Siren’s song for sedans

A skeletal white pretzel erupts fifty feet into the air, ringed by a low wall of stones, animal skulls and rusting bits of unidentifiable machinery. ‘Tis a wonder there aren’t more car pile-ups in Imlay, Nevada. One minute drivers are dodging tumbleweeds skipping across the highway, and the next, this… thing glides into view.

Motorists who don’t rubberneck and crash find themselves at Thunder Mountain, one of the weirder (and taller) roadside monuments on an otherwise uneventful interstate freeway. An architectural ode to injustices against Native Americans, it was pieced together by a troubled

soul named Frank van Zant, who lived and built here until he ended his life in 1989. Mortared with a smash-up of bricks and bottles, car windshields, manual typewriters and scraps of whatever he had on hand, it’s a folk art jumble of historical references, made piercing by the haunted faces of massacre victims.

Perpendicular to the highway, clumps of oddly-angled auto carcasses form a fence, the passenger compartments weighted down with old beer cans and the ubiquitous tumbleweeds. Perhaps they’re a commentary on industrialised society. Or maybe they just wrecked and got pasted into the scenery.