Take That Fork
by Peter Bradford

If you are blessed with a lively imagination, you are probably blessed with a taste for word play. When you see the words you say, when you dwell on the pictures they paint literally, you discover their double-edged magic. Like one square foot. Or, He threw up his hands and dropped his eyes. Or, how about stiff upper lip, or a (beep, beep) driving rain? A fork in the road?

Some people watch everything and miss nothing, like that cinematographer from England who asked me about the fork in the road on Route 199:

"I like that Fork in the road you got up there."

"Which fork is that?"

"You know, the Fork, where the road splits, going to Rhinebeck."

"Oh yeah, I turn there all the time. Nice fork."

"No, no, dammit, I mean the Fork you got there, the shiny Fork."

The shiny fork? I went to look again.

Of course, he was right. Behind the traffic light in Rock City, where Route 308 leaves Route 199 and runs to Rhinebeck, stuck deep in the ground in the middle of a vee-shaped green, is a 31-foot tall, welded sheet-metal, four-tined dinner fork, shiny as you please. For those needing help, there are little signs on it if you walk up close: Fork in the Road on the front, and on the back, Stephen B. Schreiber, "Punny Sculpture," Rock City Arts Council, S. B. Schreiber, Pres." On the remote chance that this Stephen B. Schreiber might tell me more, I called him up.

Well, you probably know about Steve. Lord knows the man has been squeezed to dust in local newspapers: he's that "slender, bearded native of Red Hook," son of apple farmers, Vietnam vet, once examiner for the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, self-titled mayor of a clutch of buildings called Peelorville, owner of the old-stuff store called Rock City Relics and almost everything else surrounding the green, dedicated packrat and dumpster-diver, sometime interior designer, and all-time tongue-in-cheek stuffer. But, when Steve produces another attractive apartment to rent in one of his Rock City houses, with still more of his inevitable "touches of the absurd," you see a clever mind in delicate balance: always practical, always sensible, always so business-like, but tilting with an irrepressible urge to surprise. Perhaps he's not driven to upset the humdrum, but he surely tends to add more fizz.

Stephen is a playful guy. He enjoys his life. High in the hills above Rock City, looking through huge windows to Red Hook and the Catskills beyond, he sits in great garlands of rummage and sleeps in a bed hung from the ceiling so he can rock himself to sleep. As I looked at his living room, I remembered an extrav-agantly cluttered poolroom in Paris, Tennessee, where throwaways were elevated to town treasure. Steve is a serious collector of bagatelles: a bronze-bound casket serves as a coffee table, his walls are laden with family history, a fatly sweet, soft-sewn, pucker-lipped woman slumps loosely in a rocker, fluffies are thrown on wing chairs, over there is a barber chair (of course), and crowds of mannequin arms and legs reach stiffly from the ceiling—"I found a dumpster full of them in New York. No torsos. Had to make two trips. Still didn't get 'em all." Crazy and cozy.

Steve traces his Fork back to a drawing on a jokey postcard. With his fancy for word and mind games ("life would be boring without them") and with Rock City softened by years of brassy precedents—chalkboard maxims sprayed on passing traffic, great plastic globes sparkling the roadside woods with colored light, a yellow steel bird roosting on the green—it wasn't a big leap for him to boost a minor pun to monumental size. "The idea sort of just showed up. The postcard said 'Greetings from the Big Fork in the Road' and had all these tiny people around it. Well, I thought. I got a fork in the road out here. Why not? So, I built a scale model with a regular dinner fork and a few two-inch yarn Guatemalan worry dolls—you know, the ones you put under your pillow at night and all your worries are gone in the morning? I had two big plates of steel in my pile of junque out back, this guy comes along who knows how to work torches, and we figure it all out." After nine months' work and lots of neighbor help, with Steve driving his tractor over the steel to get the right bends, the Fork was planted in January, 2000.

And there it is, Steve's pun in metal flesh. Who is this guy anyway? Why work so hard on a joke, no matter how tall it is? Steve is ambiguous. "This goofy Rock City stuff has been my life for twenty-five years, but I gotta say, all my sentiment is in my checkbook." Then, eyes alight, he talks about the man out west who shoved ten cars nose down in the sand to make Cadillac Ranch. "On a whim, you know. That farmer thinks art is legalized lunacy."

Not only that, it's purposely useless too, as the sculptor Richard Serra will tell you. But, any object made for public notice always has motive, even if it's only a personal one. I tell Steve about the billboard raised by a rancher to snuff all interest in developing land beside him: SNAKE FARM COMING! He snorts. "Hah! Let me tell you. Go down Route 199 towards Red Hook. Just before you come to a big LOTS FOR SALE sign, you'll see another big sign that reads: FUTURE EXPANSION SITE OF HOG RAISING FACILITY. Now, I know this guy. Bucky Coon is a mover and shaker in town, and he's gotta be doing the same thing. He'd laugh if you asked, but why the sign? Who else but a land buyer would care if he wants more pigs?" Months later, when I do ask Bucky Coon, he smiles. "But, I really am making more room for pigs—I just don't want any newcomers to be upset when I get 'em."

Too practical to say they are doing anything artful, people like Steve and Bucky Coon are local entrepreneurs of the Dutchess County roadside, Fun-and-Games-in-Art-and-Commerce category. They trans-mit messages to spin awareness their way and avoid trouble (Bucky's sign), give us a saucy jolt (Stephen's Fork), or yank our chains (so to speak) like the chubby purple truck running around Rhinebeck for the Royal Flush Septic Service. Some impish muse gives pop to what they do, but more power to the imps, I say. We need their spirits and caprice to blow the blahs away. There is a great wiener on four wheels delivering sausage in Pittsburgh doing that, there's a bright yellow army tank with rubber treads running around London. Maybe these looney birds intrude a wee bit, but isn't a bit of looney good for us? Some years ago, the English actor Alec Guiness played a painter in a film called The Horse's Mouth. He had a great itch: cover every wall he saw with his art, which was, somewhat beside the point, alarmingly hideous. No wall was safe, he wanted to paint it, he had to paint it, he could not be stopped. Finally, police at his heels, you see him floating down the Thames, framing colossal warehouses with his hands, eyes wide. Right on, renegade.

Do you remember Burma-Shave? Somebody does. The urge to dress the roadside struck again in Rock City last fall, this time with a series of red political signs on Route 199 ending with the old Burma-Shave script. Good for whoever. What's next for Steve? Have you seen the 50-foot wide heart he weed-whacked in the high grass opposite the Baptist Home yet? "I was looking for a bigger palette. I see the open field there, and I've had this idea for a long, long time...it's my crop art. You know, har, har, crop (he)art?"