In Hans Ostrom’s “The Collector,” a man’s junkyard is seen through the eyes of the people and animals around him. His wife has given up asking why the hubcaps, beer signs, and dead cars pile up; she resents the male pull toward machinery. The dog just knows the yard as a place of rust, tires, and hurt noses. The younger son hasn’t turned against his father yet—his friends think the collector is a rich pirate, and the boy understands that the objects are there to be looked at and touched. Then the collector himself speaks: he cannot help acquiring more, trading one fixed thing for three broken ones, and he insists that “strewn is the best way to keep it all in order.” The mood is wry and stubborn, comic but also a little lonely, as the collector stares down neighbors whose working junk he expects to own someday.
The Collector — Summary
If you’re his wife, you’ve quit asking why it all piles up out there in the yard for everyone to see from the highway. Hubcaps from ghostly coupes. Beer signs in neon cursive. Coke machines, cars, cars, cars. You keep the house and the backyard according to your principles. You hate the mechanism in men that drives them to love machinery.
If you're his dog, you urinate on tires encircling weeds. You sniff varieties of rust, chase squirrels until they disappear, until you ram your hot wet nose into angle iron; it all makes the yard difficult.
Now, supposing you're the younger son, you don’t hate him yet. Your friends think he’s a wealthy man, a pirate maybe; they beg their parents to let them come over, crawl through doorless cars, turn cranks, patent imaginary uses for useless contraptions. You know what it’s all for. It’s there to look at, to touch; it’s part of a big landscape that whirls by every day outside of School.
You're the collector. You can’t help yourself. You'll fix one thing and trade it away for three things you can't fix. The dog pisses on it all, knocks over cans going after squirrels, laps up rust-water. You can’t keep the neighbor-kids away. The younger boy, he follows you around all day asking What’s this for? What’s this for? You can’t understand why your wife can’t understand why iron and motors and axles are necessary, why strewn is the best way to keep it all in order. You stare right back at people who drive by and scowl at your yard. You know they’re driving junk. Their houses are filled with junk that works. You'll get hold of it soon enough.