This piece came about when a friend emailed me that this cemetery no longer existed. Someone had come and exhumed all of its inhabitants and left a dilapidated fifth wheel RV in their place.
– Marlow

Just outside the small north Georgia town of Clayton on a forgotten country back road rested for many years the strangest cemetery I have ever seen. This resting place was for Ice Boxes. True to its southern location, it was in the parking lot of an abandoned bait shop.

I came to know and visit it, when Daniel, a dear friend and fellow two wheeler rider, moved nearby. Being Georgia born, he thought nothing of it. To this Yankee, it was a complete and utter mystery. It remains so.

We first saw it when Daniel and I putted back from a day long visit to the place he credited with saving him thirty five years before — Rabun Gap Nacoochee School. Before that place saved him, Daniel was on an express train ride to a short and violent end to a life filled with physical abuse by his father.

Some anonymous person or foundation knew of his situation and secretly offered to send him from his Maryland hell home to this faraway place of real education. Not without some troubles did he graduate from this place and Georgia Tech four year later.

Daniel subsequently became a refrigeration expert and worked as an arena heating/air conditioning and rink chilling expert for the NHL and the winter Olympics for over twenty years before his multiple toxic exposures to these machines deadly gasses nearly killed him. So it didn’t surprise me that he had little interest in exploring this Ice Box graveyard.

Some folks are collectors of odd things. The person or persons who gathered these machines was one such. Examination of their manufacturing plates said they were from a broad spectrum of makers, years, and models. Over my subsequent visits, their numbers grew and none of them were left to decay or became dirty. Someone was obviously curating this collection as well as coming by to care for and clean these dead chill creatures.

At my request Daniel asked around the local HVAC businesses if anyone knew who or what was behind this collection. No one knew or at least would share what they knew or had heard. It was just one of those things folks paid no attention to.

The same was true of what led to their disappearance back in 2016.

2016 was surely a strange year.

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