Early on a Saturday morning, Rick Butterworth stood in a junkyard on Bent Mountain and stared at rows of scrapped cars rusting slowly into the mud.

Butterworth, who restores vintage cars at his shop, A.A.R. Restorations on Shenandoah Avenue in Roanoke, was searching for parts for a customer's 1972 Dodge Challenger that has its front end bashed in.

Snowflakes swirled in the wind, but Butterworth did not rush.

He walked a row of rust-pocked cars near the front of the yard, stopping at each one, ogling them at a wide angle, then close up, as if he were viewing paintings in a museum.

For Butterworth, the rust buckets were fallen specimens from the golden age of American cars -- the period from the 1950s to the early 1970s, when cars were made of chrome and steel, and horsepower trumped handling and gas mileage.

In his shop, Butterworth transforms cars like these from wasted to brand new. But workable hulks are increasingly rare finds. Butterworth wants them all.

Before he made it to the Challenger in a clearing farther up the mountain, Butterworth saw a blue 1967 Plymouth Barracuda with no engine, a stripped interior and wide tires on the back.

The off-kilter driver's door screeched when Butterworth yanked it open. He bent down and inspected the floor for rust.

"It would make a great drag car," he said finally. "I wonder how much they want for it?"

That's what life is like for Butterworth. He restores cars for a living. In the process, he often adds a car or two -- or at least a few parts -- for himself.

"He lives it, breaths it, sleeps it," said his wife, Lisa. "He'll come home and tell me about a car and I will look at him and say no. Sometimes he listens and sometimes he doesn't."

When he can't listen, he hides new acquisitions at the shop.

"Is that a customer's?" Lisa will ask when she discovers a new old car.

"Well, no," he responds under his breath, eyes downcast.

Field of Dreams

Butterworth, 49, has long stringy hair that flows from under a black skull cap.

That, and the tattoos peeking out from under his T-shirt sleeves, give him the air of a mellowed-out biker.

After nearly three decades in Roanoke, he hasn't lost his native Massachusetts accent.

Butterworth's shop is a shrine to his obsession. In the empty lots beside his rectangular building, his cars far outnumber his customer's cars.

He calls the fenced-in lot to the left the Field of Dreams, or F.O.D.

The lot is strewn with finds Butterworth couldn't pass up, including racing slicks, engine blocks, chrome grills and 17 classic cars in varying stages of disrepair.

It's not junk, just rusty, broken and rundown; pure potential in the eyes of gearheads around town.

"The stuff that he's got out there, it's just gone. It's disappeared," said Charlie Overfelt, a fellow car enthusiast and vintage drag racer who teaches at William Fleming High School.

Field of Dreams highlights include a white 1966 GTO, a '50s rail dragster and a 1937 fiberglass Fiat body on a drag car chassis.

In all, Butterworth keeps more than 25 cars at the shop, in addition to the seven he has at his Northwest Roanoke home (selling point: two driveways).

On a recent afternoon, Butterworth gave a tour of the F.O.D. He pulled off car covers, told find stories and his plans for each car.

"My goal is to restore one a year for myself," he said.

He almost never makes it.

His 1969 Chevy El Camino daily driver needs paint. Lisa Butterworth's teal '68 Pontiac Firebird convertible has no top and needs paint.

The 1971 Volkswagen Beetle Butterworth promised to fix up for his 15-year-old daughter when she gets her license is still in the field.

Art and magic

Butterworth's car obsession started when he was a kid reading the used Hot Rod magazines his father, a school custodian, brought home from work.

He still has the magazines, filed away in his basement, along with a collection of plastic model cars.

Butterworth's older brother, Charlie, sealed the obsession when he bought a new green Z-28 Camaro in 1969.

Since the day Butterworth's brother let him drive the car around a parking lot, he has never been seriously into anything else but cars.

In 1984, after working as a meat cutter, a liquor store salesman and at various other jobs, Butterworth got his first body shop job.

For 14 years, he bounced from body shop to body shop, usually working on commission. Collision work refined his skills, but the work was a drag.

"When's the last time you wrecked your car and were happy about it?" he said, recalling working with collision customers.

Along the way, his alcohol addiction went from bad to out of control.

In 1996, Butterworth took his last drink and checked himself into rehab. By 1998, he had painted his last minivan. Since opening A.A.R. that year, he figures he has turned out 100 full restorations.

The price begins at $10,000, Butterworth says. Most cost much more. The bill for the rare 1970 'Cuda he is finishing will be more than $25,000.

It's worth it, said Sam Perdue, who put $10,000 in body work and electric lime paint into the 1979 Corvette Butterworth finished for him.

"Well, I'll be 61 in August," Perdue said. "I wanted to do one more 'Vette, so I did a unique one. I'm tickled to death with it."

Restoration work is expensive, but it's no way to make money. If Lisa didn't work as a credit analyst at Bell South, Butterworth said the family of three wouldn't get by.

Collision work pays better, but restoration feels like art. Or magic.

A new car

Inside the shop on a recent afternoon, Kevin Thompson, 19, and Norm Godin, 48, Butterworth's only employees, were wet-sanding the 1970 'Cuda.

Butterworth knelt on a stool in the paint booth sanding the primered fender of a 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass.

Beyond a freshly painted light-blue '57 Chevy sat a 1963 International pickup. The truck belongs to Eric Lear, a 45-year-old Roanoke teacher.

Lear's grandfather bought the International new. At 13, Lear learned to drive it on his parents' Missouri farm and later took it with him to college.

The International died soon after and sat rusting away at the farm until 2005, when Lear hauled it by trailer more than 800 miles to Butterworth's shop.

Lear could buy a restored International for less than he has into it. Doesn't matter, he said. "Me and that truck go way back."

Lear said he approached three other shops before he found Butterworth.

"When I told him the story about it being my grandfather's truck and how important it was to me, that seemed important to him," Lear said.

Butterworth is sentimental. He sees old cars parked in fields, poking out of crumbling barns. Like old songs on the radio, they bring back memories.

He wants them before they rot away or end up in a junkyard's crusher.

That's how the Field of Dreams got filled with cars he probably will never have time to restore.

At the junkyard on Bent Mountain, Butterworth found the parts for his customer's wrecked Challenger. He didn't take them. He will come back when the car is ready.

As he idled out of the junkyard driveway, the owner's pickup pulled in.

They stopped, side window to side window. Butterworth asked how much he wanted for the blue Barracuda.

The man said he would let it go for $2,500.

Butterworth asked if he would trade it for a Model A Ford he has in the F.O.D.

The man promised to stop by to take a look.