by Beth Riner, Messenger Staff Writer

It took artist Ron Van Dyke 37 hours and a trip to the emergency room to transform a dead maple tree into a nine-foot wooden statue of a World War II soldier.

This past June, Altamont Mayor Jana Barrett asked Van Dyke to look at the tree on the Old Grundy County Courthouse Square to see what he could do with it. A lightning strike had killed the tree.

“They just hated to cut it down without doing something,” Van Dyke recalled. “The mayor called me because she knew I was doing sculpture — and I used to do wood carving, but nothing that big.”

Since the tree was next to a World War II cannon, the mayor thought a soldier from that era made sense and charged Van Dyke with completing it in time for a Fourth of July dedication.

“I’m glad they trusted my artistic creativity because they didn’t say I had to do it in a certain way,” Van Dyke said. “They left it up to me on how to design it.”

Although he researched the Internet to see what a World War II soldier looked like, the shape of the tree itself drove Van Dyke’s design. Its lowest limb looked like a saluting arm.

“It was amazing,” he said. “The tree limb was just growing that way. I cut off that limb to make two arms — one arm’s straight, and one arm’s saluting.”

With his design in mind, Van Dyke came out with a chainsaw and started carving the trunk of the tree.

“You just rough it out with the big chainsaw, and then you go in with smaller saws and start doing details,” he explained. He used a small side grinder with a wood-cutting blade for more detail and then finally wood-carving chisels for the finest detailing.

He worked on it over the course of a few days in rainy June.

“Whenever the weather was good, I’d come out here and work on it a little bit,” he noted. Passersby, including veterans, would stop to watch as he worked.

“It turned out pretty good,” he added. “It’s tricky to get everything proportionate.”

Calamity struck on the last grind of the project — the grinder slipped, came back, grabbed his shirt, and ripped into his forearm.

“It cut me wide open,” he said. “It didn’t hurt — it was so fast like someone slicing you with a knife.”

He called a buddy who lived right down the road to drive him the 30 miles to the emergency room in McMinnville where he got 13 stitches.

“That’s not bad for 50 years of carving,” he said. “That’s the only really bad accident I’ve had. I could have bled to death if it had cut an artery.”

He went back to work on the statue the very next day.

“When I got through, I sealed it with wood sealer, and then I put paint on it,” he said. “That will preserve it for a long time.”

Van Dyke, 69, grew up in Chattanooga’s East Ridge and moved in 1976 to Altamont, where he bought five acres and a house for $8,000. Van Dyke’s family used to drive through the area on the way to visit his grandmother, and he fell in love with the rugged beauty of the bluffs.

“People can’t believe I did that,” Van Dyke said. “Nobody wanted to live here — it was such a Wild West. It was crazy — moonshiners, car strippers, marijuana growers, and crankheads. When I first came here, the Klan was in sheets in the highway taking up donations in buckets.”

He found work teaching survival skills at Skymont Scout Reservation, the 2,000-acre Boy Scout camp, where he discovered an unknown cave, which still bears his name.

When the ranger at the camp told him they were looking for somebody to work the fire tower in Altamont, Van Dyke jumped at the chance.

“I was young back then and could make it to the top,” he laughed. The tower, known as the Last Lookout, was one of several used to triangulate the location of wildfires and was the last to shut down as aircraft replaced the workers manning them.

He’d work the two jobs about three-quarters of the year and then spend the rest of his time working on his cabin and focusing on his art.

A mostly self-taught artist, Van Dyke started out in wood carving and woodworking and got into making sculpture out of recycled metal.

“There was a lot of junk up here and a lot of metal in the mountains,” he explained. “I started going to the scrapyard in McMinnville every two weeks to buy scrap. Back then you could buy all you wanted for 25 cents a pound. I had buckets of stuff that I would make things out of — animals and flowers and whatever.”

Van Dyke quickly became known on the craft show circuit for his metal sculpture.

“I did that for about 25 years, and then they decided it was dangerous to let people walk around scrapyards, and they wouldn’t let me look no more.”

He was working on stone patios at the time and started carving faces out of the stones.

“People would buy those as fast as I could make them,” he said. “An artist has to be really flexible and pay attention to what his client wants. I’d make stuff out of anything I found.

“I’m just into everything — building stuff, building houses. One guy even called me to see if I could build him a coffin. He didn’t have enough money to buy anything, but he said he needed it in three days. He had cancer, and they told him he was dying. He got buried in it about a week later.”

Often called a Renaissance man, Van Dyke began writing during Covid. He hopes to market a historical fiction book on hobos to the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum in Chattanooga and self-publish a collection of supernatural short stories.

After selling his cabin, he bought property past Greeter Falls, where he ran Fern Falls, a bed-and-breakfast, for about five years until the recession hit.

“I have a 30-foot waterfall in my backyard,” he said, adding that he is thinking about renting rooms again (without the breakfast) in the near future.

Van Dyke will have his work for sale from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 7, at the Fall Sewanee Arts and Crafts Fair during the University of the South’s Family Weekend.