The Yuman shopping cart: a field observation

In the suburbs and large cities, carts are fairly docile and domesticated creatures, huddling together in neat rowns and hered in and out by high school bagger boys. But in the small town of Yuma, carts' true character are revealed.
Carts are by nature wild and solitary animals. They are amazingly elusive, skulking warily in the corners of parking lots. They gather in small clumps between parked cars like surly teenagers, plotting their escape.
And they do escape. Aided by the desperation of car-less humans faced with the challenge of hauling tortillas and beans to their homes in the stifling heat, the carts break away from their asphalt corrals. From what I've observed, the preferred habitat of the Yuman carts are vacant lots and run-down apartment buildings, where they jangle along fences and walls in solitary windblown freedom. Often, they can be found rolling on their backs in the dust, wheels raised to the sky in rusty joy.
Although the carts generally enjoy the solitary life, they do congregate in canals, where they commune in submerged secrecy until a municipal water crisis exposes their box-like bodies to the sun. And it is here, in the concrete channelled ribbons of diverted Colorado River water, that these proud steel creatures go to die. Worn out by old age and wild living, they disintegrate into the minerals that give Yuma water its distinctively unappealing taste.

That's how I see it.