Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [114]
‘When does the forest look at its best, in the evening or the morning?’
‘It looks different every part of the day.’
I asked if Elmer had a favourite bottle or tree among his collection.
‘The only thing that’s favourite is the things I’ve had since I was a kid,’ he said. ‘I’ve got childhood items out here. I still have my teddy bears. I don’t throw nothing away. This handmade rake right here’ – he struck it – ‘you hear this ring?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘I found that near the town of Boron in 1960. I was a freshman in high school. I’ve got photographs of the trip.’
‘And you brought it home with you?’
‘I bring everything home.’
‘And do people think you’re nuts?’
‘No. Well, in a good kind of way.’
‘I don’t think you’re nuts at all. I think you’re the sanest man in the place.’
Elmer’s glass orchard is spectacular. I enjoyed every second of going around it with him. He’s a completely non-violent man, but he’d built all sorts of bullets and empty cartridge cases into his bottle-tree sculptures. He doesn’t believe in guns and bullets, but he’s happy to buy old broken guns and weld them into strange shapes. They look fantastic.
Most of the items in the forest were obtained for free by sifting through rubbish dumps. Claiming to know the whereabouts of dozens of dumps, Elmer talks about them like other people talk about old churches or ruined castles – ‘I know where there’s a beauty’ – and he’s marked several on his mental map that he wants to investigate in greater detail.
‘I’ve got my eye on this rubbish dump,’ he said. ‘My wife comes with me and she sits in the car and I go and dig.’
For hours or days at a time, Elmer sifts through the dumps, digging up bottles and bits of metal. One time, he found a car door with a metal detector. Then he dug a bit further, ‘And there was a whole car there and it’s flat. So I’ve covered it up and I’m going back for it.’
In time, he hopes to put the car on top of one of his trees. God, I’d love to see that. When I visited, there were already metal parts from at least three military Jeeps, a Model-T Ford, several tractors, a swing, a trailer, a boxing-ring bell, a shotgun, an old train, a chicken feeder and dozens of other things – all of them welded on to the tops of his trees.
Elmer’s home is equally eccentric. It’s made from a Bailey bridge (those portable bridges that military engineers use to cross rivers), although you would never know to look at it. And it has no taps. Instead, the pipes have on–off switches like those used on commercial pipelines. There’s no television or radio, just an aquarium full of fish, and only one bed. Elmer is worried that people might ask to stay if he gets a second one. That doesn’t make him unfriendly or weird. He just knows what he likes and what he wants. He’d recently held a family reunion at his house, but all the relatives had stayed overnight in nearby hotels, which was better for everyone. Elmer is actually the friendliest of men, and he spared no effort or time in showing me everything and describing every inch of his garden. He was exactly the type of person I’d expected to meet in spades on Route 66. If only there had been more dreamers like Elmer over the previous two thousand miles.
Elmer Long was by far my favourite find on the 66. He embodied everything I imagined might be on the Mother Road. I wish I’d got to know him long before I did. I wish I could call him my friend.
At San Bernardino, a few miles on from Elmer’s place, the great Los Angeles sprawl began and the traffic started to build up. After weeks of empty roads and wide-open vistas, it was quite a shock. The Los Angeles basin famously has some of the most dense and aggressive traffic anywhere in the world. To get a new perspective