Route 66 in the News

Man-Made Forest in California

2004-12-22 17:15:17

Elmer Long has a forest of "evergreens," but not one will become a Christmas tree.

His evergreens, a collection of welded steel trees with thousands of bottles clinging to spiked arms, occupy a 2-acre site on old Route 66 about nine miles north of Victorville.

There are neither stars nor angels atop any of the trees at Elmer's Place, but there is just about everything else a saxophone, two double-decker birdhouses, an irrigation wheel and a water pump, several milk cans, railroad lanterns, an air rifle, a surfboard and several cow skulls.

"You would have to stretch it to call these Christmas trees," said Long, 58, a retired rock crusher at a nearby cement plant. "But it's almost like Christmas every day for me. When the sun comes up, the bottles shimmer. It's beautiful.

"Since I retired three years ago, I have all the time in the world to do what I want to do."

People from throughout the United States and the world stop to gawk at the forest of 6- to 20-foot-tall bottle trees. It's one of the inherent charms, so to speak, of the Mother Road.

"It's spectacular," said Los Angeles freelance writer Frank Berin, who pulled off the highway earlier this week to take photos of the surreal collection of discarded bottles.

"I'm traveling across the country on Route 66 to spend Christmas with my family in St. Louis," Berin explained. "Without photos, they wouldn't believe this."

Route 66, now known locally as National Trails Highway, opened the West to motorists in 1926, linking Chicago with Santa Monica. Most of its original restaurants, tourist courts and gas stations are now relics or in ruins, except for places such as the city of Amboy, 90 miles east of Barstow.

Elmer Long came along later, moving to the High Desert in 1970 from Hermosa Beach, where he was a troubleshooter at TRW, a defense contractor.

His fenced acreage lies between the highway and the double tracks of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific railroads, which parallel the nearby Mojave River between the Victor Valley and Newberry Springs, east of Barstow.

Elmer's father, an inveterate scavenger, passed his passion for bundling up bottles to his son.

"Dad had a sizable collection and gave a truckload of bottles to me," Long recalled.

"About five years ago, I put some on a post near the goat pen as a distraction while my wife was recuperating from a car wreck. The bottle trees looked so good I couldn't stop putting them up."

His wife, Maria, who works in a medical records office in Victorville, hasn't put a damper on her husband's hobby.

"She doesn't want to have anything to do with these bottle trees," Long said.

Except when curious travelers stop, his only companion in the maze of bottle trees is Chester, a 14-year-old Chihuahua who Long calls "my right-hand man."

The forest of boiler pipe trunks and steel branches continues to grow. Long installed two more bottle trees on Monday and has plans to clear a 15-by-100-foot lot cluttered with castoff objects to make way for more trees.

Long, an articulate and unassuming man, scours the desert for artifacts and flotsam left by old-timers who tossed their empty bottles of Jim Beam and Falstaff into random dumps near now-abandoned mining sites.

"Two summers ago, I spent the night in Ludlow and the next night in Needles, heaping my pickup truck with bottles," he recalled. "I've stashed over 1,000 bottles in the bed of a row boat."

Long's treasures include a clear-glass bottle that dates back to either 1877 or 1878, a 1918 measuring scale that still works, Conoco and Mobilgas signs, a like-new sewing machine, and a cash register on the top of a small bottle tree.

Every bottle has its own story, the affable collector said.

"I see different things in each bottle, telling me something about the place where I found it."

One of the forest's most unusual artifacts is a gold-colored saxophone that crowns a tree near Route 66.

"I call it my $60,000 sax," said Long, referring to the cost of putting his son, Travis, through college. "He played gigs on that horn at college and gave it to me when he graduated."

Like a forest charred by a fire or hit by bark beetles, the evergreen forest at Elmer's Place is changing color.

"I'm out of green bottles, but I've got plenty of brown ones," he said. "If anyone wants to unload their empty green bottles, come on out."

As for the future of the forest, any guess may do.

"I don't know where I'm heading with all this, but I'm sure enjoying it."

~Chuck Mueller, San Bernardino Sun