The Iron Menagerie of the Enchanted Highway

The wind off the Missouri Plateau never really stops. It leans on the power lines, combs the grass flat, and keeps the cottonwoods along the draws bent east. On a summer evening, when the light goes long and amber, a driver crossing western North Dakota on Interstate 94 catches something out of the corner of an eye: shapes standing out on the grass, between the four lanes and the buttes, too regular for cattle, too tall for fences.

At Gladstone, the exit ramp bends down to a two-lane county road. Where they meet, a flock of Canada geese hangs in the air above a slough. The birds are built of chain-link fence, oil-field pipe, and cut-up highway signs, welded into a wedge frozen mid-descent — wings furled, feet trailing, beaks tipped toward the water. Each goose is longer than a horse; the flock is wider than the road beneath it. They have hung there through every kind of weather this part of the state can throw, and they do not move.

This is the north gate of the Enchanted Highway, and it was never meant to be quiet. The road behind that flock runs thirty-two miles south to the town of Regent, and it is lined with giant scrap-metal sculptures — a museum with no walls, set out on a two-lane through ranch country, all of it built as one man's answer to the problem of a dying town.

A road built to be seen

Gary Greff, a schoolteacher, came home to Regent in the 1980s and found a town losing its reasons. The businesses that had once served the surrounding farms had closed or were closing. Young people left for the cities, and the interstate had done what highways do: it moved the traffic, and with the traffic went the chance that a stranger would ever stop.

Greff's idea was simple to state and enormous to build: put the world's largest collection of scrap-metal sculpture along the road between Regent and Gladstone, place the first piece so close to the interstate that no one could miss it, and let curiosity do the rest. If a driver turns off at Gladstone to look at geese, reads the sign, sees the next sculpture a few miles south — then the next — then the driver has come all the way to Regent, and Regent is on the way to somewhere again.

He began in the late 1980s, spending his own money and working with his own hands. People called it a folly, and some still do. The sculptures went up one at a time, each one farther from the interstate than the last, each one a payment on a promise to the road.

Giants on the grassland

Driving the Enchanted Highway is an exercise in stopping. There is no central plaza and no order to follow; the works stand alone, often a mile or more apart, each on a gravel pullout against an enormous sky. Get out, stand in the wind, look at the single object, get back in, drive to the next. The road becomes a long slow sentence, and its punctuation is metal.

The best-known piece is the Tin Man, a riveted giant of plate steel who stands near the north end of the road beside a great ribbed dome. The dome was meant to be the visitor center; it still waits for the highway to fill it. The Tin Man has a small round head, arms ending in wide flat palms, and the patient posture of something that has outlasted every piece of machinery it was built from.

South of the Tin Man, in no particular order, the highway offers the rest of its menagerie. A ring-necked pheasant stands startled on a rise, tail feathers cut from long strips of steel. Deer graze with their heads down in a coulee. A fisherman leans hard against the bend of his rod while a leaping fish hangs at the end of the line. A grasshopper nearly the length of a tractor raises one leg above the roadside grass. A cowboy sits a bucking horse welded from whatever steel the scrap piles offered.

None of the sculptures explain themselves. They stand in the grass at full size, brown with weather, rust creeping along every seam, and they ask nothing of the visitor but attention. That is the whole trick of the road: it makes a person drive across a whole county to look carefully at a single thing.

Welded from what the prairie had

The work was not cast in a foundry. It was welded into shape from the leftover materials of the place itself — oil-field pipe, chain-link fence, rebar, disk blades, bedsprings, signposts, rusted chain. The same stuff that fills farm salvage piles and the backyards of every ranch on the plains. Greff gathered it, cut it, fit it, and burned it together until the shapes read as animals and people at a hundred yards.

On the plains, steel is in a race with the weather. The wind loads the air with grit, the snow leans on every flat surface, the sun bakes the paint, and rust starts at the welds. The sculptures are repainted and repaired the way farm machinery is — seasonally, stubbornly, always a little behind. Keeping a mile of giant metal animals presentable across thirty-two miles of open country is a job with no end, but the alternative is a road nobody thinks about, and that is worse.

Grants came later, from foundations and the state. But the first dollars were one man's, and the whole project still has the character of a thing built by hand rather than by committee. Visitors find pullouts and interpretive panels on the shoulder; they stop, take photographs, walk the gravel loops, and sometimes spend money in the small towns at each end. That, too, was the plan.

The town at the end of the road

Regent sits on the prairie where the highway ends, still a small town in the old shape: grain elevator, church steeples, a Main Street of buildings that have housed generations of the same enterprise. The people there will tell a visitor which sculpture is their favorite, and the question is not idle; the sculptures are the town's front porch. The road has been good to it, or good enough — it stopped the worst of the bleeding, gave strangers a reason to come, and gave the town something to be known for besides a dot on the map.

Most travelers do the drive in one direction and then turn around, because the road has to be driven twice to leave. Heading north at dusk, the sculptures turn dark against a red sky. In November they stand up to their shins in snow; in August they wobble in the heat rising off the asphalt. The geese are still at the gate, chain-link and pipe, forever coming in to land, asking the next driver off the interstate to follow them south to a place that was almost lost, then was not.

Photos: Ken Lund, Andrew Filer (CC BY-SA 2.0); Farragutful (CC BY-SA 4.0)