The two auction-house staffers walked directly up to the table where I was standing and stopped just to my right. The man wanted to show the woman something on the table, but was too polite to ask if they could nudge closer.
I was looking at a big metal house fly with closed wings and wondering who the heck would want something like that in their house. When I was growing up in Georgia, we spent most of our time trying to keep flies out of the house.
I turned to the two people and saw that the man was nodding toward the same thing I was cringing at. He wanted to show the woman the oversized fly on the table! Like me, he was dumbfounded by its presence here.
“I don’t like flies,” she said politely but pointedly. Neither do I, I interjected. “Watch,” she said, “it’ll sell for $35.” She was probably right; somebody who saw much more in this fly than us will buy it at too high a price.
We all wondered what the thing was used for, so the man picked it up – it was heavy – and opened the top. The belly was scooped out to hold something, but what? The fly gave up no answers.
As I walked around the room previewing items, I found that Mr. Fly wasn’t the only creature for sale on this day. In another room was a menagerie of metal and wooden animal sculptures, including a larger-than-life wood carving of an eagle perched on a branch attached to a real tree stump.
The auction house had placed on the carving a newspaper article about the artist, Marty Long, who specializes in outdoor tree sculptures. When the article was written, he and his assistant had done 100 such sculptures, including an eagle (might this be the one at auction?), two dogs, a bear eating honey and a grouping of seven rabbits. His largest had been a 37-foot stump called “Fall of the Angels” depicting good overcoming evil. Most of his works were created for homeowners in the suburbs, where he still lives and works.
Long trained as a chef in Wales, then became a professional ice sculptor and then a chainsaw tree carver.
At the auction house, the eagle reigned over the other metal animals and objects, many of them bearing green absentee-bid stickers of folks itching to buy them. A gas cylinder gong bell with raised leaf decoration had four stickers. A trout looking as if it was on the wrong end of a fisherman’s hook had three. An owl had two. A praying mantis and a few others had one. Other bids would likely come from the floor.
When the fly came up for auction, I was curious about what it would sell for or if it would sell at all. It did sell, not for the $35 that the staffer had jokingly predicted but for $25. The auctioneer sold it as an ashtray, but I think he was guessing – many of them do that quite often – because it was much too big to hold ashes.
Here are some of the rest of the sculptures:
