Coyote Johnson of Red Oak has been collecting muscle cars for nearly 50 years.

The first car he bought, a 1969 Plymouth Road Runner, is still one of his favorites.

Most of Johnson's collection will be auctioned off Sept. 14, 2019, Montgomery County Fairgrounds.

RED OAK, Ia. — Just south of the town proper, the world Coyote Johnson has built for himself lies hidden within a stand of pine trees. Owl sculptures peer out from among the trees, buildings and gardens, greeting visitors like silent sentries. Closer to the house at the top of the hill, the drive is now lined with muscle cars in various states of decay.

The cars, the owls and even the trees were all brought to this place through Johnson’s own desire and craftiness. The pine trees were all brought in when he brought the property in 1980, transforming a swath of farmland formerly occupied by the Powell School, a center for educating children with mental disabilities, into a shadowy, sweet-smelling cove, hiding the property away from any rubberneckers passing by on Highway 48.

The owls that populate the grounds were each meticulously carved by Johnson with a chainsaw. The inspiration came from a nest an owl once built in the lone bur oak, a mother with a few white fluffs for chicks. Now endless iterations of wooden birds keep watch over the property.

Then there are the approximately 87 muscle cars that Johnson has accumulated over the decades. The collection began with his very first muscle car, a 1969 Plymouth Road Runner with a carriage as green as his pine trees, which he bought in high school to race across the rural highways with his friends, and has slowly expanded over the years.

His affection for Plymouth’s affordable muscle car, introduced in 1968 and branded after the popular Road Runner cartoon — a trademark Plymouth paid $50,000 dollars to Warner Bros. for the use of its likeness — changed Johnson’s life forever. It transformed him from Bill Johnson of Red Oak into Coyote Johnson, the man who would chase his own strange dreams with the tenacity and zeal of the road runner’s rival.

Johnson, a self-described third-generation carpenter, built everything on his 20-acre property. His grandfather came over on a boat from Sweden and found work with a farmer in the area. His father and uncle started their own business as builders before he struck out on his own as well.

But if his carpenter’s knack for building and fixing were inherited, his constant need to be working on the next big project coupled with a susceptibility to fragile obsessiveness is all his own.

Take, for example, the intricate and finely wrought tree house tower that rises up next to his home. Like every building on the property, he built it. Before the pine trees grew up into it, you could climb up and look out over the surrounding countryside. It even had a built-in hot tub, now covered and filled with dirt and leaves as the tower has fallen into disrepair.

“When you got a lot of time on your hands, you just keep working,” Johnson said.

Despite a fiercely protected privacy and a way of shrugging off questions he doesn’t want to answer outright, Johnson is brimming with bashful charm and a consummate host. With his unassuming manner, gray stubble, farmer’s uniform of a plaid shirt and worn jeans and rural drawl, he reveals himself slowly to strangers as someone who, almost despite himself, enjoys a bit of spotlight.

This is perfectly exemplified in the round wood building in the center of his property adorned with several painted signs that welcome you to The Owl’s Nest, a vaguely clandestine bar that Johnson and his girlfriend ran serving beer and wine to their friends in the community. The building itself is topped by an owl figure whose eyes light up after sundown.

The inside of The Owl’s Nest is now empty, populated by a further excess owl statues — one with glasses in the style of Buddy Holly, a favorite musician — and a painted Road Runner effigy. Behind the bar sits a karaoke machine which, after some questioning, Johnson admits he's carted around to bars in southeastern Iowa, holding his own karaoke events (he prefers to sing songs from the “Eddie and the Cruisers” movie soundtrack over Buddy Holly classics).

As in many private matters, Johnson shrugs away questions about the bar's beginning and abrupt end. “Don't want to s--- in your own nest,” he said cryptically. “You get crazy sometimes, you want to do something stupid.”

Nowhere is Johnson’s complicated nature more clearly distilled than in his massive muscle car collection. Each car is a reflection of his inherited expertise, his easy embodiment of a kind of vintage masculinity that covets the feeling of speed and power a specific era of muscle cars allows its driver.

Though his lifelong affair with muscle cars began on the streets of his youth, Johnson didn’t begin collecting in earnest until the '90s when he would pore over classifieds in the Des Moines Register and Omaha World-Herald, seeking out specific models unique or rare enough to pique his interest.

“It was their time to give them up,” Johnson said of the many former car owners responsible for his collection. “They drove 'em but it got to be that they couldn't drive 'em on the highway, and we took 'em and redid 'em, restored 'em.”

After driving a car for a time, he would park it with the others, eventually erecting sheds around groupings of cars so that they were packed in “tighter than sardines.” No car avoided this fate, not the special edition Pontiac Firebird Trans Am — identical to the one made famous by “Smokey and the Bandit"; not the 1971 Dodge Super Bee, with a paint job that makes it look like an actual bumblebee; even Johnson’s coveted Road Runners — from the '68 to the '72 and every year in between — couldn’t avoid being bound up in steel and wood, left to suffer in rust and neglect.

But all that’s all changing now. Johnson has been biding his time, contemplating the idea of purging his collection and waiting for the right time. He long admired the professionalism of Yvette VanDerBrink, the master auctioneer now in charge of organizing and marketing the sale of Coyote Johnson’s mythical muscle car collection at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds on Sept. 14.

This past winter, his workshop caught fire. Both his girlfriend and his only daughter have been gently pushing him toward paring it down. Now the summer’s here and the time is right.

It’s clear, too, that the person whose word mattered most in the decision to auction off the cars was Johnson’s father, who died in March. He was one of the privileged few to even know the extent of his extreme car ownership, the man who gave him his carpentry skills and his passion for vehicles in the first place. (Johnson’s father owned one Ford in his entire life and there’s not a single one in the entire muscle car collection).

“He was one of the ones telling me to get rid of them,” Johnson said. “When they start weighing you down, you want to get rid of 'em.”

After pulling the trigger with the official announcement and inventory from VanDerBrink, it’s now a race against time to clean and repair each car before the auction. Johnson has enlisted Jenny Veoa, a local mother of two who had no prior experience working with cars. Word that she's a hard worker was all that mattered to him. Now the cars are slowly leaving their sheds, their chrome fixtures gleaming again after years in the dark.

Giving a tour of the collection — many of them awaiting the full-body treatment though lined up in their sheds as if they were already in the showroom — Johnson effortlessly listed their engine specifications in arcane detail alongside the details that identify each one as unique. Despite their long entombment, each car is another light in his eye.

“You don’t see many of them,” Johnson remarked of every other vehicle, offhandedly emphasizing the care and expertise that went into amassing his formidable collection.

Despite the impending exodus of muscle cars from the land of owls and pines, not every Hemi engine is destined for the auction block. In a shed kept apart from the others, Johnson has set aside about a dozen cars he will end up keeping for himself. To him, part of the whole reason for the auction is to refine and focus the collection so he can enjoy his all-time favorites.

In the “keep” shed, the favored cars almost look as though they know they’re extra special. The collection includes a crystal blue Plymouth GTX, a copper-colored 1976 Plymouth 'Cuda (the last year they were produced), a 1968 AMC AMX painted with a black paint embedded with small red crystals that sparkle in the sun. There are also, as one might imagine, several Road Runner models.

When asked why these cars, these specific models, were being set aside from the sale, Johnson responded with his usual deference: “I just like 'em, I guess.”

If you took Coyote Johnson at his word, you’d believe that his life was built by forces as mysterious and indifferent as the rain or the wind, that he didn't have all that much to do with it. But it’s clear that nothing on his property, in his sheds or in his life is there without him meaning for it to be.

This includes his first '69 Road Runner, blocked in his garage in front of a 1967 Chevy Bel Air, purposefully occupying a place of special significance. Though he rarely enters the garage and never takes the car out, he still sleeps above it every night.

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