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~Six winters ago, I visited a Craigslister in Auburn Hills to buy Jeep parts. It was dark, snowy, and well below 0 by the time my friend and I arrived to find a young man, roughly 25, in filthy old Carhartt coveralls standing in a small, dimly lit 1940s-era garage...
...He stood there, covered in oil, surrounded by dozens of four-liter Jeep engines and a mountain of Jeep XJ transmissions. A propane heater roared in the corner, shooting a huge flame to keep the man from freezing, and aiding the singular light bulb under which he worked...
It was lonely. Just this young, dirty, guy in a dark, cold Michigan garage. My friend and I entered to what would have been pure silence had it not been for the subtle clicks of this man's ratchet and the grey noise of that propane flamethrower.
I don't know why I often think about that young Craigslist Michigander in the coveralls surrounded by stacks of car parts, covered in oil, and quietly wrenching in an ice-cold tiny garage under a singule light. Visually, it was striking. As if I'd stepped into a different era...
*single... I don't know where I'm going with this, but that moment has stuck with me for some reason. The quietness. The discomfort. The chaotic pile of worn-out parts. The filth. The darkness. The young man clicking his ratchet into the February night. All alone.
After joining Jalopnik and diving deep into wrenching culture, I began meeting numerous people who reminded me of this young man. Often times, they'd become old, their operation having expanded into the fields surrounding their homes. One moment they were 25 listening to the...
crisp click of a ratchet on a winter night, the next they were 70, talking to me in a garage in rural Missouri about the incredible Renaults among their collection of 300+ cars spread across the land. Or in a suburb of Ann Arbor trying to fend off the authorities. Or in...
...northern Michigan walking me through the woods behind their home, describing how they planned to fix this car and that car with repairs that I knew would take them well into their 100s.
Truly fascinating people with passion that knows no bounds. But that perhaps should.
Truly fascinating people with passion that knows no bounds. But that perhaps should.
