At some point I actually thought I was headed into the woods with Freddy Kruger. Lamb to slaughter. My wife always warned me about buying and selling stuff on Craigslist. Might meet a thief. Or an axe murderer. Or even Freddy.
I had ridden my scooter up the road about thirty miles, way into the country, to meet a guy who was selling glass insulators. You know, from old telephone poles. Super price. And he said he had a lot of them. Unusual ones too. I found the house and rode up the driveway to meet the man standing in the driveway. Seemed nice enough.
He had said he found a stash of these insulators. In my mind that meant that the guy had found a box full in his parent’s attic. Or he ran up on them at a yard sale or something. So I was expecting to go into the house to look at the insulators. But as we talked, he kept walking. Past the house. Past the first barn. Past another outbuilding. And then we came to a fence with a locked gate and we climbed over. Into a field with tall grass and down a dirt road. Where the hell was this guy taking me? And that’s when I saw Freddy Kruger’s face superimposed on my guide.
I don’t know this dude. Never saw him before. Did I tell anyone where I was going today? But it got really weird when he hung a left turn off the dirt path and went straight into a dense forest thick with underbrush. No path. Just crashing through the bushes. And for some reason I followed him. Maybe because he had been telling me about the religious poetry he wrote.
Inside this thicket I realized that his stash of insulators was there in front of me. On the ground. There were hundreds of them strewn all about. Some half buried. They had been there a long time because the trees and the vines and the shrubs had all grown up around them.
He told me his father had worked for the telephone company and had dumped them all there over the years. Don’t know why. He didn’t say. Just that they had taken up residence there because they had been dumped there. I was more interested in finding some rare and valuable specimen than in asking those questions. A lot of them were broken. Or chipped.
The two of us, me and Freddy, spent about thirty minutes rooting around digging these things up. In the end I had five really nice ones. Dirty, but they would clean up well. We walked back to my scooter, through the thicket, and the field, and down the dirt path, over the fence, past the barn and past the house. And he told me he was sorry for all the inconvenience. He knew he had a box full of really nice ones in the house somewhere, but couldn’t remember where. He told me to take the ones I’d found, no charge. When he found the box he’d let me know.
Nice guy. Looking for a job. Tough times. And I thought to myself, “ I sure do meet some nice people doing this Craigslist thing.”
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