The Artist of Many Bottles An Episode from Tales of Springdale Copyright 1990-2000 by Dave Laird It all started with a green and white travel trailer of somewhat questionable lineage that arrived in town early one Saturday morning in tow behind a wheezing Ford station wagon with a broken tail light lens and well-worn tires. A five gallon ice chest, strapped on the back bumper of the trailer, was held in place with baling twine and had a ragged garden hose swinging beneath the cooler ostensibly to serve as a drain for the makeshift refrigerator. The travel-worn car and trailer cruised unnoticed through town, since hardly anyone in Springdale in their right mind would be stirring so early after the drinking binges that took place the previous night. Some jaded historian may someday note that, on an otherwise inauspicious August morning in 1954, Carolyn Winkle, on the lam in two states for parking tickets and drunk driving, joined the populace of Springdale. Having bought a piece of what the friendly real estate broker told her was prime real estate, she was about to settle down, thanks to a generous life insurance policy of her late husband whom she had planted two states back. After consuming half of a Fifth of Burgundy, the town had mellowed in her opinion, and it appeared to have a good potential for providing her with the long sought after and often denied good life. She somehow managed to back the trailer into its final resting place at the western end of the business district, plopped herself down on the lawn of her new homestead and began alternating between inspecting the town and covertly taking swigs off the remainder of her bottle. This was, in her opinion, definitely a prime piece of property. She had arrived. Today, the motley collection of parts and pieces hardly bears any resemblance to what arrived in town forty years ago. The Ford station wagon, now indistinguishable through its coating of rust, sits halfway down the creek bank where she drove it several years back in a fit of anger, when the motor started unceremoniously knocking. Although the trailer still sits in its former place, through the years, Carolyn has added little embellishments: a porch in front in 1958, two additional rooms at the rear in 1964 when she was pregnant with her daughter, in 1976 a wooden deck that overhangs the creek bank, partially hiding the old Ford wagon from view and finally in 1976, a real bathroom with running hot and cold water. Finally, in 1979, she had to put a roof over the entire affair because it leaked whenever it rained and weeds started flourishing in the middle of her kitchen floor. Last year, in a burst of kinetic energy, she began a lawn decoration project which has persisted to this day. Some folks insist her efforts may be destined for greatness, perhaps even an art award of some kind. She has been gathering up all the various bottles and decanters which she has drained throughout the years and is building a fence across the front of her property out of them. It is true, she didn't have to go far to find an ample supply of art materials, since they were already in various places behind or inside the trailer where she had either thrown or dropped them during one of her less lucid moments. There is hardly a day that passes but what she goes out into her front yard armed with an industrial-sized tube of Super Glue, and pursing her lips in total concentration, begins the task of adhering the next bottle to the juggernaut creation. She has become the chief artist in residence to the entire town, and if it is a warm afternoon, by two or so, she inevitably begins feeling the Great Thirst, and shortly thereafter drives her 1968 Ford Station Wagon down the street two blocks to the Reservation Tavern to hold forth with a cold glass of wine in one hand. Her daughter, visiting from California, recently offended the entire town by adding a piece of lawn furniture to Carolyn's creation. Freddy the Logger, who usually has the last word about everything in town, thought the ungainly pair of plastic green herons with over-sized eyes and four foot spring steel legs seemed to add an especially hilarious touch to Carolyn's endeavor, for the slightest breeze would set the herons to bobbing up and down, rolling their eyes in a thoroughly suggestive and obscene manner. When Carolyn saw the bobbing creatures adorning her front yard, she threw what Betty Nicols, the Town Clerk, referred to as a "hissy fit and two-thirds". First, she violently uprooted the herons from the ground by one end of the wall of bottles, throwing them across her front yard. In the process, she managed to bend both their steels legs by stepping on them where they lay in her flower bed, so she picked them out of her petunias and threw them again. The pair of damaged herons landed at the front of the trailer, astraddle the rusty hitch where they continue to this day, to perform the "bump and grind", their eyes hopelessly crossed. At sixty-seven years of age, Carolyn has sometimes been called a perpetual embarrassment to the entire town. Perhaps that has nothing to do with her artistic endeavors, but is because she sometimes forgets her age in a flight of intoxication, disrobes and climbs up on the bar of the Reservation Tavern. There, she dances nude, much to the customers' amusement, until the bar owner, also the town's Mayor, finally summons her back down off the bar, forcibly puts her clothes on and sends her home to sober up. Still, she is considered the town's only artist of record, and continues building her wall out of whatever bottles she happens to find. Thus she has become, after all, the artist of many bottles.