REGENT - Keith Kroschel didn't plan to see the Enchanted Highway when he pulled clear of heavy commuting exhaust Wednesday morning.

He'd packed his bags and left at dawn's early light, hoping to make good cross-country time from St. Paul, Minn., out to his daughter's in Seattle.

Then, at Gladstone, he was seized by one of those "life is short" moments. Enticed by the "geese in flight" sculpture out near the road, he took an impulsive turn off Interstate 94 and tooled on down the Enchanted Highway.

He drove to the next sculpture - a leaping deer - and thought, "This is cool."

The idea of more surprises ahead kept him going, and 30 entertaining miles later, the Enchanted Highway spilled him out on Regent's main street. He topped off his gas tank at Gary Wiseman's station and bought postcards of the sculptures.

The trip was serendipitous. So was the fact that Gary Greff, the man who dreamed, designed and sculpted the Enchanted Highway, happened to be at Wiseman's station. March sunlight streamed through the big pane windows of Wiseman's shop and warmed the old cracked leather couches there.

Kroschel and Greff had what for Kroschel was a new conversation, and for Greff, one oft repeated.

The Minnesota man was delighted with what he'd seen, pleased he'd taken an hour or so out of his life to travel down the hilly, rural highway.

"They're beautiful," he told Greff.

His favorite sculpture was "Fisherman's Dream," the newest one on the highway. It's so new, the delicate pink paint on the salmon's underbelly and the sky blue on the dragonfly's wings is barely dry.

In technical terms, it is the most complicated of the sculptures. To some, including Kroschel, it is the most fabulous of them all.

Kroschel handed Greff a modest donation and left, he himself a little richer for the hour of whimsy and admiration he'd spent.

The "Fisherman's Dream" is sculpture number seven on the highway. A rainbow trout leaping from the water, about to snap a dragonfly, is 70 feet from top to bottom. It is the only one of seven fish to clear the metal water. A catfish, smallmouth bass, northern pike, blue gill, walleye and a salmon swim beneath the metal water.

To prepare, Greff looked at dozens of photographs of the fish and quickly realized each species comes in a hundred hues, not to mention shapes and proportions.

Fishermen traveling on the Enchanted Highway will love the fish for the realism Greff has wrought with metal.

Up on the highway, Greff is pleased.

"The colors turned out real good," he says, his arm out his pickup window, looking at the fish sculptures in the revealing afternoon light, each scale a different density of sun and shadow.

Greff is 58 years old. Artistically, he has come miles since the first simplistic Tin Family sculpture just outside Regent, built 17 years ago when he was a younger man with a younger man's idealism.

He still believes in the possibilities of the Enchanted Highway, beyond the 10,000 people who travel down it every year. He sees a metal shop where 10 skilled welders turn out miniatures of the sculptures or other fabricated metal art, like the spruce and oak trees he fabricated from aluminum and other metals. He sees other businesses growing and new ones coming because Regent has something happening.

He's already at work on the next sculpture, a gargantuan spider web with giant spiders crawling about. There will be 11 sculptures when his enchanted dream is complete.

He has never lost his vision of an enriching destination that could be coupled with, say, bus tours to Medora. At the same time, for all these years, he has become far from a rich man, living in a trailer and subsisting mainly on the one solid meal his folks invite him over to every day.

The sculptures have cost nearly $500,000. The geese in flight cost $150,000 alone. The "Fisherman's Dream" another $45,000, and so on and so on.

Money comes from donations, grants and whatever sources he and others helping him can find, including proceeds from a soon-to-be expanded gift shop in Regent. Then Greff turns the money into a metal sculpture. This year, the project will get a $24,000 boost from the Department of Commerce.

Satisfaction and less often money comes from encounters with people like Kroschel, who either purposely or accidentally have a "life is short" moment and find the highway.

There was the old guy last summer, who sought out Greff just to tell him that he'd have died a poorer man if he hadn't first seen the amazing enchantment on a highway north of Regent.

In other words, if life has to be short, a trip down the Enchanted Highway - now with fabulous fish swimming over the prairie - makes it a sweet and fantastical bit wider.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)