BOOK EXCERPT
controversial fashion, collected many artifacts owned by local tribes — a haul that today makes up the bulk of the MAC collection. After the two cultures clashed during what Nisbet calls that “period of flux,” the fallout has been, well, complicated. “’Tis ye, ’tis your estranged faces,” the Thompson poem continues, “that miss the manysplendored thing.” Nisbet wants us to look so we don’t miss those manysplendored things — to see, as he shows in Chapter One, a wonder like the Northern Lights. Aristotle nailed it: All those tiny motes do add up to something truly marvelous. n Jack Nisbet reads from Ancient Places • Tue, May 19, at 7 pm • Auntie’s • 402 W. Main • auntiesbooks.com • 838-0206
TE R RA- C OT TA MAN BY JACK NISBET Outsider artist Leno Prestini emigrated to the United States with his family from Besano, Italy, in the early part of the 20th century. His father worked as a terra-cotta finisher for the Washington Brick, Lime and Sewer Pipe Company in Clayton, just north of Spokane. After the elder Prestini passed away, young Leno dropped out of school and joined his brother Batista at the brickyard.
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t was during the 1930s that Leno Prestini emerged as a unique figure in local lore, proving himself time and again to be a gifted design artist crossed with a clever engineer, a broad conversationalist and a mad adventurer. He seemed to breathe in the essence of northeastern Washington — including the Clayton brick plant and its machine shop; the region’s sawmill and mining culture; its mountains, coniferous forests and glacier-carved lakes; tribal culture and extended trail-horse rides; the taverns, churches and country music — and spit them back out in ways that were entirely personal. When Leno decided he wanted to go boating on nearby Loon Lake, he fashioned a craft with cement-sack sails and an iron rudder oriented like the tail of an airplane. The keel was a coffin cover held in place with a length of company strap iron, and the thin steel would begin to hum as the boat picked up speed. After seeing a round diving helmet made by a Spokane machinist, Leno and his friend Burton Stewart used an acetylene torch to shape their own helmet out of a hot water heater, decorated it with a sculpted octopus and installed double glass to prevent the faceplate from fogging. Adapting a garden hose for an air supply line, they put their odd headdress to work, diving after lost property for the summer lake crowd. Soon the dive team started descending beyond available sunlight, so they cobbled up an underwater flashlight from a six-cell battery enclosed in an aluminum cylinder, with a fuse head to hold the glass and a Model T radiator cap to seal the end. As their dives in Loon Lake approached 90 feet, they ordered balloon cloth from the Goodyear company to sew into a suit that could handle the cold temperatures. Stewart and Prestini’s eccentric operations were just getting warmed up. They salvaged a stainless-steel cream can and fabricated an improved helmet. A beer-barrel pressure pump regulated the air supply flowing through their garden hose. One dockside photograph shows Burton and another pal, in dark shirts, bending over the compressor in the background while Leno, fully tricked out in the white Goodyear diving suit, weighted yoke and leaden shoes, stares at the camera like Captain Nemo himself. They thought enough of their efforts to exhibit the suit at the Spokane Interstate Fair that fall and to answer a call from the Colville Police Department to help locate the body of a drowned man in a lake north of town. Leno and Burton Stewart climbed mountain peaks all around the region. When the terra-cotta plant shut down for a brief period, they customized a 10-foot ladder and used it to scale the kiln’s 110-foot brick smokestack, taking panoramic photographs from the top to prove it. And at every opportunity, Leno added his own strange creations to the terra-cotta kiln. He molded a diver dodging dangerous sharks, and an elf lamp that carried an unsettlingly dark aura. A two-headed mountain climber seemed to teeter toward an abyss, and when his brother Batista asked him about the double heads, Leno replied, “Every time I get to the top of the mountain, my problems are still with me.” n Reprinted by permission from Ancient Places: People and Landscape in the Emerging Northwest by Jack Nisbet. Published by Sasquatch Books.
MAY 14, 2015 INLANDER 31