Easily the most useless thing that our dad brought home from the dump, a 15 foot rubber life raft from some sort of ship.
Behind the green once-Saab, under piles and piles of tires, was this "thing". A twisted mass of rubber and vinyl that had been employed as "ground cover" more than anything. I suspect dad thought he could use it to "cover something" or something like that.
It's impossible to tell what this thing was from the photos, and it had to be dragged out by chaining it to a car. Once out into the open yard, I laid it all flat and discovered it originally was about 15 feet long, with two layers of inflatable tubes, some sort of lights built into it, and divided into 3 sections. I think it also had some sort of flares attached to it on ropes, and all sorts of various directions and stuff. It was pretty old, as the lack of safety orange seemed to indicate.
Whatever it was originally for, it was now trash that was now nearly impossible to get rid of. It was partly under the root system of all sorts of horrible weeds and also very wet from the rainwater that had been basting inside the tires, now as a sauce in which a whole mosquito civilization had seen it's genesis. Utterly disgusting and useless (it was already full of holes 25 years ago), it had to be cut up into 4 manageable pieces and rolled up and put into 4 very large 40 gallon garbage bags.
Thankfully we were still on un-restricted garbage pick up (they have since changed over to buy-your-own town bags), and they picked it up no questions asked.. They were very heavy, to say the least.
Yet it still begs the question.. Why do we own this? Once again, he saved that?
-Tara
