Route 96

In Lucas, Kansas, twenty-two miles east of Paradise and two-hundred miles west of Hell, is a true masterwork of kookdom: Samuel P. Dinsmoor’s “Garden of Eden.” An eccentric Civil War veteran (Union army) who married a woman 61 years his junior and fathered three children after the age of 80, Dinsmoor came in his dotage to believe concrete the miracle substance of the Twentieth Century. To prove this to the world, Samuel P. built a “log cabin” out of concrete “logs” and was so happy with it, he went on to create a concrete barn, a concrete spring (which he supplied with water by illegally tapping into the town’s water main), a concrete pyramid and mausoleum, and an an elaborate lattice-work of concrete trees, flags, and statues–over 100 tons in total–suspended from poles and scaffolds and wires around his house.

Like Floyd Miles, the nutbar music collector of Eureka Springs, Dinsmoor was clearly a few seats short of a majority. But while everything in the Miles Museum seemed unsettling and dark, the Garden of Eden was filled with good vibes. For one thing, Dinsmoor was a dyed-in-the-wool Populist, and his concrete versions of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Devil and the Angel of the Lord are intermingled with loopy leftist political allegory. In one installation, evil concrete bankers, lawyers, and preachers crucify Labor. In another, the concrete common man uses his vote to fight back against the Trusts–monopoly capitalism represented by weird, tentacled beasts and watched over by corrupt politicians–while a woman and a black man, still denied the vote, look on. Above it all is Dinsmoor’s representatio of the Almighty: a giant concrete eyeball and pointing finger. A hollow tube runs from the “All Seeing Eye of Providence” down into the house, where Dinsmoor used to shout into it and startle passers-by with the voice of God. (Awesome as Dinsmoor was, one also develops some sympathy for Dinsmoor’s neighbors: “Oh, hi there, Samuel. Oh, so you’re constructing another creepy concrete octopus on our street? Great, great.”)

The Devil’s Rope

Another Dinsmoor enthusiasm was barbed wire. A display in his basement described barbed wire collecting as “a popular, fast-growing hobby” and presented over six hundred varieties of “the fence wire that tamed both man and beast of the pioneer west.” Now that’s a hobby: “Say is, that a Scutt Single Clip “H” Plate? Land sakes, I do believe that’s a Hodge Square Rowel with a Merrill Four Point Twirl!!!”

The climax of the Garden of Eden tour, though, was Samuel P. himself. In accordance with his wishes, he was buried in a glass coffin in the “mausoleum,” a giant concrete (of course) pyramid in the middle of his front yard. (His first wife (not the 20-year-old) was also buried there, but you couldn’t see her. Concerned the town fathers might not give him permission to bury his wife in a giant concrete pyramid in his front yard, Dinsmoor snuck out and buried her there in dead of night, then entombed her in several feet of solid concrete so nobody could do much about it.)

“None except my widow, my descendants, their husbands and wives, shall go in to see me for less than $1,” Dinsmoor wrote in his final will and testiment. “I promise everyone that comes to see me … that if I see them dropping a dollar in the hands of the flunky, and I see the dollar, I will give them a smile.” Dinsmoor obviously put some thought into his final resting place. He even took the time to pose for a double exposure photograph that showed him viewing his own body in his coffin. We dropped three dollars into the hands of the designated flunkies, and there he was, the funny old SOB, sealed in his little glass box. It was hard to tell if he was smiling though, not having been embalmed or mummified in any way: just a sixty-year old corpse, a greyeish skeleton under dirty glass, hung with a few remaining gobbets of yellow meat.

[2006 edit: You may have noticed that I've posted this out of order. You may also notice that our heroes have been stranded on the outskirts of Bellingham since early September. I'm unaware of any evidence that anybody but me cares very much, but here you go: The latter is because this is a vacation blog, and my vacation ended. I'll either return to the story over Winter vacation or when summer comes around again. The former is because I'm about to post something related to the Garden of Eden at Old is the New New, and I wanted to have this post available to link to.]