On the corner of my desk here at Plugged In headquarters, I have a stack of empty Mountain Dew cans.
The size and shape of the stack varies from week to week and month to month (depending on where I am with my recycling). I was in the process of building a shiny, aluminum pyramid for a while—until my editor knocked it down with a balled-up wad of paper (one of my reviews he didn’t particularly like). I’ve thought about making a castle out of ’em (perhaps one surrounded by a moat of actual Mountain Dew, if I could get HR’s permission) but I haven’t figured out how to construct a drawbridge yet. So for now, I’m just shaping a piece of hexagonal modern art out of them … one that may turn out to be a cogent statement on the conformity and caffeinated consumerism of modern man—or barring that, something that looks just kinda neat.
I thought about my Mountain Dew collection while watching American Pickers the other day, and it made me ponder why we collect the weird stuff we sometimes do.
If you’ve not watched American Pickers, the “plot” (such as it is) is this: Two guys (Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz) trundle around the country, buying stuff from people in the hopes of reselling it to someone else—sometimes for four or five times more than they bought it for. Pickers like Mike and Frank are the middle men in the world of antiquing—but they’re a little like alchemists, too: Instead of turning lead into gold, they take junk and turn it into something “collectable,” and thus profitable.
Sure, there’s not a lot of CGI wizardry involved in the show, no great character development. But the food chain we see at play here is still pretty fascinating.
The folks who Mike and Frank visit tend to be older, and they often live on large plots of land dotted with outbuildings. Their stuff—be it rusty cars or turn-of-the-last-century toys or taxidermied baboons—has often been accumulated for decades, sometimes begun a generation or two before. Often, there seems to be no real pattern for what these folks own: It’s just a mishmash of detritus.
We never really meet the people who buy from Mike and Frank, but I imagine they’re a different sort of person. I picture them as richer, younger, more urban and more urbane. Maybe they own a trendy antique shop, or they’re looking for the perfect piece of Americana to hang in their den or home theater.
To me, the cycle itself seems to say something about America—how we’ve grown and grown richer: You can imagine that the original owners—folks who might have memories of their parents trudging through the Great Depression—collected widgets (whatever they might be) because they might be useful one day. The buyers, on the other hand, know the widgets don’t have any real use at all—and perhaps that’s one of the reasons why they buy them.
In a strange sort of way, maybe my collection of Mountain Dew cans shows that transition in miniature: The cans were once quite useful—each holding 12 fluid ounces of my sugary morning pick-me-up. But emptied of their value, there’s part of me that’s a little loathe to get rid of them. Maybe it’s the part of me—the part that used to sleep on the floor and buy groceries on credit—that thinks, somehow, I’ll find use for them. Or maybe it’s the part of me that likes ’em because they’re just shiny and green, and they add a little color to my dreary cubicle. Maybe I like them because, unlike much of what is found on my desk, they serve no real purpose at all.
Or maybe it’s something else entirely.
When I was growing up in the artsy, hippy community of Taos, N.M., one of my parents’ good friends owned a house made out of old aluminum cans and glass bottles. Really. Each can served as a kind of brick, with the shiny, metallic bases faced inward—turning the interior walls into an expanse of architectural sequins. I don’t know how the house would look to me now, but to a child of 7, the place was magical. And even now, when I look at one of my used cans, I remember just a bit of that magic.
Maybe that’s why we collect what we do—the sellers and buyers of American Pickers and all the rest of us who display salt-and-pepper shakers in our kitchens or show off our collections of vintage comic books. To most folks off the street, maybe this stuff doesn’t look like much. But to the owner, there’s something special in it—a secret magic that few others can see.
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