Fiberglass Lawn Ornaments

Art is a reflection of the artist’s inner and outer world during the period of creation.[1]

—Rick Rubin

Italy has frescoes, Paris has oil paintings, Mexico has a stone wall with skulls carved in it of the people who won a ball game and got their heads chopped off, and Grand Island has oversized fiberglass lawn ornaments. And we’re damn good at it. Less than a mile from E-Free was the not-so-private collection of one of these master artisans. His spacious front yard was more sprawling than most, which made a perfect canvas to fill with masterpieces. Fiberglass deer, fiberglass bears, fiberglass moose—posed in graceful tranquility in the most serene of wooded getaways. Then he said “f**k it” and added a dinosaur, sasquatch, and a bunch of cacti. It’s awesome. My visiting friends never got it. But they also never saw it during Christmas when the guy put a Rudolph nose on one of the deer. I mean, how great is that?

There are more beauties out there in our great city, enough to create a fiberglass scavenger hunt. There’s the giant cow with a marquee sign advertising steak. When one steakhouse closed, the cow moved to a different steakhouse. There’s the giant rooster in front of the twenty-four-hour diner—Tommy’s—which is also on its second life after it migrated from a farm supply store that went out of business. A gigantic roller skate beckoned all to skin their knees on the wooden floor of Skate Island. It used to rotate and have flashing light bulbs around the sides, but one day it broke, and no one bothered to fix it. Rounding out the inanimate objects category, a giant hammer is on top of the local Ace Hardware franchise.[2] When the hammer started to deteriorate, it was replaced with a brand-new, even better hammer.

But the Sistine Chapel of lawn sculpture wasn’t the shark head mounted above the doorway of Bonzai Pizza, but the junkyard/auto body shop four blocks from my childhood home in the not-so-great part of town. This virtuoso/car mechanic wanted to share his gifts with the world but also didn’t want any car strippers tearing apart his scrap metal. The solution? He made characters out of car parts, welded them to poles, and hoisted them up above his fence line so the world could admire them from the street. The collection made the front page of The Grand Island Independent newspaper after he made a chili dog car with Coney Island George driving it.

Even though we didn’t have much to work with, we still found a way to create something uniquely ours.

Target

“I EXIST” is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing—& all good writing.[1]

—David Foster Wallace

The final tour stop is not a destination but a lack thereof. It is the embodiment of our town’s angst, disappointment, and low self-esteem. It is the daily reminder of all we lack, the one small thing that if we could just obtain, then we’d be something. We’d have made our mark. We’d matter. We’d arrive. We’d do more than just exist. But that’s not on the tour. We don’t have a Target.

I don’t mean “target” in a teleological sense. I mean the department store. The fact that we didn’t have this f*****g place to shop has been the bane of our existence. That God-forsaken cesspool of a town Kearney has one, and we all had to vacation forty-five minutes away to do our back-to-school shopping for those few classy items. Every tax dollar my mom spent in Kearney for my new clothes probably funded a methadone clinic.

The reality is, Grand Island was more of a Walmart kind of town, full of Walmart kind of people. We aspired to be the Target shopping type, but that’s just not who we were. Shopping at Target was like taking your wife to a steakhouse on your anniversary. It’s nice to indulge, to pretend as though this was the lifestyle you lived—and it’s fun to pretend. But as soon as the waitress brings you the check, you are reminded that’s not who you are at heart. You can’t pretend forever.

I didn’t know there was a stigma about Walmart until I got to college and my friends made fun of how often I shopped there. Eventually, I understood when I looked around at all the pajama pants and oversized Tweety bird air-brushed t-shirts adorning my fellow shoppers, in Omaha, these people looked out of place. I thought they just looked like Islanders.

We loved Walmart so much that it was a highlight of my adolescence when they announced they would be building not one, BUT TWO, new Walmart stores in Grand Island.

Damn right we’re a two Walmart town. F**k you again Kearney.

I mean I loved Walmart, so much so that my friends and I hung out there. Noah and I invented this game where we separated and tried to find an item that would make the other person laugh. We’d establish a rendezvous point, break for twenty-five minutes, and then present our discovery to the other and watch his reaction. It was great. He won with a book written by The Dog Whisperer Cesar Milano. Walmart was one of four places open past 9:00 p.m. that welcomed minors. When I was on staff at Camp Augustine and had the night off, we ran the circuit between Bosselman’s Truck Stop, McDonald’s, Tommy’s Restaurant (of fiber glass rooster fame), and both Walmarts. One time we did the whole trip in Native American regalia and saw the same drunk guy at the truck stop and Tommy’s. Clearly, he was as tuned into the Grand Island nightlife as we were. I bet he gave his meth dealer a big tip when he started seeing Indians follow him around.

My dad was in such a state of excitement and disbelief that he used the news of the two Walmarts as a conversation starter. In middle school I went to a national wrestling tournament in Denver. I was a terrible wrestler, but my parents volunteered to drive so I made the team. Olympic Gold Medal winning wrestler Rulon Gardner was making an appearance and signing autographs. If you’re not sure who that is, he completed one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history, then almost died after being buried in the snow after a snowmobiling accident. He lost a toe and kept it in a jar in his fridge, got super fat, and then won the reality competition, The Biggest Loser. If that’s not a resume, then don’t come to me for career advice.

As I waited in line for a signature, I got a little star struck, but Rulon led the conversation:

“Where you from?”

“Grand Island, Nebraska. You’ve probably never heard of it.”

“Oh, I know Grand Island!”

“You do?”

“Yeah, I went to school in Lincoln. I’m a Husker. I’ve been there a couple of times.”

My dad couldn’t help himself.

Dad: “So, you know how big Grand Island is?

Rulon: “Yeah, I think so.”

Dad: “Can you believe that we’re getting TWO Walmarts?”

Rulon could believe it. Or couldn’t. He mostly didn’t know what he was supposed to say. He signed my shirt, took a nice photo, and moved us along without matching my dad’s enthusiasm. He was mostly just happy that my dad was so happy. He could tell this was important to him.

[1] David Foster Wallace, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” (1990) in Both Flesh and Not, (Little, Brown and Company, 2012), 83.

[1] Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, (Penguin Press, 2023), 171.

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