Holy Haulers, Baltimore!

Photo by Dale Prince.

Baltimore is the land of a million amateur haulers. The streets are teeming with old trucks hand-painted with phone numbers and offers to haul anything—telephone poles always have handwritten ads for the same service. Having moved into two old-lady houses since moving here, I can see the need. One was still full of a hoarder’s lifetime of jars of screws, boxes of old Life magazines, and scary jars of home-preserved items. The other, in which I currently live, was not so bad but still had some wall-to-wall that needed removing. And now I’m in the process of accumulating and weeding-out, and like all good Baltimoreans, I need hauling every so often. That charming 1940s bamboo settee? Just fell apart. Too big to put out for the once-weekly trash pickup. Nail-filled wood planks left over from a renovation? Ditto. I need a truck to come and take some stuff: the good news is that all I have to do is step outside and hail one like a taxi. (If I were hailing a hack cab, I’d hold my hand down low and wiggle my fingers a bit.) Oh! There’s the one! Gotta go!