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Dreambox: a Visit to Tinkertown
Monday, June 27, 2011 at 11:03PM “I did this while you were watching television.” —Ross Ward, creator of Tinkertown.
A room added on to another room. And another. And another. Until I lose count of how many rooms (the website says 22) and porches and connections make up this ramshackle mountain home. Some rooms have walls of wood. Some are composites of concrete and empty glass bottles — the open ends left pointing out so we can tuck messages and wishes inside as we pass by. Some floors are also concrete. Some are hard-packed dirt. Old license plates have been hammered down to cover gaps or jagged bits where two seams of the floor don’t line up quite right. Every room is filled with something. Collections of oddball Americana or dolls or a dry-docked boat. Here and there are mechanical contraptions that move and sing when you drop in a quarter.
The most impressive collection is made up of hundreds of hand-carved and painted wooden figurines, all made by the same man over forty-odd years. A whole town and a circus, filled with characters. Like a Mordillo soccer scene made into little wooden people. I could look all day and still not see every individual carving in the scenes. I make do by trying to see everything that moves when I press a button. The jump-roping girl, the flying Mary Poppins, the hammering blacksmith, the slowly opening coffin lid.
The people visiting this quirky place are mixed. A businessman, middle-class tourists from Texas and Japan, a handful of Mennonites, among many others. We all find the place strange. It’s dusty. Piled in a garage, we might call it junk. Laid out with love on the counters and in boxes and every nook and cranny, it’s not so much a museum as it is the fertile imagination of one man. Imagination given a form that continues on in his memory.
New Mexico, You Can Know Who Did It in Craft, People, Words, World 
Reader Comments (2)
I'm so in love with this place already, and the bottles, oh, I like those bottles. So much America is crammed into the little spaces by the sides of the road.
The bottles were my favorite part, Victoria.