Along the street that ran through the center of the Cedars West Arts festival, out in front of the new fencing around OKON Metals, sat the chopped off cockpit of some unknown aircraft. I guess it was out there to show the variety of materials that a metal recycler can deal with – or maybe it was out there simply because it was way cool.

I couldn’t help but hang around the severed snout. One guy looked at it and said to his buddy, “Look at all the bullet holes.” Now I knew better – those puncture wounds weren’t from ballistic ammunition, they were pierce marks from forklift forks (how do you think they move that massive chunk of aircraft aluminum around?) – but I didn’t want to disappoint the guy’s martial imagination, so I stayed silent.

Off to the side, an artist stood with a pad on an easel. His name was Joshua Boulet and I chatted with him for a bit. He had a portfolio of his line-drawings on a stand. I looked over his work done at Occupy Wall Street. “Did you go to New York for these?” I asked.

“Yeah, I set up right there just like I did today and drew these live,” he said with a hint of excitement in his voice.

Here is his work in progress. You can see the fire engine from yesterday’s entry in the foreground.

Here’s the finished sketch (click to enlarge)

There was a high step up into the cockpit, but I took a breath, grabbed some loose aluminum and pulled myself in. There are few things as cool as the complex destruction in old, junked aerospace detritus.