The Poetry of Transience
A car graveyard—back in my youth in the 1960s, that phrase had a magical ring to it and held a peculiar fascination for my brother and me. There, cars weren’t scrapped or stripped for parts (what a word!), but lay peacefully side by side, laid to rest.
These cars weren’t viewed as potential organ donors or future “classic cars.” No—they had served their purpose and were now being returned to the earth through a slow natural process. After all, the iron they were made of had been extracted from the earth.
We weren’t aware that harmful substances were also seeping into the soil and, consequently, into the water. On our wanderings, we were fascinated by how the process of decay transformed monochromatic colors into dazzling patterns of color, how a tree grew through the sunroof, how moss spread protectively over a car like a roof covering, and how the car bodies lay wearily on the ground once the tires had lost their air. A vague sense of the transience of everything humans create took root within us.
In the spring, *Automobil Revue* would always publish its unforgettable special issues on the Geneva Motor Show, that glittering, glamorous world of flawless car bodies. But even they would one day find their final resting place in a junkyard (unless they were lucky enough to be part of a collection today).
“Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas,” it says in the Old Testament—in the Book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” It stands for the transience of all earthly things and their futility.
Normally, this isn’t a topic one encounters much as a teenager. But it has stayed with me to this day, so much so that one day, on a previously undeveloped “lot” in my Scale 0 model railroad layout, I began to create a car graveyard. I was inspired by a beautifully weathered model garage that I’d discovered under a table at an open-air flea market in southern Burgundy for two euros.
There they lie now—the sedans, the coupes, and the convertibles—resting quietly in their peculiar beauty of decay, and in their own right, on a 1:43 scale, serving as a memento of an “institution” that no longer exists in reality for environmental reasons: the car graveyard. May it rest in peace.
