The father needs a work shop with all the stuff in that yard.
Heck. Kids get into stuff. I remember when I was 13, my brother had one of those tubular mini-bikes with a lawnmower engine. It stopped working, and by God, I was going to take it apart and make it work.
I started by draining the gas tank into any available container, and I grabbed a big styrofoam cup.
When the gas hit it, to my astonishment, it completely melted. So I found an old Folger’s coffee can and drained it into that, which filled it about halfway up.
I was curious, so I dipped the remainder of the cup into the gas in the coffee can, and...it just disappeared.
I threw the rest of it in, and it disappeared.
I got insanely curious, and found a bag of stryofoam pellets and began tossing them in...and they simply vanished. I began putting more and more of them in, and grabbed one of my dad’s flathead screwdrivers, and began mixing them in.
Soon, it turned into a thick sludge, and stopped melting the Styrofoam packing peanuts. At that point, I saw my dad walking towards the garage, so I hurriedly put it behind an old wooden cabinet and promptly forgot about it.
A year or two later, as we were moving when my dad retired, we were cleaning out the garage to put things into a moving van. As I approached the garage, I saw my dad, head down, one hand on his hip, and in the other hand, he was holding that coffee can full of sludgy gas/styrofoam mix that had completely solidified, and the screwdriver was sticking out of it, firmly embedded. I did an about face and left immediately.
I should have asked him about that before he died...if he remembered, what was going through his mind when he found that coffee can?