Head west on Interstate 90 and not far from downtown Spokane, near Exit 257, you'll see what appears to be the dreamscape of a 10-year-old brain.
A 16-foot Tyrannosaurus Rex terrorizing a treehouse. Two equally tall roosters going head-to-head. Three cows in a boat, because why not? And, of course, a spaceship that looks like it teleported straight out of an episode of The Twilight Zone, from which two aliens are emerging to stretch their long, gangly limbs.
For first-timers driving by, these scenes surely make for a surreal moment, loaded with many understandable questions: What in the world?! Is that stuff for sale, or is it just some madman's idea of yard art? If it is a business, how do I get there, and where's the sign? I wonder if they'd let me sit in the spaceship?
The entire spectacle is the creation of a 10-year-old brain, it's just trapped inside the body of long-time "junker" and Spokane businessman, Mike Ferguson.
"The front line is my sign," Ferguson says of his stylized display of whimsical items at his junkyard of fun called Way Out West.
For many, happening upon this fantastical playground in the middle of a field is akin to a mirage they have to experience to believe, regardless the time of day.
However (hint-hint) there is a giant World War II-era submarine net float ball that swivels to say "open" or "closed."
"If people want to stop and look, they do, no matter my hours," Ferguson says, throwing up his hands.
But the good-natured, talkative Ferguson says he doesn't mind. He lets photographers come shoot any time of day, as long as they let him know they're coming. Senior portraits and prom pictures are common occurrences.
"If they want to climb on a dinosaur or giraffe, let 'em. It's all for touch," Ferguson says.
And, even more, it's "all for sale," with price tags ranging from under $100 to $35,000.
Growing up in Southern California, Ferguson got his start "trash-picking" around his neighborhood and going to the annual Saugus Swap Meet in Santa Clarita with his dad who was also a "junker."
"I'd drag things home and sell them to the neighborhood kids," Ferguson says. "I did get in trouble when I sold one of them an adult magazine... I made a killing off those."
Even though he became a registered nurse 38 years ago, the thrill of junking remained a constant hobby.
"I never stopped buying and selling, regardless of what I was doing," Ferguson says. "I didn't miss a lot of yard sales."
In 1991, he opened Ruby Street Antiques in Spokane, which morphed into an antique shop specializing in oversized statuary pieces. He took annual trips to Mexico, China and Indonesia, filling up shipping containers and semi-trucks with architectural oddities.
Many locals remember the two monstrous lions flanking the entrance of Ruby Street Antiques, drawing in curious visitors with the attractive absurdity of it all. The pair eventually sold for $40,000.
"You have to be willing to risk a lot of money, with little guarantee of finding the right buyer," Ferguson says. "You have to think 'This is so cool, everyone else will think it's cool,' right?"
His purchases began getting bigger and bigger. Deciding he needed a "warehouse," he bought the property off I-90.
"A phenomenon happened where people started stopping to look around, and they couldn't be denied," Ferguson says, so he moved the business west of town in 2004.
Business boomed exponentially in the three years that followed. But even with over $1 million in sales, Ferguson would put 100 percent right back into it.
"If I had to live off what I was making, I could never have built my inventory," he says.
He was still buying bigger — and weirder — items. With the new location so visibly located along I-90, plus becoming more easily accessible and spread out in the open as opposed to a crowded store, it appealed to a lot of people. One of them was Nirvana ex-bassist Krist Novoselic, who bought a spaceship, and actor Adrien Brody, who put a "ton of items on hold, then never called back."
"A lot of times, to keep famous people busy when in Spokane, we'll show up on a list of interesting things for them to do," Ferguson says.
However, when the recession hit at the end of 2007, "it was like a light shut off."
That year, he says he'd purchased a "staggering amount of inventory," including four semi-trucks from Mexico and 42 ocean containers from China. Often he would sell entire containers to his customers, but most of them wound up at Way Out West.
As a result, he hosted a huge auction (Ferguson has also owned several auction businesses throughout his career, including his current company, I-90 Auctions), liquidating most of his inventory to pay bills.
When sales began picking up again in 2010, spaceships costing $7,500 sounded reasonable once more.
Ferguson originally worked with a designer from China to manufacture nine total of his retro-futuristic spaceships.
"I said, 'I need it to look like the ones when I was a kid,'" he recalls.
Just recently, he sold the last of those nine spaceships — the one perched on the little knoll at the west edge of his property for 15 years — the one thing he always said was never for sale.
"I heard from hundreds of people...'What are you doing? Where did it go?' They get comfortable and love a certain thing," Ferguson says with a chuckle. "Everything is for sale, at the right price."
When a guy who stopped by Way Out West every year, each time bugging Ferguson to sell him the last spaceship, finally offered "a dumb amount of money," Ferguson told him if he could get them manufactured again he'd sell him the one on the knoll.
Ferguson's designer found the blueprints and made another load of nine spaceships, three of which have sold already.
"If you want your spaceship, the few we have left are probably it, as the profit margin was a lot smaller this time around," he says.
The industry has changed. Ferguson recalls how he used to have his T-rexes manufactured at $750 a piece and then would sell them for $3,500.
"I couldn't have them manufactured at $3,500 these days. There's no room for profit," he says.
When asked what the future holds for Way Out West, Ferguson isn't sure. He and his brother Mark, who's been the venture's long-time manager "aren't spring chickens any more." And Ferguson's son, who once ran his auction business with him, is currently interested in traveling the world, not in running his dad's business.
But for now, Ferguson once again has headed down to Mexico for his annual buying trip to find more of the strange and outlandish.
As for what he's looking to haul back home, it's "proven winners" — stuff he knows is going to sell. And with that sale, comes his favorite part:
"It's mostly about seeing the joy it brings out in people that makes it all worth it." ♦
