‘The statue once called ‘The Melty Miser’ of west Alabama didn’t start out melty. In fact, it didn’t even start out a miser. ‘The Melty Miser’ was born into this world as ‘Happy Harold,’ the manic-looking mascot of a local hardware chain. The statue was erected in the style of Texas’ cement cowboys, made to loom over an empty stretch of highway and alert travelers that various power tools were available at unbeatable prices just off the next exit.
What set ‘Harold’ apart initially was his size. It’s said his signature cowlick brought him to nearly 80’ at the outset. The great irony of ‘Happy Harold’ is, of course, that his height was achieved with the use of subpar materials- seemingly some sort of thick, experimental plastic. It was only a few weeks before his features began to droop under the hot, Alabama sun.
Thus, the ‘melty.’
By the next year, ‘Happy Harold’s’ smile had inverted and his brow had taken on the unbridled cruelty of a fairy tale villain. The money bag he once held high (to indicate a celebration of what he had saved on hardware), slowly dropped behind his back, the arm twisting unnaturally, until it settled into a position that looked distinctly like he was attempting to keep the money away from roadside viewers.
Thus, the ‘miser.’
This is all ancient history, of course, because ‘The Melty Miser’ collapsed during a heatwave in 2021, his body sprawled backward in the field off the highway. Was anyone hurt? Well, that’s a good question- and one that seems particularly pointed given how quickly the owner of ‘The Melty Miser’ chose not to dismantle the Miser, or even to just let heat and gravity make a puddle out of him. The man chose to bury the Miser under a mountain of dirt and those hollow parts, kept solid in the cool earth, now form the Wayside attraction known as ‘Melty Miser Caverns.’’
The entrance to ‘Melty Miser Caverns’ doesn’t look like much but the maps I’ve located online all suggest that it roughly represents the anus of the titular Melty Miser. Maybe that’s why I loiter with Hector at the statue’s abandoned base, all shorn bolts and shattered plastic.
Finally, I push down my dignity and pull Hector into the caverns proper. We wander through the unstable stalactite fields of the groin (where visitors customarily use lighters to melt little plastic icicles from the ceiling). We peer into the psychedelic maze of the arms and squeeze through the tight passage formed by the left hand’s middle finger fusing with the money bag sometime post-impact and pre-burial (now heavily graffitied in UV-reactive paints). Finally, we emerge from between the Melty Miser’s lips and into a hollowed out room of natural earth. There, we cast our light on the excavated face of ‘The Melty Miser,’ massive and horrible in the dark.
-traveler
