Raising Art

We’re installing an arbor to surround Faithful Fountain. I bet you never thought about how all that big art was installed, did you? Yeah, me too.

The arbor is made of rebar. It was built in the metal shop, which is down by the house. In order to move it up the hill to Dandelion Ballad, Candace and Loren had to cut it into four sections—each of which is still bigger than a truck can easily carry. I honestly have no idea how they got it up the hill. But I know one thing for sure: these folks can really work with what they have.

Introducing the Power Wagon.

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Yep, that’s an old Dodge (circa 1948) with a boom lift mounted to the front. It takes us (and by “us” I mean “Loren”) hours to get the boom positioned correctly and ropes tied just right so they don’t take off the top of the fountain, but damn if Loren doesn’t work it out.

And then, we start raising it up. It goes a few inches at a time: lift it a little, put cinderblocks underneath, shorten the ropes, lift again. I am full of doubt: there’s no way this will work, the angles are all wrong, it’s too heavy, etc etc. But before long, lo and behold, we’ve got it a couple feet off the ground!

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So now comes the positioning. It’s got to be just right, so that the arched doorways are aligned with the center. Candace and Loren and I all take turns staring at it, hemming and hawing, pointing, lifting, turning the arbor until it looks pretty much right-on. My favorite part is when the boom needs to move to the right a hair: Loren just puts a jack under the left side of the truck, and cranks it up until the positioning is better.

And there it is. Next Loren busts out a transit level, and we get the heights just right. From there it’s a simple matter of hammering in about a zillion stakes (which we make by welding together lengths of recycled rebar) and mounting the arbor so it stands on its own. Tedious work, that, but it gets done despite my griping.

All told, it takes us nearly four days to get that crazy thing in the ground. But the closer we get to finishing it, the better and better it looks; by the end, our furrowed brows have turned to big grins, and dang if we don’t have a piece of art on our hands.

Another victory for Dandelion Ballad!