The Kitchen Garden Novice: On Picking

I have a confession to make. I am a closet fan of the History Channel's American Pickers. I can veg out and watch that show mindlessly for an hour. (Actually, if you throw in a Mexican take-out dinner, I'll watch for several. Follow it with an episode of Pawn Stars, and I can be in front of the tube for days.) 

For those of you who haven't enjoyed this guilty pleasure, American Pickers is a docu-reality show that follows two antique dealers, Mike and Frank, as they scour the rural landscape in search of resellable...well...junk.  Let's just call it what it is. Most of their acquisitions lay untouched, unnoticed for decades in someone's yard, basement, or barn, just waiting to be uncovered and possibly, possibly restored.  Some of their finds they resell "as is." The value of those items is enhanced by the patina of their age and decay. Patina--that's a euphemism for "rust," isn't it?

I cannot tell you why I have become a Pickers junkie. We've already established the fact that I get a kick out of recycling old vintage clothing--(see my previous post on Skirting the Issue.) Perhaps I identify with Mike and Frank's sense of adventure in the hunt. But that's about where my empathy ends. Once they uncover a stash of "treasure" it's a bit like viewing scavengers rip apart a carcass. As they zero in on what they really want, let the games begin. Mike and Frank are masters at haggling over trash.

The most recent episode centered around a hot tip they received from their homebase about a man named Hobo Jack. They followed this lead down the railroad tracks and into the woods to a dump site of landfill proportions. In the timber they met one wily picker who had been collecting ''stuff" for decades. They spent hours sifting through piles of junk, superficially covered under tarps and inside dilapidated shacks. I'm not even sure the property belonged to Hobo Jack. Mike and Frank were like two kids on Christmas morning.

Now what struck me about this episode was not that these two pickers were so enthralled by their discovery. What blew me away was Hobo Jack.  He spent decades acquiring stuff and squirreling it away. For what? He wasn't even aware anymore what he had or where it was. He had attended no careful maintenance to any of his cache. But when offered cash for some of his horde, you would have thought he was in possession of museum objets d'art. He immediately recognized the Gollum-like gleam of greed in the two pickers' eyes. And he drove the hard bargain. After much dickering, Jack accepted several thousand dollars for a few of his treasures. And I had to wonder...what will a hobo do with that kind of money?

I'm left to marvel at the irony of it all. One man's trash is indeed another man's treasure. We value that which we want. Those things are only valuable because we assign their worth to them. Centuries from now, if the same items remain and have not gone to dust, will they be of value to everyone or to just a select few--those born to be pickers?