(male announcer) Production funding for Rare Visions & Roadside Revelations has been provided by: (female announcer) YRC Worldwide and public TV are natural partners.

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In this big world, that's a big job.

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YRC Worldwide: honored to support the communities we serve.

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(man) ♪ Welcome to a show about things you can see ♪ ♪ without going far, and a lot of them are free.

♪ ♪ If you thought there was nothing ♪ ♪ in the old heartland, ♪ ♪ you ought to hit the blacktop ♪ ♪ with these fools in a van.

♪ ♪ Look out; they're driving hard, ♪ ♪ checking out art in their own backyard.

♪ ♪ Randy does the steering so he won't hurl.

♪ ♪ Mike's got the map, such a man of the world.

♪ ♪ That's Don with the camera, ♪ ♪ kind of heavy on his shoulder.

♪ ♪ And that giant ball of tape, it's a world record holder.

♪ ♪ Look out; they're driving hard, ♪ ♪ checking out art in their own backyard.

♪ ♪ Look out; they're driving hard, ♪ ♪ checking out the world in their own backyard, ♪ ♪ checking out the world in their own backyard.

♪ Look, Mary Lou's homemade... (Don) Dear TV Mailbag, got milk?

How about a milk bottle building?

Hi, Don the camera guy here with two TV weasels up front, once again on the trail of genuine roadside Americana.

(Randy) Did you ever shoot milk out your nose?

(Don) It's a beaut, all right, and somewhere in Spokane, they say there's another.

But you get the idea, and the idea now is to head for the park, the big one downtown with the oversized Radio Flyer in it, which just happens to bear a keen resemblance to the way in which we've been hauling around our own world record holder.

This is, as they say, a moment.

(Randy) Come on, Donnie.

Come on.

Come on.

Come on.

Oh!

Ooh!

And then it's over, and we are moving on to the recycling portion of the park for an audience with Spokane's famous garbage-eating goat.

There's a button here that says "Start."

(Don) Or would be if it were working, which apparently today, it is not.

No, I don't think it's working.

Call Richard.

(Don) There is no time to call for repairs, since this show, if nothing else, does race like the wind.

Let's move on.

(Don) And call it coincidence, by the wind is calling us to Electric City, not for the Grand Coulee Dam, a true engineering marvel, but for this windmill garden, fabulous folk art that once filled the yard of Emil and Viola Gehrke, trucked down here for safekeeping.

So safe, in fact, that big-time bolt cutters can't get us in.

Need some-- need me to help?

(Don) Looks like climbing time is here.

(woman) Well, I just know they've been around here a long time and that Gehrke started collecting things and putting them together.

And it used to be up above-- on old Grand Coulee up above the canal and on his fence.

When he got older and couldn't do it anymore, well, they were going to just tear them down, and the city kind of decided they ought to go someplace, and so they built this park here.

I guess he--someone said he came here in '58.

I came here in '67, so he was pretty well on his way.

But, yeah, he had most of them-- they were, like, around a low fence and stuff, so, you know--and of course, he added to it all the time.

It's kind of neat.

It's all just--you can see it's all different things that have just been collected around the area.

(Randy) So he's wasn't out buying fancy parts.

(Hensley) No, he wasn't buying fancy parts.

It was just things that he could collect and find and that.

Kind of like a recycle center, I guess.

(Mike) How about these right next to you?

I would say these are out of-- my guess would be out of the 230 switchyard.

When we put in a dam-- the third power house at the Grand Coulee Dam started in '67.

(Mike) Did everybody take one home?

(Hensley) Uh, not everybody.

It's kind of unique, you know.

It's just stuff that you wouldn't see all the time.

And the guy had to be-- to think about some of the stuff and look around and put what he put, you know, had to be kind of creative to, "Well, would that work" or something, you know, and get them to work and that.

I guess he was--you know, he worked construction, millwright, and things and that.

But he's not one of the families that you hear around here all the time, one of the names and that.

I don't even know if there's any relatives of his around.

I haven't heard of any.

(Mike) Do people stop in and look at these all the time?

(Hensley) Oh, yeah, there's quite a few.

You come by here all the time.

I come by here going to town, and there's people here all kind of hours, you know.

(Randy) It's going like crazy.

Does it do this all the time, or did you order this up for us?

No, we didn't order it.

Well, we always get wind or rain on Colorama, so kind of, we did.

'Cause our yearly celebration, you can just bet on the rain, you know.

(Don) Well, kudos to Coulee for saving the Gehrkes' work, even if that steel cage is a bit much.

With visions of WD-40 dancing in our heads, we bid adieu to the dam and all that water it retains, heading on to Soap Lake, a small town with large, somewhat psychedelic dreams.

Would you believe a giant lava lamp will soon be lava-tating right by this road?

So where is that lava lamp?

(Don) For now, though, there's just The Caffeine Couch, which we are sliding into, since more driving is in store, driving to Ellensburg, home of Central Washington U and a house that, in 20-some years, has gone from eyesore to jaw dropper, known simply as Dick and Jane's art spot.

(man) But when we bought the house, we started doing something to it immediately, but it took us two years to realize we were doing it.

One of the hallmarks of our place is the incredible order.

But, at the same time, there's incredible freedom in it and incredible unorder in it.

(Orleman) We've always collected art.

We collected art before we had a house, let's say.

We had a home, but it was a rental.

And so, really, the only place to go was outdoors.

Dick was a--he drew.

That was what he really did, and I was a painter.

So making art that went outdoors was not something that we did.

And somewhere in the middle of this process, Dick thought, "Well, I can do this."

[laughs] And so he started making outdoor pieces.

And I got into it pretty quickly after Dick did, because I didn't want him to get ahead of me.

(Elliott) And our timing couldn't have been better, because once we really began it and did some pretty strange things, like the hand on the house, Mount Saint Helens blew up.

And so we were filled with ash, and by the time the community got through dealing with the ash, it was, like, two years later, and the place was here.

So these headposts were part of our old fence.

(Elliott) I would carve them, and Jane would paint them.

(Orleman) Things are always-- (Elliott) Yeah, the old fence wasn't all reflectorized like this.

(Orleman) Artwork moves all around the yard.

(Elliott) Things decay.

Things change.

Well, just the very basis of my reflector work is about light.

It is not a single entity.

You can never--there is no perfect way to light it or experience it.

It changes all the time.

(Orleman) This walkway is probably 20 years old.

I did all the flower beds all the way around.

(Mike) It's beautiful.

(Orleman) It's insane.

[laughter] (Elliott) These are... high-line insulators, where the power line would be here.

And these pieces up here are from a bakery.

I like arches.

(Elliott) And the bottle caps, it's a way to paint with something, and they're free.

There's a lot of used bottle caps in the world.

(Orleman) The city gave us a ten-foot easement on the north side of our property.

As you'll notice, there's a whole row of totems there and ten feet of walkway.

So they gave us that ten-foot easement to create a tourist walkway so people could walk around the house without going in the parking lot.

(Elliott) An d then here's ou r insulator collection that came from the Grand Coulee.

You guys were just there.

These are our future tree people.

And we'll make a concession here.

We have an assistant.

He's been with us four years.

And we come up with a plan, and he mixes the cement and does the work.

[laughter] [siren wailing] (Elliott) The world has this thing that the police department represents: the hard bricks, straight lines that clamps down on everything.

And this place is just-- pwoosh!

And people need that in their life.

(Orleman) We can do it without the gallery filtering or the museum filtering or the need to sell.

That's why we run a janitor business is that all these years, we could make our art any way we want to, because we don't have to sell it.

(Elliott) Jane always says that a reason for this place is that when she grew up as a kid, she never heard of any artists that were alive.

All artists were dead.

And so she wanted to create a place that, when people grew up in Ellensburg, they would know that's something that you could be, that you could be an artist.

(Mike) That looks good.

Oh, that's perfect.

moo!

(Don) Sure enough.

On this new morning, there are onlookers looking on at the art spot while Jane tends garden and Dick putters around.

Even Joel, their assistant, has popped in for a look at the ball.

And then we are off and out of the valley, heading up, up, up into a part of the state with TV ties of its own.

David Lynch shot Twin Peaks up here somewhere, and Northern Exposure transformed the streets of Roslyn, Washington, into Cicely, Alaska.

We're big fans, so why not stop in for a few photo ops and some quick catch on Main Street?

Favorite character, Donnie?

Uh, I think it would be maybe Ed Chigliak.

Remember the time when Holling's wife, whatever her name is, ran off with her old high school beau, the hockey player?

(Mike) Yeah.

What was her name?

It's killing me.

Julie.

No, it wasn't Julie.

Tricia?

No, it wasn't Tricia.

Research we should have done.

Hey.

Wasn't that Joel?

(Don) That was Joel.

He settled in.

(Randy) Beefed up.

Maggie.

Normally she's in her plane.

Is that Pee Wee Reese back behind you?

[laughter] (Don) Alaska or not, Roslyn offered a great taste of the great outdoors, and we savored it, well aware we are now city bound.

And that city, of course, is Seattle, large enough for us to almost immediately lose our way in.

We're down somewhere near Pioneer Square, looking for the Garde Rail Gallery, where a Southern transplant named Karen Light brings self-taught art to the great Northwest, including works by one Ree Brown, a corporate accountant who one day decided to chuck it all for a low-paying future in art and antiques.

(Brown) I have absolutely no knowledge, never studied it.

The fact that they even sold them, really, is just amazing.

I'm not kidding.

It was an amazing thing that they could sell those things, you know, for $200 or $300.

I'm still amazed every time one of them sells.

I did used to sit at the Pike Market when they would let you.

They won't let you do that anymore, but years ago, you could just go down there in the mornings and pick a spot in the window somewhere and just watch people go by, and you could draw them.

You get some interesting characters when you're out in the public.

I usually remember seeing someone, you know, that looked like something, or they're leading a dog, or they had some physical thing that was either really thin and good-looking or the other extreme.

That's what I usually try to duplicate, and I would do it from memory most of the time.

But I don't think any of them would ever recognize themselves.

They're not that good.

Why the fascination with the African Americans?

Do you know?

You know, I actually don't know, unless it's because the contrast in the colors is better.

Most of the people I do are African American.

I think it's easier for me to paint dark than it is light.

(Mike) And the cats are kind of a new thing for you to explore?

(Brown) I've been doing them forever.

Everybody thinks that's all I do.

Yeah, they've been one of the hot sellers.

Everybody loves cats, I guess.

People are more appealing to me.

They really are, and that's what I-- I do more of those.

You know, I also love to experiment with landscapes, little small landscapes.

It's all in the proportions, I found out finally.

You can make a big thing in a small item if you get the proportions in there like they ought to be.

(Randy) What kind of bird is that?

(Brown) Well, it's supposed to be one of these eagles that catch fish, but I think I missed the boat on it.

(Don) Now, Ree says he's never sure which ones people will like.

He just paints them.

And there are piles and piles at his house, which we are not going to go see, because, apparently, we have reached the training portion of this show.

Good thing there's still child labor laws, or I'll have to see if Starbucks is hiring.

That was Hollywood.

I told them you'd call them back.

(Don) Looks like I'm still with the band.

And, no, this is not where viewers like you are paying for us to stay.

We're over here in the bunker, though it does have a skyline view right out the front door.

And this would be the bay.

Well, sort of, as we cross over into West Seattle for a Mother's Day visit to a granddaddy site in the world of grassroots art.

I'm talking about the Walker Rock Garden, built by an airplane mechanic named Milton Walker in his bungalow's backyard.

(woman) He worked on this for 20 years.

And for the first 11 years while he was working on it, he had a full-time job at Boeing's.

But Dad worked swing shift, so he had more daylight hours to do the work.

And Mother would come out early in the morning, and she would start in with her gardening or watering the flowers.

When the water pressure went down in the hose, she knew Dad was awake, so she'd go in and fix his breakfast.

Then they'd both come out, and he'd go to his rock work, and she'd go back to her gardening.

(Mike) Did it start as just some nice little thing that kind of got out of hand or-- (Adams) Note that little pond down there.

And then after he built it, it looked kind of plain, and he kept trying to do something to make it look a little more natural.

So finally, he put in a little mountain next to it, and then finally, he took out the corn patch and put in thare mountain range over there.

And in 1961, he met a man who had to sell his rock collection, so he sold Dad ten ton of rocks for $150.

And Dad knew nothing about rocks, but he and Mother took ten trips down to Oregon with a Dodge Dart and U-Haul trailer.

(Mike) Did you say a Dodge Dart and a U-Haul trailer?

A Dodge Dart, yeah.

No four-wheel-drive pickups.

He just--he went all over the place rockhounding in this little Dodge Dart.

Excuse me; I'm going to go turn on the fountain here.

We just fixed it.

You're the first people, other than the guy that fixed the fountain, to see it work.

(Randy) Wow.

[laughs] Oh, look at that.

We got the spurt.

Were these based on anything in particular?

(Adams) No, well, he had a lot of thunder eggs after he bought that man's collection.

And so he cut them in half, and he designed the fountain so that the thunder eggs would be exposed to water, 'cause they look much better when they're wet.

(Mike) So he cut them in half.

(Adams) Yeah.

The rock saw was going continuously.

[Mike laughs] (Adams) There's a critter over here, right there.

(Mike) Oh, I see that.

A little dinosaur, it looks like.

(Adam) And then he has his fossils here.

And the triple arch is there.

He called that the Stew Pot, because he put a little bit of everything in it.

(Mike) And these colors are not enhanced in any way?

(Adams) No, it's just glass and rocks.

And he and Mother put the tower up in 1976.

That's why they call it the Bicentennial Tower.

And that structure there, the little ring on top of it, that is supposed to resemble a birthday cake.

(Randy) How tall is that?

(Adams) 18 feet.

And in 1996, '97, Seattle had a very, very rough winter, and so a lot of snow melted suddenly.

When that happened, the land dropped.

That's why that artwork there is catawampus.

And that dropped, but you notice the arch that is on it.

It dropped without breaking.

Dad put--he put rebar in everything.

In the summertime, no matter how hot it gets out there, it's always cool in here and, you know, especially when the grapes start hanging over the edge.

And there have been weddings here.

(Randy) There was no big master plan.

(Adams) Not to my knowledge.

I don't think he had one.

Mother did not--was not aware of any master plan.

I'm sure he was thinking of one all the time in his head, but he never put it on paper.

(Mike) He probably wouldn't have referred to himself as an artist, would he?

(Adams) I don't think he would have, no.

I don't think he understood that other people would have a little more difficult time doing this.

(Mike) The fact that this didn't just get bulldozed down, which so many sites do-- (Adams) Oh, I hope not.

No, we want this to last as long as possible.

(Don) I'd throw rocks at anybody who came in here-- We've got plenty of them here.

(Don) And plenty of sightseers too: moms, moms-to-be, and, yes, even the world's largest ball of videotape, which, as usual, was quite the crowd-pleaser.

(Randy) He's putting me in my place.

(Don) All in all, it's a lovely sight and well worth the generous donation this weasel's making with my cash.

You kids get out of the way.

(Don) We left those Walker rocks with a generous assist from Milton's old wheelbarrow, passing by another skyline view, which we expected, and Lady Liberty on the beach, which we did not.

She seemed to be pointing us back to the heart of town, a neighborhood near Capitol Hill where gentrification runs rampant, though sculptor, roofer, and cycle enthusiast Tim Fowler is bucking that trend.

(Mike) So when did you buy this place?

(Fowler) '86.

Got in cheap.

Had to suffer with the crime for quite a while before the gentrification came.

Now I got to suffer with that.

[laughs] I mean, look at this crap.

It's all beige and gray.

Those are the only two colors these jerks know how to use.

And it's all ugly.

It's all the same.

So in protest of having to look at this gray box instead of the Cascade Mountains, I striped my shed in about 85 different colors.

I started putting things up in the air, because I realized that people couldn't see them for the most part and therefore wouldn't vandalize them.

I put that motorcycle-- the wooden motorcycle guy I was just innocently screwing spark plugs in, and I got going with the whole sort of gambling theme, and eventually I'm going to fill this whole wall, probably, in another 20 years, 'cause I don't have anywhere else to put them.

(Randy) What was your woodworking background?

(Fowler) None.

I was a whittler as a kid and carved millions of things, including lots of dope pipes, 'cause it was, in fact, the '70s.

Well, I would rant.

I've been a ranter.

I've been ranting to the camera.

I mean, you know, I rant, and so I would make these wooden political cartoons.

The problem is, they take 100 hours, whereas a guy with a pen and paper can dash them off.

They can be very topical, but you got to pick your cartoons, 'cause things could change, you know.

I ridiculed one local sleazebag, the guy who owns the football team, the Paul Allen guy, and then he shaves his beard off.

I was like, "Great," you know.

"I only put 100 hours into this."

You know, I was like, "What am I doing this for?"

And who the hell would buy them?

You're not going to come home and look at this in your living room every day.

I mean, no.

It's a cartoon, you know.

It's funny, great, ha ha.

Put it away, you know?

(Randy) It's sort of a Shiva pig bird thing.

(Fowler) Yeah, here you got your basic senators and businessmen, you know, with their little pots of gold, waving their little defense procurement.

I'm not fast; that's the problem, you know?

I mean, some of these Third World guys can whip you out a little elephant or a giraffe in, you know, 35 minutes, man.

You know, you do them all winter, and then you end up working on them into the spring, and it's, like, nice out, you know?

But as I semi-retire from roofing, I do more and more art.

And I've been making giant wooden animals, like this snake here, which I'll flip over for you.

I was putting teeth in it.

I've got a little wooden guy inside the house that's going to go in his mouth that's starting to look a bit like Dick Cheney.

Making outdoor art's great, 'cause you just push it outside.

And you just keep lining them up against the fence, and you don't have to dust them.

Clean the moss off them once in a while and do a little maintenance.

But, you know, the cement girlfriend series is what we've got here.

I've actually sold a few of these, 'cause, you know, they look nice, and people put them in their yards.

(Randy) Concrete girlfriend series?

(Fowler) Yeah, I like them, because you can put a lot of tile into a dress.

Then you can make hats too.

Hats are fun.

Then you have your brick girlfriend.

I sold one of those with a matching brick guy, sort of.

The mummy is a great way to use up white tile, 'cause you get so much of it.

People bring you all their leftover tile.

(Mike) So sometimes it's about what's fun to make.

(Fowler) Yeah, oh, yeah.

I'm having fun here.

I'm not making any big, huge artistic statements anymore, if I ever did.

And, you know, I just have fun in my backyard making things.

You know, what the hell?

Occasionally they sell, and that's great, 'cause otherwise it would get too crowded around here, plus I could sure use the money.

I'd like to build a concrete wall around the place sometime and tile that.

That would take me quite a while.

This is the existing nuisance rule.

Here, I'm the existing nuisance.

I've been here a long time.

I have all this junk.

I do odd things.

I can get away with it.

You move somewhere with a lot of junk and start doing odd things, it's bad, especially when everywhere is expensive now, and everybody else has paid $1 million to be there, and they don't want you there.

(Randy) Did you say you're a ranter?

Yeah, ranter.

I'm not a renter; I'm a ranter.

(Don) Tim has been accused of engaging in a rural lifestyle.

But as he points out, there are no used appliances or even dogs in the yard, just some vintage vehicles and a whole lot of art, which we think calls for some shameless self-promotion here and now.

Excellent.

(Randy) "I saw the big ball."

I did.

I couldn't lift it, but I saw it.

(Don) Did I mention I rant some too?

This is Don the camera guy signing off.

(female announcer) To learn more about the sights on this show and how to find them, visit us on the web at: DVDs, tapes, and a companion book to this series are available by calling: Captioning byCaptionMax www.captionmax.com Ooh, that was close.

Oh, it's like driving, man.

He's never really killed me.

(Randy) No.

The city is great, and we've got the kids and the skateboard park and the police and the firemen.

They're all great.

(Mike) So all you are saying is gi ve police a chance.

ding for Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations has been provided by: (female announcer) YRC Worldwide and public TV are natural partners.

We share the very important goal of connecting people, places, and information.

In this big world, that's a big job.

YRC Worldwide and public TV can handle it.

YRC Worldwide: honored to support the communities we serve.

(male announcer) The DeBruce Companies, with facilities providing customers with market information and marketing opportunities for domestic and international grain, fertilizer, and feed ingredient businesses.

(male announcer) And by Fred & Lou Hartwig, generous supporters of KCPT and public television, urging you to become a member today.