Ben Neale
One recent evening, while driving home I passed on the roadside what appeared to be a perfectly-good wingback chair. Handsome, sturdy-looking, and upholstered in dark blue fabric, this regal seating amenity was standing under a shade tree beside a lightly-trafficked rural road, looking as if it were just waiting for someone to show up with a side table and standard lamp, then sit down to watch the world go by. It hadn’t been there when I’d left home that morning, so since it was only a couple of miles from our house, I did what any self-respecting roadside scavenger would do: rushed home and traded vehicles for something large enough to put it in. I knew there wasn’t much time. Even on a road as sparsely traveled as this one, it wouldn’t be long before another driver with the scavenger gene happened by. As I gunned the car back to our house, then jumped into the farm truck that we keep for occasions such as this, I considered what I might do with my newfound throne. Adding such grand seating to my barn-cum-workshop was an appealing notion. Or perhaps this was the universe’s way of telling me to add furniture upholstery to my long list of hobbies, since the chance that something nasty had befallen the chair’s existing fabric seemed a likely explanation for it being on the side of the road in the first place. As I rounded the corner, my heart leapt when I saw that the chair was still there. But no sooner had I set about furtively heaving the thing into the back of my truck then came the sound of another vehicle coming down on the road. It pulled to a stop beside me, and the driver’s window rolled down to reveal an attractive lady who, through batted eyelids, said “Oh, I was just coming back for that bee-OOTiful chair … but it looks like you’ve beaten me to it!” What, I ask, was a gentleman supposed to do? Smiling through gritted teeth I waved away her protestations as I lifted the damn chair into the back of her SUV, wondering for the umpteenth time why I don’t drive a pickup truck on a daily basis.
Yes, the roadside scavenger in me is strong. But I come by it honestly. When I was a kid my dad would offload all kinds of unwanted belongings by simply putting them by the road in front of the house with a “Free to Good Home” sign leaning against them, then sit back to see how long it would take before someone stopped to pick them up. During my adolescence, bicycles and baby beds, skis, a trampoline, a picnic table, a windsurfer, a dog kennel, a wardrobe, and various other once-cherished-but-since-outgrown belongings left our household in this fashion. We lived on a busy road, with a grassy street verge out front (this is called a “nature strip” in Australia) which made a useful staging ground for things you wanted to get rid of. Dad’s freecycling never rose to the organizational level of a yard sale. Rather, whenever he tired of stepping over or around some item of furniture or recreational equipment that had been relegated to the garage, he would just drag it out to the nature strip, lean the “Free-to-Good-Home” sign up against it, and see how long it would take to disappear. Usually the disappearing happened overnight—under cover of darkness—which suggests that I’m not the only one who feels a little bit furtive about making off with stuff from the side of highways. The next morning dad would emerge, survey the empty nature strip, then go back inside to read his newspaper with considerable satisfaction.
No money ever changed hands during these exchanges so I suppose my dad was an exponent of freecycling—the practice of giving stuff away for free rather than sending it to the landfill. What a decent and satisfying practice freecycling is. Who amongst us doesn’t suffer from the condition of being surrounded by stuff too hard to sell but too good to throw away? Online, there are loads of freecycling groups that exist to align supply and demand between their members. Or failing that, one can simply put that bike or wingback chair out by the curb with a “free to good home” sign, and just see how long it takes to take flight. You’ll be lightening your existential load, keeping stuff out of the landfill, and affording someone the special pleasure of getting something for free (combined with the mildly illicit thrill of making off with it from the roadside). Everybody wins. You can’t ask for better than that.
