Welder recycles scrap into bovine pasture art

Originally published Saturday, January 15, 2000

By AMY E. NEVALA
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Some people look at old oil containers, propane tanks and rusted truck parts and see junk. Gary Vig sees cows.

Three of them, in fact -- first a mooing cow, then a nursing calf, and last month, a 3-ton, 22-foot-long bull.

Vig welded the bovine bunch entirely from scrap metal. They can be seen standing in the horse pasture of Vig's friend Paul Waterman on 14415 Woodinville-Redmond Road.

"He doesn't make any drawings," said Waterman, 86, who speaks on behalf of his private neighbor. "He just gets an idea and puts it together. It's all up in his head."

Looking for a place to display his work, Vig approached Waterman, a horse boarder. "I said sure, I don't think it will bother the horses."

Three years ago the cow arrived, a 12-foot-high beauty created from 10 300-gallon diesel oil-fuel tanks. "Everybody kept calling her a bull, even though she's got an udder, so I said, 'Gary, you've got to whittle out a calf,' " Watherman said.

In December, they became the nuclear family when Vig, who worked on the Space Needle and the Alaska pipeline before entering commercial real estate and creating cows in his free time, and a half-dozen friends hauled in the bull sculpture. Standing about 50 feet from mama and calf, he's welded from a 1948 Ford truck and a pair of propane tanks.

"The cows, they're landmarks around here, a navigation aid," said Ken Mermis, owner of Grand Prix Equestrian, located down the road from Waterman's pasture. If you pass the metal cattle, you've gone too far.

Life isn't always a walk in the pasture for these critters. They're surrounded by horse droppings, and the rain rusts their hides. Sometime during the night of June 5, vandals -- presumably Woodinville High School fans trashing rival Inglemoor High -- spray-painted "IHS sucks" on the calf's rump and "Class of 2000 WHS" on the cow's left side. An outraged, anonymous Woodinville neighbor later sandblasted off the graffiti.

The sculptures collectively weigh more than 41/2 tons. Just let those pranksters try cow tipping.