The Art of Scavenging: Beginnings

My origins as a scavenger

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: how my journey as a junkman began.

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AI Disclaimer

For this publication, I pledge to never use AI for the purposes of brainstorming, organizing, reorganizing, editing, cleaning up, rewording, writing, or generating anything other than what comes out of my own head and hands. Because of that, you will likely find plenty of errors and redundancies and grammatical mistakes.

That is all. Now onto dinner service.

Course 1: McMillions Hashbrowns

The first step of recovery is admitting you’re an addict. However, I’m not a scavenging addict so I won’t admit that. I just love scoring some junk– some street smack– once in a while.

Again, I’m not an addict so I regret nothing, but sometimes I reflect on how I got to this place. That of a scavenger, of someone always on the search for unexpected treasures, a mix of American Pickers, Antique Roadshow, and the Curse of Oak Island. The insatiable hunger for the next deal or the perfect flip. Navigating workarounds for paying for things, stacking discounts, bartering and negotiating. Picking up battered pennies in back alleys, gathering discarded plywood to make planters, checking discarded lottery tickets, scanning discarded gift cards, cashing in coupons off the back of Burger King receipts… that I found on the ground.

Surely this isn’t every American’s dream. So why is it mine?

In the same way that Stanley Yelnats’ great great grandfather Elya Yelnats’ was a no good dirty rotten pig-stealing man who cursed the family for 150 years by refusing to carry a pig up a hill, eventually leading to Stanley himself digging holes in the bleak desert of Camp Green Lake as a child, it appears I’ve been cursed.

I can’t trace the scavenging far down the trunk of my family tree, unless you count my great grandmother picking up pieces of fallen coal on the side of rail lines during the Great Depression. That seems less like a hobby and more like survival.

I can trace it to my maternal grandparents, though. My grandpa wasn’t a pig stealer, though he did raise them. As a youth, he was a chicken thief, but we’ve all been known to run a-fowl (sorry) of the law.

When I was six years old and visiting my grandparents’ house, my grandma would, on occasion, hand me a shovel and tell me to go dig a hole, and as I write this I’m just now realizing that I really am Stanley Yelnats. She’d pull the pointy spade at the end of a long wooden handle out of the garage, wander around the yard for a bit, and say… “Hmmm, try digging here.” So my cousin and I would dig, taking turns lifting grass and dirt. It wasn’t toilsome work. We’d only be a few inches into the soil before we saw it: A glint of silver, a flash of metal, a hint of copper.

We had hit pay dirt.

This was miraculous to us, marvelous even. We played tag and games of S.P.U.D. in this grass all the time. My mom grew up on this farm, oblivious that it was the former stomping grounds of Pennsylvanian pirates. My grandma walked here every day of her life, with a gold and silver mine under her feet! Technically a nickel-copper alloy mine, but metal nonetheless. If only she knew how rich she really was.

As we sifted through the soil, the dirt would unveil the faces of presidents– Washington, Lincoln, Eisenhower. Oddly, the dates were from not so long ago, less than a decade in some cases. Perhaps those had fallen out of my uncle’s pockets and found a spot of quicksand that drew it into the earth more quickly. We dug some more. A bit of green– what is this? A magnetic ring from the Philadelphia Zoo, just like the one I got when I was there last month! I mean, how crazy is that?

Being six years old, none of this was suspicious. It was treasure, after all. Who cares about the logistics of a potential time traveler cutting through decades with coins and souvenirs jingling around in his pockets, arriving at a farm in the middle of Pennsylvania intent on burying his $2.67 treasure right where we were digging. I didn’t have to figure out the science of it, I just needed that money for a pack of baseball cards.

For years, I believed that buried treasure was just… everywhere.

Just a couple months ago, my grandma apologized for tricking us when we were kids, saying she felt so bad for burying that and making us think there was actual treasure. True, it may have led to some pointless digging in my own backyard, wondering how she got so lucky when all I found were some rusty nails. And that was with a metal detector, which I of course asked for, for Christmas that year. I told her not to apologize, it’s one of my favorite memories as a young child.

The treasure hunting came from my grandma, the scavenging came from my grandpa.

You see, he was a man without a tether, bouncing from job to job, all low-wage stuff for the most part. Much of that was spent on booze and cigarettes while my grandma brought in the paycheck to keep the lights on. In his free time and on the clock, he was always pulling side hustles of the most minor magnitudes.

Forgive me if I’ve told this story a dozen times over, but to me it’s the paramount of low-value-low-reward scavenging, really my favorite category of scavenging because it relies solely on effort and persistence. My grandpa was born at a time for many things– to serve in the Korean War, to see the first man walk on the moon, to buy land when there was land to buy. But more important than all of that, he really was born right-place-right-time for the Marlboro Miles phenomenon to take hold.

If you grew up on the ‘90s, then you obviously know the chokehold that Marlboro Miles had on the “buy stuff, get points” marketing promotion angle. McDonald’s Monopoly was the bombastic version of this, arriving once a year with great aplomb, carrot dangling the very real possibility of becoming a millionaire via the good fortune of simply being addicted to Big Macs and liter of colas (though real ones know the best value was the hashbrown with two Monopoly pieces per sleeve). If McDonald’s Monopoly was the bottle rocket of prize promotions, then Marlboro Miles were a slow burn through the accumulation of rewards, an unfiltered version of prizewinning. There was no timetable for the contest. It was endless, like the desert expanse gazed upon by leather-skinned cowboys, taking in the sweet smell of cacti flower as the singe of North Carolina tobacco and lab-formed formaldehyde filled their nasal passages, expelling and blending into the haze of an autumn sunset upon all the land.

The Marlboro point catalog spoke of adventure– kayaks, grill sets, denim jackets, duffel bags, sleeping bags, tents, even a Fuji mountain bike. Quite literally, it offered everything you could find in an outdoor store, just with a red Marlboro logo slapped onto it. It was truly a tapestry of the American dream of stuff made in China. Of course, acquiring these goods meant that you had to smoke an inordinate amount of cigarettes, like a two pack a day habit, to acquire any of the top-tier items. My grandpa was close to that, but his preferred brand was Winston, which he stockpiled in the garage fridge next to the cans of Surge for the kids. It was a real smorgasbord of addictions. Winston didn’t have prizes, probably because they spent all their money sponsoring NASCAR; their customer rewards program was just a future oxygen tank on layaway, paid for in monthly installments of lung tar. That wouldn’t buy Christmas presents for the family.

So my grandpa went scavenging.

When I was growing up, he finally settled into a job at a TA truck stop just a few miles away from us off Interstate 81. I think he was a mechanic or an assistant to one, but for all I know he could have been the shop janitor. At the time, not much was around there. Just a couple other truck stops and gas stations and eventually a Perkins restaurant that would become my first job, bussing tables in the smoking section while it was still a truck stop itself. When truckers came through the area, it was kind of a trading post as well. In some ways, it was a modern version of a wild west town. There were lot lizards and moonshine and buffet meals under dying fluorescent lights. There was even a semi truck with a whole church set-up in its trailer, complete with pews and a pulpit, the preacher stationed in the parking lot in search of weary travelers on the road of life. While at his own truck stop, my grandpa would work whatever hustle he was on at the time. Random goods would show up at their house, my favorite being a Super Mario Game & Watch from Japan, a retro handheld that now fetches upwards of $200 (and that my grandma still has). For the Fourth of July, he would acquire quarter sticks of dynamite, and I’m pretty sure he secured a a gun or two throughout the years.

But nothing compared to the Marlboro Miles.

I’ll never know the extent to which he amassed such an extraordinary amount of Marlboro Miles, but I know it came by hook and by crook, through garbage and trash, snaked off barroom pool tables and scavenged from the tile floor of the local VFW. For years, my grandpa only saw red, scooping up a majority of the items in the prize catalog. One memorable Christmas, he gifted every male adult in the family a Marlboro parka, which I imagine was more of an elaborate practical joke knowing that my minister father would never don such apparel. After he passed away, my grandma passed two of his things on to me– his 9mm Russian Makarov and a Marlboro jean jacket with leather collar. It’s hard to say which one I treasure more.

Marlboro jean jacket with raccoon in dumpster, circle of life

Other brands jumped on this marketing bandwagon, most notably Pepsi. One of the most memorable pieces of ‘90s advertising was the Pepsi points commercial in which a kid shows up to school in a Harrier jet purchased with 7 million points, a stunt that Pepsi almost had to pay out when someone actually accumulated the requisite amount. In my grandpa’s case, he was already digging through trash for Marlboro Miles, so there was no reason not to double down on Pepsi. Again, the prizes came. Pepsi sunglasses and a CD case from the original set, then Arnette wraparound sunglasses and a Santa Cruz Mountain Dew skateboard from the next gen catalog. On top of this, a friend of mine had figured out how to properly angle an unopened soda bottle so you could see the point payout from inside the label, which was a multiplier for us whenever we had the money to buy soda.

Suffice it say, times were good. Ignorance was truly bliss. We didn’t know that an insider was hoarding all the good Monopoly pieces as part of the McMillions Fraud scheme and distributing them to friends and family. None of us cared that Pepsi sucked in comparison to Coke, because they had points that added up to prizes. There was no need for apps and return visits and forgetting passwords and logins just to secure a small fry on a Friday. You just cut points out of labels and sent them in to a real, physical address.

I also didn’t know that I’d also become addicted to cigarettes for a good decade of my life and none of us knew that someday my grandpa would have COPD and spend the last four years of his life on a mix of oxygen and steroids, even if he did live past 80.

All I knew was that collecting was fun and scavenging was even better.

So that’s how I got to where I am, a person who is convinced he’ll someday find a winning lottery ticket on the ground that fell out of somebody’s pocket, who will give a discarded coin a second lease on life, who is convinced that someday he’ll find a suitcase of cash in the woods.

Because you never know when your luck could change, or when it could stay the same.

Maybe I’ve been lucky this whole time.

Course 2

Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week

Finally getting back into a bit of normalcy after school started and schedules are a little bit more standardized. It’s been a mostly calm past couple of weeks, got in some really nice long runs as I’m training for both the New York City Marathon and JFK 50 Miler in November.

We had a new family move in across the street from us, with two boys close in age to our boys. It’s changed everything, almost the entire nature of our little corner here in Baltimore. They had one other friend who they’d play with all the time, but now they have an actual neighborhood crew. It’s fantastic– playing tag and manhunt around the block and in the alley, shooting basketball, running in and out of each other’s houses. I even heard a “bubble gum, bubble gum, in a dish, how many pieces do you wish.” It’s just great.

This next week will be a little crazy as the team at Believe in the Run is heading to Tokyo for the World Athletic Championships. My wife is also coming along, so I’m super excited for her to experience Tokyo, which is probably my favorite place on earth. We leave in 54 hours, so I should probably start packing.

Oh, I’ve also just been wallowing in sorrow and regret for not seeing Oasis at one of their two dates in New Jersey. There’s only so many things you can do in life, but nevertheless… it should have been one of them.

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.

I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to this week’s episode here.

Ingredients List

Things I enjoyed this week.

📖 : “Alas, Babylon” by Pat Frank // Finished this book that was given to my be a Suppertime subscriber (thanks Christina!). Really enjoyed it for the most part, though I thought it was a bit too optimistic that we as a society would somehow band together and get through a nuclear apocalypse. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Cormac McCarthy, but there just wasn’t enough cannibalism for me to take the ending seriously.

“Suttree” by Cormac McCarthy // Speaking of Mr. McCarthy, I started reading this one over the past week and have been loving it so far (only 60 pages in though). When I was in Leadville, I stopped in a small bookstore and really loved the selection. I asked the owner if he curated it himself, and he said yes, so then I asked him which book was his favorite. I had a premonition that he was going to go the Cormac McCarthy route, but was surprised when he pulled this one, which is one that I hadn’t read. So far, I think he may be onto something, because it’s been great. Not much has happened, but his writing is so vivid and creative and just the right amount of pushing and pulling between broad strokes and minute details that it all works.

🎵: I’m a sucker for a good pop song and Gracie Abrams has a whole bunch of good ones on her record from last year. I also prefer her sound and songwriting over Taylor Swift, so when I need to scratch that itch, I’ll just put on “The Secret of Us” and listen to it straight through. There’s just something about her music that strikes a nostalgic chord. Anyway, I never caught her on SNL earlier this year, so I just got around to watching it. Mainly because I was interested in seeing how she pulled off singing “That’s So True” live, because it’s a super hard song from a pacing and range perspective. And she really, really crushed it on the SNL version, which is the one rare case where it actually sounds better live than on the recording. Anyway, I just really enjoyed that, even if I’m eight months late on it.

You can find some of my favorite songs right now on my ongoing Summer 2025 playlist.

END OF MENU

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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