Earlier in the summer, a photographer buddy of mine told me a friend of a friend of his lived out in Kendal, ON with a ton of old cars just sitting on their property. He asked if I’d be interested in checking it out and bringing my camera along. Of course I jumped at the opportunity. He said he’d try to arrange for us to head over there sometime in the fall when the colours were vibrant and leaves had started to fall.
So this past weekend, it finally happened. I’d never really been to this area before. Only passed through briefly on the way to somewhere else. We got an early start. 8:30am on Saturday morning. The grass was wet and the air was crisp, but it didn’t matter, because this place was like nothing I had ever seen before.
There were a couple dozen cars, tractors, and trucks towards the front of the property. I naively said to my buddy, “Wow! There’s gotta be like 200 or 300 cars here!” He turned and laughed at me. He responded in his heavy British accent, “F**k, mate… there’s a lot more than that!”
After a short uphill walk through a wooded area, we came to a clearing. I had to pick my jaw up off the leaf littered ground. I immediately realized I had spoken too soon. My friend wasn’t exaggerating. There were old, rusting vehicles as far as the eye could see.
I trudged up and down the seemingly endless rows of vehicles. Mostly North American brands: GM, Ford, Pontiac, Dodge, and Chevrolet. The deeper I wandered into the property, the older the cars got. I only know as much about cars as the next guy, but they appeared to range from the early 80s all the way back to the 1940s.
I had never in my life seen anything like this before. It felt as if there was a music festival at a rural outdoor venue, thousands of concert goers parked their cars in orderly rows, then disappeared from the face of the earth. Like some sort of cult/rapture/apocalypse took place.
I especially loved the cars with trees growing right up through them. Most were stained with rust and had moss growing on them. Others appeared to be sinking into the ground, being swallowed up by the surrounding leaves and shrubbery. Faded paint on old, forgotten tow trucks revealed their original locales: Oshawa, Peterborough, Bowmanville, or Cobourg.
After being so busy in October with hired photography work, it was refreshing to get out and shoot strictly for myself. Before I even had a chance to peek at my watch, three hours had flown by and I had nearly 500 images to pick from.