing the contents or the inside of a junk yard. Also, to make the outwardly appearance compatible with the neighborhood in which you are located”.
In response, on May 6th, Dad wrote back that “our Nursery Consultant has recommended that we plant Bamboo (Bamusa Beecheyana) along the Bristol Road side, parallel to the fence… We will continue to work on the clean up”. I have to laugh because knowing Dad, I am 99% sure that said “nursery consultant” was about as real as his Covid companion Skippy the dog—that is to say completely fabricated—but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. After a back-and-forth exchange, John Wolff issued a final warning on August 14th: “If these violations are not corrected in the very near future, the Borough will be compelled to seek other means by which compliance will be accomplished”. An official Enforcement Notice was issued on June 20th, 1996 by Borough Manager Robert Schaffer for “weeds or grass in excess of eight inches in height”. I’m not sure exactly what to make of that, but to me it reads like “mow your fucking lawn!”
Seven months transpired, and then this, again from Mr. Schaffer on January 21st: “This correspondence is a follow-up to the decision rendered by the Borough Council at their monthly meeting on Tuesday, January 14th, 1997, concerning your fence gates. At that time, it was unanimously agreed that you would be given 60 days to provide a satisfactory solution to the problem of your junk yard gates being left open 24 hours a day”. The actual meeting minutes are pretty entertaining: “Mr. Jay Wechsler requested Council to waive his obligation outlined in the Zoning Hearing Board decision to keep the gate closed in front of his junk yard on evenings and weekends. Mr. Wechsler feels it is a personal safety hazard. After a lengthy discussion, Council agreed that there was no safety threat to Mr. Wechsler”. The ensuing mandate was for the front gate to be closed; every time we left and entered the property, we were supposed to open and close this big ass gate. I remember the gate was so big that Sam and I couldn’t handle it, and by this point we’re 10 and 12 years old. So, every time we drove anywhere, Dad got out of the truck to open and close it, which he did…
…For about a month. Then, after things cooled down a little, we were back to status quo. Two years go by until (exciting news!) we have a new Borough Manager, Robin E. Trymbiski, who visited the property on March 29th, 1999—along with Police Chief Sempowski—and warned that “permitting a junk yard in a community must carry with it strict conformance to Zoning Board decisions and all applicable ordinances, and the New Britain Borough Council is insisting on this conformance”. And yet Dad persisted. Clearly Trymbiski didn’t know who he was dealing with, and soon thereafter the Borough threw in the towel. And so it was for about four decades, when the SEPTA train crossed Route 202 and cars backed up on Bristol Road, anyone stuck in traffic had a free glimpse into Shangri-La—forklift, jet engines, restaurant coolers, and all.
Fifteen years of tenuous peace passed, and then, for some reason, Dad decided to hire a landscaper to cut down about a third of the trees in the back nine of the property. From what I remember, at this point he was considering the future of the property, and in his mind, the optimal prospective buyer was Copart, Inc., which is a huge automotive scrap yard and auction house that abutted our property’s eastern border. Rather than broach the conversation directly with Copart, which would have given away some leverage, Dad’s genius idea was to clear the trees as a means to insinuate/suggest/showcase the value of the property—specifically to Copart in terms of access. As a result, on October 17th, 2014, we were informed by Zoning Officer Thomas Yatsky that the tree-cutting act was a violation (of the Borough Zoning Ordinance 94-262, Article 6, Section 608) which “directs that trees having diameters of 16 inches or greater shall be preserved, or if removed, shall be replaced”. What followed was a two-year appeal process. Ultimately, Dad had to pay a few thousand dollars in fines and the trees grew back naturally over the span of a decade. As a postscript, Sam and I solicited Copart when we put the property up for sale, but the message may have gotten lost in the sauce AKA a global corporate chain-of-command communication network.
But wait, there’s more! Enter Michael Italia, new Zoning Officer. On January 26th, 2018, he sent the following Correction Order: “It was brought to the attention of the Borough that you have bamboo growing on your property and that it is spreading to adjacent properties. This is in violation of New Britain Borough Ordinance #380 (Weeds/Bamboo) as adopted on April 12th, 2017… Offending plants need to be removed or abated within 10 days”. I wonder if said ordinance was passed solely because of us. Two years later, on October 29th, 2020, another letter was addressed to “Samuel & Max Wechsler” because by this point in time, the property had been transferred to us. It reads: “Dear Mr. Wechsler, we have been in contact with your father Jay on several occasions and have made site visits about the bamboo… the bamboo growing along the front of the property along the road has been known to cause issues when it snows. It is also prohibiting pedestrians from passing the property without walking into the roadway.” The ultimate irony of course is that the shrubbery was mandated 20 years earlier and approved of by the Borough. Someone ought to fire that damn Nursery Consultant!
A few loose threads need to be tied up before concluding this saga. The tank prisms mentioned in the initial 1989 hearing eventually became kind of famous. Renowned local artist Steve Tobin was dating my mom’s friend, Liz, at the time. Even in his earlier days, Steve was a famous glass blower, and at my first birthday party Dad told Steve about these 1,000 Korean War era M60 Patton combat tank windows. Steve and his crew came over and hauled the prisms away at no cost (to either party). As told by Dad in my interview with him “The Lone Wolf Recycler” the prisms were stored in a trailer. However, as described by Tobin in a highfalutin French art publication, his crew recovered the prisms out of a “river” in a junkyard, referencing what I would describe as barely a creek (but who knows, maybe it was bigger back then; anyway it makes a good visual). The prisms sat on Tobin’s property for a few years, until eventually he was inspired to build an igloo-like structure out of them. The glass, he told me, was folded over hundreds of times to create its impenetrable quality—he and his crew tested its structural integrity by firing armor piercing rifles at it—and he was intrigued to use glass as building blocks for the first time. The tank prism prototype inspired an entire series called Adobe. On Veterans Day of 2023, Sam and I commissioned Steve to dedicate a structure in the same style called “Swords to Plowshares” in Dad’s honor at nearby Delaware Valley University, where our family has some deep roots. Read more about it here.
Regarding mowing the lawn: mowing the lawn at Shangri-La was a big pain in the ass. The ground was uneven, sloped, often soaked with water, and full of divots and metal fixtures that we soon learned to avoid. Pushing the gas-powered hand mower in sub-tropical heat and humidity sucked. Right behind the house stood a big black walnut tree, and when a walnut was run over by the mower, it exploded into a hundred pieces like a frag grenade; shin pads would have been useful. Eventually, Sam bought a used John Deere riding mower on Craigslist, and that thing saved us a ton of work. The day before we sold the property, in an effort to save the mower from liquidation, Sam heroically (some might say stupidly) drove it about a mile down Butler Ave/Route 202 to Eiseman Construction, where it remains as of this writing. You can watch part of that journey here.
The sale of 117 Bristol Road, Chalfont, PA 18914 was closed on Monday, November 4th, 2024. It was the day before the 2024 election and Pennsylvania was a state divided. Both presidential candidates campaigned in PA that day, and the atmosphere was tense in our battleground county of a famously purple swing state. During the real estate deal meeting, as the ink of our signatures dried, the topic of politics was expertly avoided by all parties. It had nearly been a two-year process to sell the property. Once the various hoops were successfully jumped through, the property went through a three-month rezoning process (including a window for appeals) as a condition for the buyer, a residential developer. Given the track record outlined in this post-mortem, I would wager my share of the sale of the property on even odds that nobody appealed the rezoning process.
I spent a good deal of my adolescence cleaning up Dad’s mess. There was always work available during summers and between college semesters. After college, when I lived there—trying to figure out what to do with my life—I was able to really attack the back portion of the property. Once, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a piece of metal sticking out of the ground, so I used a crowbar to pop it out. This exposed a tangled mass of other junk hidden in the muck. So I attached a chain to it and pulled it out with the forklift, revealing amidst the jungle what seemed to be an entire ancient Aztec archaeological dig full of junk, like a whole civilization was buried back there. One of the key takeaways of “junkyard life” was witnessing how quickly Mother Nature retakes what is hers. Many of the photos in the gallery above showcase the raw power and beauty of nature curling around, ripping through, and devouring everything in its path. In the battle of man vs. machine vs. nature, “Mother Nature bats last, and the bases are always loaded”. This concept can provide solace in the grand scheme of things.
The bamboo really captures the essence of the junkyard saga: the complaints, the contradictions and arbitration of the law, the “don’t give a fuck” attitude from Dad—neighbors, Zoning Board, “interested citizens”, and Police Chief be damned—the mandated solutions, the problems caused by said solutions, the dominance of nature, the subjective appeal of beauty, the successes and failures and ambitions of man. Days before the sale, I had dinner with a nice woman named Linda who was recently retired after having served as the Executive Director of the Nature Conservancy Trust for thirteen years. What some people have done in our situation—and this was a fantasy of mine for a while—is donate their property to the Trust when they die, and the land exists as a nature preserve in perpetuity. Linda told me that our property would not have qualified because it’s not big enough. This actually relieved me of the guilt I had been experiencing—the guilt of selling out and developing the property. You see, I’ve complained about the development of Bucks County for my entire life. Linda also told me that a lot of people don’t realize that the process is not simply donating your land; you also need to finance the continued maintenance of the property. This means bamboo, this means fencing, this means weeds and grass, etc. This is not something we would have wanted to deal with, even if we did qualify. W.B. Homes told us that they are going to use an excavator to dig up the bamboo. Watch Sam’s YouTube series “Bamboo Warrior” here.
Perhaps one of my greatest inferences from life is this: all of the physical assets we own will one day become liabilities. Someday, somebody is going to have to deal with your shit. It was amazing how quickly the property turned into a liability since becoming vacant. We found all types of evidence of shenanigans. Someone broke into the garage (please take whatever you want!), the window to the basement was popped open, people were using the yard as a dog park, and a family of vultures took over the room where Mr. Bigglesworth resided. Some speculate that the vultures ripped Bigglesworth to shreds; others believe that the curse has been lifted and Mr. B roams Bucks County as a free cat once again. One day, we got a call from our real estate broker saying, “you’ve got a problem”. The pilot light went out in the oil heater, we think, and this caused a water pipe to freeze and burst. The result was three feet of flooding in the basement—shelves floating sideways—and a $2,500 water bill plus the cost of hiring someone to clean it up. With windows closed, condensation built up to the point where the ceilings were dripping wet and wide swaths of paint were peeling off the walls. The laws of entropy destine all things toward the path of decay, and all assets transform into liabilities over time.
So ultimately the prevailing emotion is relief. A weight has been lifted, an era has ended, a chapter has closed. We flew back to San Francisco on Wednesday the 6th, and upon picking up our dog Kelce from my father-in-law, Alex, he asked me how I felt. I said, “all things are temporary” and he responded tearily, “but they’re permanent in our souls”. It was later revealed that he had drank a whole bottle of wine by himself that night—again, the election results were determined that day—but still, he had a good point. Yes, selling the property was bittersweet, for it was a major part of my upbringing, the (only) stable place I could call home since my parents’ divorce in 1991, almost a character itself—and losing it felt like losing a part of my identity, like losing Dad all over again. There’s comfort in knowing that the legacy lives on. I do believe in what Alex said; even though everything is temporary in one sense, there is permanence in the fabric of time/space—our souls included—and Shangri-La will continue to exist in our collective memories. About a year ago I had a dream. The dream took place in the future. The property had well-manicured soccer fields where children could play. Who knows, maybe in a thousand years, that is what will come to pass. It’s nice to think that families with kids will be living where all of these “junkyard life” stories once took place.
Although my stories glorify the junkyard (by design), according to historical record, it was a nuisance to others. This retrospective pulls back the curtain a little bit. Dad was the master of the “do nothing” approach. As the name implies, when a problem arises, the strategy is to do nothing. When I ran my problems by Dad, it wasn’t uncommon for his response to essentially be “do nothing”. Although it’s not a complicated concept, it has actually proved to be some good advice that’s helped me get past my borderline neurotic (and stress inducing) inclination to solve problems as soon as possible. The best problems are the ones that resolve themselves on their own accord, and this happens more often than you might think; the trick is allowing time and space for them to do so. Some battles are won simply by waiting out the other party. Take the gate problem or the lunch truck (so-called) problem. Administrations change, people change, priorities change. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it’s good to let your problems breathe. Fortunately, everything worked out in the case of our property.
To conclude, let’s circle back to the beginning of the end—the impetus for writing this retrospective—the Pandora’s Box of New Britain Borough’s file on 117 Bristol Road. The paper on top of the pile was the most recent incident i.e. the 2020 complaint about the bamboo. I called Zoning Officer Mike Italia, who had written, “Because this has repeatedly been an issue, the Borough would like to meet with you to discuss your plans for regular and long-term maintenance of the bamboo”. I told Mike that this was my first time hearing about it, which was true (even though the letter was addressed to me and brother Sam). We shot the shit for a few minutes; it turns out his niece was in my high school class. I informed him of the situation, that we would be selling the property and figuring out solutions for the bamboo. Looking back, that phone call may have been the best news the Borough had heard in years.