Glasswork : 11,281 Bottles in Tree Speak Against Littering

Robert Salz, a tourist from Berkeley, thought he knew everything Southern California had to offer until he came upon the glittering apparition by the side of the Golden State Freeway.

Dangling from the branches of a tall locust tree in Castaic are 11,281 glass bottles that shimmer in the sunlight and tinkle in the nearly incessant wind.

“We went to Disneyland, but something unexpected like this was the highlight of the whole trip,” said Salz, 37, a sales manager for a wine and spirits company, who was driving home with his wife and two children. “It’s like a giant wind chime.”

But Bob Hallgren, the homeless man who created the roadside attraction, did not set out to make what may be the world’s largest wind chime when he began collecting bottles that he found in nearby fields and along roads.

Instead, as Hallgren has told Salz and many other curious motorists, he started putting the trash in the tree seven months ago to shame Americans into cleaning up their act.

“This is my fight back against litter,” said Hallgren, 57, brushing his copious gray hair off his forehead as he warmed to his favorite subject. “I’ll quit when I get 20,000 bottles up there, and if America doesn’t wake up by then, God help them.”

But rather than raising litter consciousness, the shiny tree baffles some residents of Castaic, a fast-growing bedroom community and popular truck stop north of Santa Clarita.

“It’s for Christmas and they just didn’t take down the decorations, right?” asked Etsel Yamasaki, a landscape architect for the county.

Others are outraged over what they consider “probably the biggest waste of a tree I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Paul Shaw, co-owner of a nearby glass company. “I view it as graffiti.”

Still others credit Hallgren with ridding the community of the many discarded bottles left by truckers and tourists visiting Castaic Lake. “He’s a law-abiding citizen who has helped abate the litter problem,” said Deputy Steve Vaughan of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Hallgren, accompanied by “Mitzie the Wonder Dog,” his 8-year-old Belgian shepherd, stumbled onto the 80-foot tree with thorny branches last year after running out of gas in Castaic, and he moved in beside it.

The tree towers over a vacant four-acre lot, which Hallgren and other transients have long used as a campground. The property is owned by a group of Orange County investors, who say they have obtained approval from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to build a restaurant and shopping center there. Nine months ago, they put the land up for sale for $2.9 million.

“We know he’s there, but he hasn’t been a major nuisance,” said Joan Byrd, a local real estate agent representing the owners. “If it gets into escrow, we’ll have to ask him to leave.”

In the meantime, Hallgren spends much of his time using nylon cord to tie two bottles at a time together before tossing them into the tree.

He has also painted a large white sign on the pavement of a nearby parking lot:

“Bob and Mitzie’s Famous Bottle Tree . . . Come On Great People of America, Take Pride in Her and Keep Her Beautiful. It’s Up to You.”

Hallgren said he has always had a yen to perform unusual feats. Four years ago, he quit his job as an industrial painter, emptied his savings account and traveled more than 70,000 miles on a motorcycle with Mitzie perched in a box in the back.

“My dad worked almost 50 solid years and died six months after he retired,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to enjoy a little bit of life, do things that have never been done before.’ ”

Hallgren feels so strongly about litter that he never considered cashing in the bottles, which would net him about $300.

“If it takes America one step further than it was before, that’s one step further along,” he said.