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.]

I’m not sure if I buy it: after all, Spain has some pretty big flat parts too. But it is a good story, and I like to picture the Spanish conquistadors in their pointed silver helmets and puffy shorts, flopping around on the great prairie like fish in the bottom of the boat, their brains blown out by the sheer vastness of it all, while a couple of bemused Indians stnad off to the side, saying, “So who are these jokers?”

Anyway, Gove, Kansas is the sort of place that makes you think it might just be true.

[2007 Edit: I was too "cool" to mention it back in 1996, but the reason we actually went to Gove, Kansas was that it was the setting for a 1980s-era Call of Cthulhu adventure called "The Killer Out Of Space" (from the Cthulhu Now supplement) that scared the underoos off me and my buddies when we played it back in high school. Decades later, I would revise/update the Coronado legend for gaming purposes, as seen here.]

As you might surmise from the name, Carhenge is a full-scale replica of Stonehenge, accurate to the smallest detail–except for the rateher significant detail that, instead of massive stones, it’s made out of cars.

Nebraska’s answer to England’s most famous Neolithic monument was erected by a farmer named Jim Reinders and his clan at a family reunion in 1979. When asked why, this modern-day Merlin’s only response was the cryptic plane loqui deprehendi–Latin (sort of) for “the thing speaks for itself.” Today the Reinders have moved on like the Druids of old (to Santa Fe, I think), leaving only the mystery of the standing cars as mute testimony to their former greatness.

Carhenge stands a few miles north of a little town called Alliance, Nebraska. Never intended to be a tourist attraction, the ‘Henge is set well back from the road and only nominally advertised. [2006 Edit: In 1996, that is. The good people of Alliance have since realized they had a kitsch kash kow on their hands and have stepped up accordingly.] We arrived on foot in the middle of the night. There was no moon, and making our way across the Nebraska plain with only one thin flashlight, one could well imagine himself upon the English moors. (Whatever. It was dark and cool.)

The slaughter stone was a station wagon, a pre-OPEC monster with a grill like the jaws of a hungry beast. It was here, in the dead of night, that we performed the blasphemous rituals only whispered of in Brown Jenkin‘s owner’s manual. We stripped off our raiments and fell to our knees in the manner of the ancient Druids. A fat cloud of mosquitoes performed blood sacrifice. In a guttural tongue known to us only by dim ancestral memory, we gave thanks to the Elder Automotive Gods for carrying us thus far and offered strange tribute to ensure our safe return…

We came back the next morning to get a bunch more pictures. In the light of day, of course, what we had been able to imagine as spooky and ominous became merely cheesy. But that was fine too. I mean, Christ, whaddaya want? It’s just a bunch of cars sticking out of the ground.

OK, OK. We just cut through the corner of Utah to pad out our total number of states.

Craters of the Moon National Monument, in Idaho about 140 miles east of Boise, is a huge field of crumbly, pointy black rock left over from some ancient Idahoan volcano. But it doesn’t look much like the moon, and you certainly can’t bounce around astronaut-style with the greatest of ease. It’s more like standing in a giant barbecue full of charcoal briquettes the day after the cookout.

I was eating some Doritos as we made our lunar landing, and it came into my head that the craters and the crackers were ver well matched: that is, if these rock fields were a food, they’d be Cool Ranch Doritos–and conversely, if Cool Ranch Doritos were a national monument, they’d be the Craters of the Moon. I wasn’t trying to be especially profound: I just meant that the landscape looked and felt like a big plate of blackened Doritos, and that the Doritos, like the landscape, were hard and crunchy and would be difficult to walk over. [2006 edit: No, I was not high.] Pete and Derek gave me weird looks and made me sit in the back seet for the rest of the day.

You Had To Be There Moment #77

(as seen on Entertainment Tonight)
“Pssst! Onytay! Ixnay on the abybay!”
–Tony Danza’s agent

Pepe came over, Derek tracked down his buddy Sean, another Ontarioan expatriate, and we opened my birthday presents: American malt liquor from Derek and Pete and some Canadian [redacted] from the Birdman. So we partied in, around, and on top of Big Bird’s high rise apartment building, listened to space age bachelor pad music, watched Star Wars, and somehow acquiered a little stuffed pig wearing a Harley-Davidson jacket.

The next day, while Big Bird was off to work and Brown Jenkin underwent some reconstructive surgery at Canadian Tire, we toured Vancouver with Sean, who came out here to live the good life a few months ago. Sean had what you might call a “mandatorily minimalist” apartment off of Commercial: after six months, the sum total of furniture he had acquired was: a TV, an air mattress, and a roommate (yet another UFO). The beach was just okay, and a lot of Vancouver was pretty seedy and depressing, but Sean kept us in stitches all day with old stories of Derek’s love life, Lovecraftian spellings of “Dole” a story involving Patrick “Jean-Luc Picard” Stewart that segued into a three-minute guitar solo from “Jesus Is Just Alright,” and pantloads more. Granted, we were an easy audience after hearing and making the same fifteen jokes for three weeks straight, but Sean remains a machine.

And watch for the second half of the journey, blogged a mere eleven years after the fact.

Six Road Movies to Inspire and Delight–and not one involving a Trucker and a Chimp!

Raising Arizona
Fargo, while fun, was redundant. Hilarious and hyper-kinetic, Raising Arizona is the only film the Coen brothers, or anyone else for that matter, ever need to make. If I start recounting my favorite parts, we’ll be here all night, so I’ll just say, “Boy, you got a panty on your head,” and leave it at that. Oh, and Nicholas Cage has never been better, and that’s saying a lot. [Well, it was in 1996! Remember, all this was written 10 years ago.]

The Road Warrior
Everyone talks about how Blade Runner defined the cinematic look of the future, but for my money, the much lower brow Mad Max movies, with their hordes of punk rockers tearing around the desert on motorcycles and cannibalized cars, were every bit as influential. Don’t ask where post-apocalypse Australians get all that hairspray and football equipment. Just enjoy the vehicular carnage (certain low-budget chase scenes were accelerated, like the old Batman TV series, just by speeding up the film) and young Mel Gibson in leather pants. [And it was still OK to like Mel Gibson in 1996 too!]

Highway 61
Here’s our required Canadian content: a barber and a roadie drive a cocaine-filled corpse from Thunder Bay to New Orleans with the Devil on their tail. Essential viewing for any Canadians going south of the border, and a surprising treat for all three Americans who saw it.

Repo Man
If you haven’t seen it in ten years, rent it tonight. [I haven't, actually. Maybe I should.] With slackers before there were slackers, and UFOs and Men In Black fifteen years before they were “the shit.” [Hee. How quaint that in 1996, "the shit" required scare quotes.] I don’t know if Repo Man was ahead of its time or just outside of time altogether. Did you know the story was originally a comic strip in a homemade ‘zine? Like nothing else then or now, Repo Man can only be the product of some alternate history where the eighties were everything they could have been. Every time you watch it, you actually become cooler.

Kalifornia
Brad Pitt and Ensign Ro guest star in a long, morose episode of The X Files. I mention this mainly as an example of one of my favorite subgenres of road movie, the White Trash Lovers on the Run. You know what a White Trash Lovers on the Run movie is, don’t you? Take two star-crossed lovers, on a bra-less beauty in a tank top, the other a violent sociopath in a Hawaiian shirt. Give them a vintage convertible, and sick the law and/or the Mob on their tail. Add surf rock and desert scenery, and before you can say, “Get me Juliette Lewis,” they’re calling you the next Tarantino. Say hi to Mira for me!

Thelma & Louise
“That’s what good waffles do, they stick together.” A White Trash Platonic Female Buddies on the Run Movie that boys loved too. This boy, anyway. T&L ushered in a wave of womyn-centred road movyes, none of which have had even a fraction of the original’s cojones. Hmm. That’s an unfortunately gendered metaphor, but you know what I mean.