Roadside Art

By Beth Yarbrough

Some scenes are fictional tales begging to be told. This is one such scene.

My daughter prefers interstate travel for road trips, which is surely an errant gene. She didn’t get that from her mama, whose genetic profile reads something about “two-lane blacktop” on every other line.

I live for moments like the one above. The intersection in rural South Carolina doesn’t announce itself with preview signs that say “Car in the Air, 2 miles ahead”. Instead, the thing just presents itself without warning and then calmly stares you down.

“What? You’ve never seen an old car up on a pole? Not my problem.”

Given a complete absence of any facts, here is what I think happened - or at least could have. You are welcome to disagree.

Let’s say the man’s name was Junior. He was the king of the northeast corner of Highway 301 and Highway 176 in rural South Carolina. Obviously a mechanic, and an alpha male, the whole world came through his door sooner or later. He didn’t much care one way or another, but if he liked you, he’d work on your car.

If he didn’t, he’d tell you he didn’t do transmissions “Go on up to the Chevy place in Orangeburg.” It didn’t matter when you told him “Orangeburg doesn’t have a Chevy place.” His back was already turned.

You didn’t want to make him mad.

A good case in point was that time back in 1956 when Newby Winn crossed him. The thing started when he agreed to rebuild the brakes in Newby’s 1953 Chevy and Newby disputed the work and dragged his feet about paying. Junior refused to hand over the keys and things went sideways from there. After a two-week standoff that eventually ended up drawing the whole community in to take sides and caused a split in one of the churches, Newby’s phone rang. It was Junior. “Come get your car”.

We still don’t know how he got the thing up there. It happened in the night. And it never came down. My take on things is that Junior himself may have died in 1973, but he never left his corner. I think he just grabbed himself a couple of beers and decided to float on up to the drivers seat of that car and spend eternity right there. And the fear of him is still so strong in these parts that no one dares go in there and knock the icon to his memory off its perch - especially not anyone named Newby Winn or his kin.

Maybe you have a different take. Maybe you are from around there and know what really happened. Either way, here is a lovely piece of roadside art to inspire your imagination and one thing is for sure. It doesn’t live on the interstate.