There's been a life-size replica of Stonehenge in Goldendale, WA for nearly 90 years. It was built as a memorial to Klickitat County's WWI dead.
Posted on 04/02/2004 1:07:35 PM PST by Darnright
NATURAL BRIDGE - This kind of madness requires planning.
It took weeks for artist and oddball Mark Cline to reach this point. Monday, he stood on a hill by U.S. 11 with the dust devils, his sidekick Victor Reyes Peres and a disassembled life-size Styrofoam replica of Stonehenge. They awaited a kind, portly old guy named Hershel and his concrete truck.
There may be other imaginations unregulated enough to conceive of "Foamhenge." Not many could pull it off. Not many would even try. But they are not Cline. In fact, the madness of Foamhenge may not be in the mere notion, but in the sustained effort to bring such a goofy idea to fruition.
But where on earth was Hershel with the concrete?
Surely the ancient Britons who erected the real Stonehenge didn't have to endure this kind of thumb-twiddling.
It required hundreds of them and 1,500 years to stack 40-ton stones into the iconographic configuration we now see in ruin on the Salisbury Plain in Southern England.
By contrast, Cline's stones weigh a mere 150 pounds - roughly the same as a welterweight boxer or any two supermodels - and will require, by the artist's estimation, exactly him and Peres to erect.
"I figure we'll be done by four o'clock," he predicted.
Hershel Chittum finally arrived only a few minutes late - in plenty of time to beat the ancient Britons' pace.
"You'll see Foamhenge happen just right before your very eyes," Cline promised. It might even happen faster with him, Peres and Chittum all at work.
"Whatever the man wants," Hershel said, unmoved by the weirdness of what Cline was doing. "I get paid by the hour."
Very little Cline does surprises anyone these days.
Lenny Puglisi, whose family owns the Natural Bridge attraction and the land on which Foamhenge now stands, found the exhibit almost unremarkable. He's a partner with Cline in the Haunted Monster Museum and has worked with him on other projects. He stays out of the way of Cline's strange genius.
He's become accustomed to Cline's doing things at the last minute - like erecting Foamhenge in the two days before its unveiling. He watched things come together Monday with his tie loosened, shirt-sleeves rolled up, dragging on a cigarette.
"He likes to work this way," Puglisi said. "I can't understand it."
Cline is a showman in a 19th-century mold, bent on topping himself with ever odder oddities. The Rockbridge County resident earns his living making fiberglass sculptures and created just about every fiberglass dinosaur, buffalo, rhinoceros or chicken you've seen in these parts. But he thrives on publicity.
He cultivates an eccentric outward appearance that complements his unfettered mind. Monday, he wore a pin-striped suit vest over a paisley shirt, and concealed his balding pate under a white canvas fedora, with wispy shoulder length hair trailing below it.
Cline's April Fools' Day gags are becoming a tradition along U.S. 11.
They started in 2001 with "A Space Oddity." Cline put up some phony space ships in a roadside field a few miles south of Lexington.
They seemed silly and harmless enough, but soon afterward, Cline's studio burned to the ground in an apparent arson. While the building blazed, Cline found his mailbox stuffed with religious pamphlets, a letter accusing him of glorifying Satan, and a clipping of a Roanoke Times story about the space ships burned around the edges. No one was ever arrested.
It took two years for Cline to recover enough to haul a half dozen fiberglass dinosaurs to Glasgow and turn the place into "The Town that Time Forgot" last April.
The idea is to get tourists to pull off the road for something free, with the hope that while they're knocking around, they'll spend some money somewhere along the road, too.
Cline hit upon the idea for Foamhenge 15 years ago, on a foray into the warehouse of Insulated Building Systems in Winchester. As soon as he saw the huge blocks of foam, he knew what they could become.
"You wait for an opportunity to present itself. And the means," Cline said.
The "means" were all donated, from the foam to the gray paint to Hershel and his concrete truck, from C.W. Barger and Son.
Hershel dumped concrete into a pattern of holes about a foot across and two or three feet deep, which would serve as anchors for the wooden "legs" of the foam pieces.
Cline, Peres and Chittum surrounded a foam piece.
"Listo?" Cline asked Peres in Spanish. Ready?
They lifted, and their lack of strain beneath such an enormous object was absurd. The columns are so light, their own weight wasn't enough to sink them into the concrete.
Cline embraced the column and shook it like a snack machine that had cheated him out of a pack of Nabs . Finally, it settled into place.
The wind whipped up, and Hershel wondered out loud if it was too strong for Foamhenge. "You got a way to tie these things together?" he asked.
Surely wind was not an issue for the ancient Britons.
But they also lacked scaffolding and ladders and concrete. For that matter, they didn't have the wheel.
All of the pillars were in place within an hour, and Cline and Peres scaled the scaffolding to place the first lintels, or top pieces.
"All in a day's work," Hershel said. "I get paid by the hour."
Silhouetted against the evening sun, Foamhenge soon looked remarkably like its inspiration. Cline was careful to orient the whole thing on the compass like the original, which was believed to have been used to mark the changing of the seasons.
Afterwards, he walked off into the dry grass and shaded his eyes to admire his feat.
"I could set my watch by it," he said. "If I wore a watch."
| Rank | Location | Receipts | Donors/Avg | Freepers/Avg | Monthlies | |||
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| Armed Forces - Europe |
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35.00 |
3 |
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There's been a life-size replica of Stonehenge in Goldendale, WA for nearly 90 years. It was built as a memorial to Klickitat County's WWI dead.
My kind of guy.
Maybe not (and it was posted here on FR!).
Interesting town -- bi-lingual Scottish Gaelic & English street signs, and a memorial plaque that manages to say just a wee bit more in the Gaelic than it does in the English... *\;-)
"BS! I know Merlin...and this man, sir, is no Merlin!"
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