The Corvair

Mary's River snakes through the south end of town, and most of the time she is a quiet stream, offering her banks to the homeless at Avery park, and creating one or two swimming holes for the locals.

As far as I know, she  has not been dammed. So, every year that is extra-rainy, she floods.

Yesterday John and I walked in the city-owned "natural area," a flood plain, that flanks her in the southwest part of town. It is a lonely and lovely thing.

On her bank was a junked car, filled with silt from repeated flooding.

When we lived in the deep South we visited Providence Park in west Georgia, where we laughed at a sign on a nature trail that proclaimed a trashed car as "an ecosystem." It stuck with both of us, though. So whenever we see a junked car out in the middle of nowhere we allow that it might be an ecosystem for various weeds and rodents. It may be so, and we no longer laugh.

Identified by friends on Facebook, the car seems to be an old Corvair or Renault, ruined and dotted with bullet holes. What was its story?

Where had it traveled? How did it end up here? I don't know. But slowly and surely, it is embraced by the world around it. It leaks no oil, and the rear engine was long ago looted. It's now a home for weeds and small animals, Mary's River silt, and not much else.  

You have to love it.