Junk

by Alison Stewart

  “No way,” says Josh.

  This is a first for the duo. They aren’t exactly sure what it is they are going to haul out of this place. The are greeted by a soft-spoken middle-aged auto mechanic who happens to double as the new owner of this establishment.

  “Are you Jonathan?” asks Nathan.

  “Yes sir. Let me show you upstairs.”

  It starts to make sense when they hit the door. This must have been an old time garage for the locals in the Weaverville area. It has the distinct look of a place changing hands. While the garage itself is orderly and tidy, you can see in one of the corners a tangle mess of tools. Jonathan has only owned the place a month. Not so long ago the whole first floor looked like that corner, but now just the attic does. That’s where the men were headed. They climbed up some brown, rickety wood stairs to what could generously be called a second floor. It was more like a crawl space. If you were just one hair over six feet you’d have to hunch over.

  “I’m gonna be the first one to hit my head,” says Josh. “It isn’t a day at Junk Recyclers if someone doesn’t get hurt.” Nathan confesses he crushed his finger last week.

  What the heck was up there? The ghosts of the previous auto shop including four ACs, water pumps, steering wheels, air filters, carburetors, more car parts, Carquest BF252 oil filter, and all of it was on industrial steel shelving. But to the trained eye, like Nathan’s, there were nonautomotive items tucked away. Push aside a crushed old box and behind it was a blue tin of Laura Lynn coffee from a southern grocery chain. An old floral couch was covered up too. There was an old workout bench too. This wasn’t just a storage space for parts. It appears someone and his cat bunked up there more than occasionally.

  This is the moment of truth. What can they take for free? Nathan just wants to be certain he makes the right decision, so he calls Tyler to explain the situation. The issues are 1) this could be a daylong event, 2) the things they could remove for free, mostly metal, might not be worth anything. After a couple of minutes on the phone of listening and nodding, Nathan has an answer: “Well, if it is over five hundred pounds of metal we can take it for free. So there’s definitely over five hundred pounds of metal. So it is worth some money.” Tyler also suggests they look for any cool gears or any materials that Mike McCracken could use.

  The client is polite, but isn’t really interested in all that. He just wants to know what can go and if it can go today. Nathan tells him all the metal can go for free and anything else will be based on how much of the truck is filled, like all the other junk removal models. Jonathon considers this and hands them some disappointing news. “Well, take what you can for free and put the rest in the corner.” Not the best answer for the financial bottom line. Hauling out the metal will be labor intensive, but not that lucrative at the scrap shop. It is going to be a long morning.

  The next two hours are backbreaking and at moments a little scary. Taking all the car parts of the shelves and putting them into boxes makes a lot of noise in a room with low ceilings. The sound of metal on metal is frightening. Nothing good ever happens when metal crashes together. When they move the boxes from place to place it sounds like elephants clog dancing. Repeatedly they load up the dolly with the heavy boxes and slowly, very slowly, chug it down the steep narrow wood stairs one riser at a time. Ka-thunk-boom. Ka-thunk-boom. Ka-thunk-boom. “This one is going to be a backbreaker,” says Josh, who was on the bottom-receiving end of one particularly enormous load. Nathan holds on to the top of the loaded dolly with all his might or else Josh will get a face full of gears. It was an extreme trust exercise.

  When they finally get this particular load out to the truck, Nathan lets go of his end and Josh pops up into the air like the skinny kid on the end of a seesaw whose husky buddy decides to take a seat. It is a well-needed moment of levity. They notice that the wheels on the dolly look like they are going to pop and they pray the tires just hold out. After several hours they determine they can’t do all the boxes of gears and the metal shelving in one run. They take what they can to the scrap yard and unload 860 pounds of metal from that job. It yields less than $100.

  Tyler knows that free junk removal isn’t going to pay the bills either. Keeping the store stocked is really what is important. “In the beginning I thought we could do all free removal. You can’t.” Now it is fairly balanced. He says in gross sales the store brings in about 60 to 70 percent of gross profits. He believes in this model and plans to expand to Florida. He thinks he’s hit the financial and emotional sweet spot of what the customers want and need. “People fall in love with repurposing things and putting them in the home.”

  14

  THE REPAIR CAFÉ

  * * *

  “LOOK! IT’S AN ACTUAL TYPEWRITER.” The woman placed the 1970s-era boxy machine with the familiar black keys and silver hammers on the table. She was enthusiastic about her recent purchase. “I bought it at a yard sale for five dollars! I just liked it. Now I need it to work.”

  Dimitri, a bald, sixty-something, retired mechanical engineer took off the top as the lady handed him the only new typewriter ribbon she could find. Dimitri quickly saw the issue. The existing ribbon uptake reel in the typewriter was much smaller than the new ribbon reel. Dimitri took the end of the new ribbon and fastened it to the empty smaller uptake reel. He then inserted the power drill into the center of that smaller reel. When he started the drill, an instant winch was created that automatically spooled in the ribbon from the big new wheel onto the smaller old one that fit in the typewriter. The MacGyver move drew a few oohs and ahhs from others who were taking part in this Repair Café in upstate New York.

  “Repair Café is a free community meeting place to bring beloved but broken items to be repaired for free.” That is John Wackman’s elevator pitch at a Repair Café in New York’s Hudson Valley. He organizes a regularly scheduled event where anyone can show up to the designated location with something to be fixed and volunteers will do their best to make it right. If you have a VCR that won’t fast forward, a tinkerer at the electronics table might help you out. If the hem on your coat is loose, an altruistic seamstress will tack it right up.

  Wackman sees a lot of worried looking people enter the room full of handy and neighborly folks. They aren’t quite sure what to expect when they arrive with a busted object, but usually are quite happy when they leave. “People bring things they care about. It’s broken [but] they’d like to keep it. They don’t want to throw it away or buy a replacement. But where are they going to take it? That is what we address.”

  It is a common problem. For some broken items, especially older ones, the parts don’t exist anymore, or the people who know how to fix these things don’t exist anymore or have become increasingly hard to find. Or in some cases, a fix can cost as much as a new item. It is why so many nearly useable items are relegated to junk status.

  This tendency to pitch instead of stitch really bothered Dutch journalist Martine Postma. She became concerned about the acceptance of the chuck-it culture. “It’s a shame, because the things we throw away are usually not that broken. There are more and more people in the world, and we can’t keep handling things the way we do. . . . I had the feeling I wanted to [do] something, not just write about it.”1 Her solution was simple: connect people with broken things with people who could and would fix them for free.

  The first Repair Café was held on October 18, 2009, in the lobby of the Fijnhout Theatre in Amsterdam. Fast forward to 2015 and there are Repair Cafés in sixteen countries, including the United States. The small idea grew rapidly and the Repair Café soon morphed into the Repair Café Foundation, a nonprofit overseer of cafes that fall under its purview. The foundation stays alive through donations, including a six-figure grant from the Dutch government. To be affiliated with and replicate the Repair Café model, one must purchase a starter kit for forty-five euro, about fifty dollars. It includes a graphics package to use on promotional literature, a press kit, start-up advice, guidelines about safety, (e.g.,
“When in doubt, don’t”), liability waivers, and language to use to describe a Repair Cafe. It asks that you use all of the logos and use the repaircafe.org site as your hub. It is a bit like a franchise without the commercial element.

  The first official version of the Repair Café in the United States was held in Palo Alto, California, in October 2012, founded by Pete Skinner, who says he had no clue how successful the venture would be. “The community has been extremely responsive because people are kind of fed up with the whole buy-it-and-toss-it mentality. It just resonates with people. Whether it makes any economic sense or any sort of time management sense, the fact that they have an option to do something other [than] put it in their basement and never have it see the light of day or toss it out.”

  In May 2012 Pete was a CFO of a software company and read about the first Netherlands Repair Café in the New York Times. His own personal experience compelled him to make it happen in the states. “I fall in the category of the frustrated consumer who doesn’t like to throw stuff out from both an environmental standpoint and bridling at our world of over-hyped consumerism. Also, I’m a cheap Midwesterner, so I just don’t like throwing stuff out! What I am not is an expert fixer. When I read this article I had a basement full of stuff I wanted to try to fix, but didn’t have the time or skills to tackle.”

  Within six months of reading the article, Pete found a location, secured the fixers, and started a 501(c)(3). He paid for the start-up costs out of pocket, about $1,000. Half of that went to establishing the nonprofit status. Pete found that big companies that wanted to donate services, like food for the workers or cases of water, wouldn’t make donations without it being an official nonprofit. The Palo Alto Repair Café has been able to sustain itself and has no shortage of volunteers. Pete says thirty to forty show up at the quarterly events, and being in Silicon Valley you can imagine they are some skilled tinkerers. “We have a great collection of volunteers who are technically savvy and they are really comfortable tearing stuff apart and diving in. You might expect that in Palo Alto or any community with a big engineering population. . . . We see a lot of household electronics, stereos, receivers, CD players, toasters, microwave ovens, stuff that is—things that have printed circuit boards that require a special level of willingness to tackle complexity. The greatest volume—electronics.”

  Some of the Repair Cafés are more productive than others. In some cities it has been a one and done venture. It takes commitment to keep one up and running consistently. It requires a regular space, reliable volunteers, and good marketing. It is interesting that out of the approximately twenty Repair Cafes in the states, six of them—Kingston, Rosendale, Gardiner, New Paltz, Rhinebeck, and Poughkeepsie—are located in New York’s Hudson Valley around the Catskill Mountains. It has allowed the Hudson Valley to have a fix-it event almost every weekend, hosted by a community entity like a church or a town hall. This part of New York state is a blend of progressives, hunters, college students, average income families, and senior citizens. The towns themselves are old. Rhinebeck was founded in 1686 and Kingston was the first capital of the state of New York. Maybe there’s something in the DNA of the population in this area because, coincidentally, this the part of the “New World” settled by the Dutch. If there is an area that appreciates the old and how it can be new again, this is it.

  At the Rhinebeck town hall a woman wandered in to see what the fuss was all about. The event has been advertised in the local paper and there’s a big sign out front.

  “Lamps are us!” a volunteer offers as she is greeted at the check-in desk.

  “Well, I will run home and get my lamp!” says the lady.

  “I think you should,” says the volunteer.

  “I think I will,” says the lady.

  And she does. She’s back in twenty minutes with an old, black, three-pronged floor lamp. She explains, “It has been in the closet for five years. I took it to a lamp guy in town and he said it would be fifty dollars. I can’t do that right now.” Terry Nelson gets to work on it. Nelson is a skilled woodworker with her own shop in the area. The lamp lady doesn’t know it, but someone who builds high-end furniture and has built an exhibit that appeared in a New York museum is fixing her old light. She often does small electrical work when she is installing her custom-made cabinets. “It is a bad switch. It is fairly simple, but you kinda have to know how to do it. You want to be safe with it. It is electricity.”

  Terry has volunteered at every Hudson Valley Repair Café so far. “I thought this is a fabulous idea because people are always asking me to fix anyway! I am always thinking, What kind of donation or contribution can I make to help the community that’s not paying money out to something? I do it in real terms. That fits into that realm.” Lamps and vacuums are the items seen most often at these cafés. She remembers the first one being exhausting and that she worked for four hours straight. “I’ve seen some nice antique lamps. It had a Roadshow feel. People come in and say This was my grandmother’s. You hear the story that This was my great-grandmother’s and it sat by her bed. And then it didn’t work and it was in the attic for fifty years. That’s kind of fun.”

  The woman with the three-pronged lamp applauded when it lit up for the first time in years. She thanked Terry profusely and seemed at a loss for what to do. She seemed to want to pay Nelson or extend the interaction in some way. She was a bit discombobulated that she could just take her lamp and go home. She finally asked, “Can I do something for you?” Terry just smiled and said, “You can leave a tip.” Small tip jars were on the table and it seemed to make people comfortable to stick a dollar or two in a jar for a job well done.

  When John Wackman started the café in New Paltz, it was only the fourth in the country. He is a tall, thin man. His boyish face and thick, black-frame glasses give him a youthful look, despite a full head of white hair. As a former television producer he is well suited to bring together different types of people to work toward one goal. It was a good skill set when he had to go about finding the volunteers for this thing no one had ever heard of before. First, he went after the pros, like Terry Nelson. “Where do you find seamstresses, jewelry repair, digital? You reach out to the people who are already doing this, and then people would say, Why would they want to volunteer and give away what they do? The answer is, it is one Saturday every other month. There is no better way than to get out into community and let people know what they do. Although nobody talks about that. In fact, I have to remind these guys to Bring your cards!”

  So many of the skills needed are only known by people of a certain age. Home economics and shop classes are relics of public school curriculums of the past. John went to the source to find folks who still knew how to fix things: retirees. “I became aware of the ‘Retired men of New Paltz.’ They meet for breakfast the first Monday of every month at the Plaza Diner. Every meeting they need a speaker. They invited me. I got immediately three or four guys.”

  “Gonna be a good day!” John said to no one in particular as he surveyed the room. His television production skills were on full display as he set the stage for the second anniversary of the New Paltz Repair Café. He prepared the basement of the United Methodist Church on Main Street by spreading out sunny tablecloths on card tables and placing small milk glass vases with bright yellow plastic flowers right in the middle. The muffled sound of the organist practicing in the chapel bled through the ceiling as he affixed posters to the walls and placed handmade magazine-collage-style posters on display easels at each station. They read, THINGS MADE OF WOOD, DIGITAL DEVICE RECONFIG., DOLLS & STUFFED ANIMALS, and CLOTHING AND TEXTILES.

  He really wants the café and community aspects of the day to shine through. That means snacks would be offered; some volunteers have donated baked goods. In the kitchen area of the church, John was joined by four other fixers who debated about how to fix the coffee. They end up just dumping grounds into an industrial grade brewer and pressing start.

  The finishing touches included posters with
event-appropriate quotes to inspire or set the tone for the day. A line from the romantic English poet William Blake read, “Tools are Made,” while another offered a deadpan humor provided by absurdist Steven Wright which read, “I couldn’t fix your brakes, so I made your horn louder.”

  The sewing table sees the early action in the day. Lisa and Caroline are patient and full of advice. Lisa started as a kid creating accessories for her toys. “I made a sleeping bag for my Troll doll, with a zipper that went all the way around.” Lisa will take care of work that needs a machine and Caroline will handle any hand stitching that comes their way. She unpacks colorful spools of threat and pieces of yarn. “The hardest thing is for me is the items go from the pragmatic to the sentinmental. . . . It is something like, either a zipper all the way to My friend who died gave this to me and . . . and the item is usually close to falling apart.” Sometimes an item is too far gone and she’s quick to tell people the truth, but if it can be saved Caroline will try and usually succeed. “I had a woman cry once. She was so excited.”

  Caroline met John at an Earth Day event and she had the thought, I have skills! When I asked her if she was ever a professional seamstress she hollers, “Oh, God no!” This is and has always been purely a hobby for the retired MBA (1972) turned environmental advocate.

  She and Lisa often deal with poorly made clothing, and it is hard to tell someone that the item they brought in for a tweak is made of cheap material and the fix will be very temporary. Low-grade goods are something repairers deal with a lot. One of the woodworkers put it this way: “If it is something new, sometimes they are using materials that are not very strong that can’t be glued. It can really only be patched.”