When  I meet the people who call themselves “scrappers,” I sometimes think of Mel Gibson and those grim and futuristic Dystopian movies. Roscoe is a scrapper and he scavengers all through the country for anything with metal in it – tires, car parts, pails and tin. He loves old barns and he barters for wages. If he can use the metal and wood, no charge. If he can’t, he’ll haul it to the dump or take it to an old farm and buried it. When he showed up, he looked deep into the woods and said he was sure there was a boiler or old rake out there  – and sure enough there was a rusty old boiler, buried behind some brush.

“Scrappers” are pretty new in the country. Metal was once so plentiful it wasn’t worth much. It is now. But Roscoe will take anything with metal in it, even old tires. I asked him if I could photograph him, and he said he didn’t have much of a face. Not true, I said, he has a wonderful face. I just hired him for a days’ wages to haul some of the wood from the collapsed barn away. You can’t call a scrapper, they don’t have cards or cell phones. They appear or they don’t. If you want to make sure they come back, you hold onto the tailgate of their trucks, and you know they’ll be back.