The New Bindle

 

I like looking for things along the roads. I like finding toilets, bumpers, rundown houses, and recently, discarded shopping carts. Shopping carts are interesting to me because they’re ubiquitous and multi-functional. They can be easily turned into something else without much work. They’re sturdy and easy to steal. They’re like post-industrial cars that haven’t received their motors. They’re trailers. They’re big trashcans. Most importantly, they’re somewhat expendable, tossed aside whenever their function has been exhausted.

They’re like “the new bindle,” and who doesn’t like hobo evocation?

Peter’s Creek Parkway, the road that crosses Silas Creek Parkway in Winston-Salem NC, is lousy with these. For the past few years, folks have set up residences in the woods up and down Peter’s Creek and Silas Creek Parkways, right beside Interstate 40. To move their “treasures” around, many of these people take shopping carts and pile as much as they can inside of them. I imagine it’s things they collect from the road or from dumpster diving the many shops in the area. I once saw a cart filled with shoes and a hand painted sign advertising a “sale” on the lot. Twenty dollars, not a bad deal. Sometimes these carts have five or six feet of stuff in them. Ride down either of these roads, and you’ll see carts off to the side of the road or just sitting in the green-space in the middle of the road. I don’t know where the collectors go. I don’t know why they take so much time to collect the items just to abandon them.

It’s an activity that draws attention to itself. In recent months, I’ve noticed that the piled high carts have started to mostly disappear, leaving only the modestly filled ones to languish by the major thoroughfares. Always looking for another thing to look for, find, and then document in some ridiculous way, I started taking pictures of these carts whenever I was driving around. Any creative use of a shopping cart I snapped a picture of, mostly looking for carts filled with weird stuff, or in an odd location. I pull up and snap a picture, most of the time I don’t have to get out of my car.

I had a few minutes to waste when I went on a shopping cart hunt. The sweet spot for shopping carts is off Silas Creek Parkway. From Compare Foods until Taco Bell, you see at least one of them daily. Since I like to get some variety in my pictures, from many different places as possible, I only go by there occasionally. It had been a while, so I thought I was due to treat myself to the wealth of carts lined up in that area, three of them.

I took pictures of the first two, nothing out of the ordinary, but then I came to the third cart which was right by IHOP. When I put my head out the window and extended my phone, I noticed paper inside the cart. Lots of paper. Most of my waking life is spent looking for paper so seeing it sitting out for me, in broad daylight, was a dream come true. An oasis in the middle of a Chinese Restaurant buffet made possible by roving hobos. What grabbed my attention is that I saw that infamous Avery logo that goes with printable labels. It was enough to get me out of the car to check it out. Clearly, someone did some dumpster diving at the Office Max in that shopping center. I’m sure they tried to sell what they picked up. I ended up taking a few unopened packs of printable labels, blank greeting cards, and something you attach to windows. Later in the day, I thought about going back and taking the rest of the stuff, spreading the wealth around.