• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

14

Get Hip to This Timely Tip, When You Make That California Trip

Crossing the Colorado River, I entered California, the Golden State, and my home for many years. Entering the eighth and final state I would have to pass through to complete the long journey from Chicago, I had mixed feelings about the approaching end – both disappointment and relief that it would all soon be over. Shouting the battle cry of generations of westbound travellers – ‘California or bust!’ – I eased back in my seat and pointed the bike in the direction of Barstow, some two hundred miles down the tarmac. However, when I arrived at the little town I found little worth exploring, so I just kept rolling, the miles passing easily under my tyres as I crossed the wide-open spaces of the Mojave Desert, en route to the fleshpots of Los Angeles. Then, shortly after passing through the village of Helendale, I spotted an oasis of colour in the sandy desert – an orchard made of bottles.

It was an astonishing sight. In the front yard of one of a strip of dusty properties stood row upon higgledy-piggledy row of trees constructed out of coloured bottles, most of them topped with metallic pieces of junk, like car wheels or watering cans or even a rusty old rifle. I had to meet the person who’d created this magical world of ironmongery and glass in the middle of the desert. At the back of the wonderful enchanted crystalline forest I found him – a man in a sun hat with a trailing white beard that was even longer than those sported by the guys in ZZ Top. He told me his name was Elmer Long.

Elmer is a genuine eccentric in the traditional English sense. In other words, he thinks he’s completely normal; which, for my money, he is. He’d built the hundreds of trees in his front yard by welding rods on to poles bought from a scrap dealer and slipping the bottles on to the ends.

‘I love it,’ I said to Elmer. ‘When did you start doing it?’

‘In 2000.’

‘As recently as that?’ Judging by the extent and intricacy of his orchard, Elmer had been working very hard.

‘Yes, eleven years. But I’ve always collected and some of the bottles my father collected. He was a bottle collector but he had no way of displaying it.’

‘What was your father’s idea when he collected the bottles? He just liked them?’

‘He thought he was going to get rich. I mean, he found some good bottles. They’re put away. But I’ve got photographs of him digging for his bottles. He would dig a hole in the ground maybe five foot deep and when he found an old one, he honestly thought he had a gold mine in his hand.’

‘Sometimes you do.’

‘Yes, well … it didn’t work out that way. You’ve got to find someone who is willing to pay the price. You know what I found out, just by doing what I do? There’s no money in it. It’s all free. Yesterday, I had a couple of ladies from Mexico come here, a mother and a daughter. The daughter had an eight-year-old son with her, and before they left, the grandma gave me a hug and her daughter immediately gave me a hug. Now, if you were to compare going to a mine and excavating a vein of gold and taking it to the bank and getting rich, that’s one thing. But little hugs like that coming from people from another country, that’s pure gold. You don’t put that in a bank, you put it in your heart, you know?’

‘You’ve got it.’

‘That’s the key here. I have so much fun talking to and meeting people, you never know what you are going to run into.’

Just before Elmer’s father died, he gave away all of his best bottles, but there were still thousands left. Around the same time, Elmer chopped down his fruit orchard. ‘The birds were getting all the fruit anyway,’ he said. ‘So I just pulled the orchard down and I made this.’

All around us were piles of bottles, some of them sorted by colour or size, but most of them piled up randomly. ‘Are these ready to go up?’ I said, pointing at some bottles that looked quite old.

‘I found a new dump. Well, not a new dump, it’s an old