SCENES FROM `A TIME BEFORE NOW'

After getting home in the evening from his radiator and air conditioning repair shop, Dale Beam often goes to the Cayman Islands or to the Bahamas.

How he goes there is to be discovered in a remarkable exhibit this month at Gallery 100.

These minutely detailed wooden models are his interpretations of the remote villages he sought out during many years of traveling in Central America and the Caribbean.

These village have no electricity and running water, existing "in a time before this current time," he says.

"... When I'm working on these I'm right there."

Most travelers take pictures. Beam returns with mental pictures he makes three dimensional.

"If you were three inches tall you could walk around and take a look," he says. "I guess that's what I do. I like to live in them."

He stays there for an hour or so most nights during the six months to a year each one takes to finish.

"I have to make myself stop," he says. "I could go on forever."

The McGee resident's folk art is the first exhibit at Gallery 100's new Lorimier Gallery, which is dedicated to showing Missouri artisans.

Some of Beam's work resembles scenes from "The Mosquito Coast," rustic assemblages of ingenious contraptions: an irrigation system that catches rainwater and funnels it to the houses and gardens, or a beacon devised with fire and reflective material in a place called Goat Creek.

Each house in the village and each room is intricately detailed, from half-eaten plates of food to the kettle hanging on a spit over a fire to the toilet paper in an outhouse.

You can look inside Miss Emily's Bar, a joint in the Bahamas. Or Barclay's Bank, open only from 10-2 on Thursdays.

Beam is afraid the smallest of his details sometimes are missed.

"Not many people look at it long enough," he says.

Beam likes putting a "No fishing" sign next to a stack of cane poles. All the scenes also include trash.

"Nothing's perfect," he says. "There's always trash. We don't live in a spotless world.

"I try to make it as real as possible."

But one of his pieces, titled "Pirates," is a work of pure imagination. Part of the town has been burned by attackers.

Another is a fishing pole factory.

The largest work, "New Plymouth," recreates a real rustic village in the Bahamas "much as it is today."

The scenes are made of cedar roofing shingles cut with wire cutters, joined with household glue and covered with polyurethane. He uses a lighter to give the wood an aged look.

The tiny rocks in one are from Grand Cayman, the glass pieces in another found on the ground in Mexico. These are treasures to Beam.

"When somebody's going somewhere and says, What can I bring you, a T-shirt?, I say, No, a handful of rocks."

Beam has no background in art. "I can't do anything else," he says. "It's hard to write my name sometimes.

"These are my interpretations of the things I have seen," he says. "It may not have looked anything like it."

Beam lived in Florida until moving to the Wappapello area two years ago. "We wanted to get the kids in a school away from drugs and violence," he said.

Now, he lives with his wife, Barbara, and their two children in a cabin by a stream. It's a scene not far removed from those he creates.

"We live in a place we would have liked to have grown up in," he says.