Meteor Junction, Arizona.
01-Apr-12Encounter with Route 66.
01-Apr-12
The ruin from a distance.
Heading back to I-40 from Meteor Crater I saw down a side road what appeared to be a large ruined structure, of a kind of stony substantiality very unusual in these parts – indeed it looked from a distance like the ruins of Gabii, one of the little towns which had vanished into the maw of ancient Rome. I turned down the road to investigate. The road was in terrible condition – with weeds growing in the pavement, and large potholes. One pothole five feet across and two feet deep took me entirely by surprise, and my truck fell into it, bouncing back out of it with a terrible cracking sound I thought might be a broken axle. I stopped, got out, and checked for damage but found none. I proceeded thenceforth at five miles per hour rather than fifteen.
The ruin was an old stone building, built of the local red sandstone, a beautiful stuff. The construction, though of stone, was of the poorest; stones were frequently laid on end in order to create smooth surfaces rather than bedded to create strength; the mortar which had been thinly applied was vanishing. Not surprisingly, the whole was quickly collapsing. A giant nest, as of a stork, occupied an old window, but it was not even clear the building could support even a stork’s nest: the whole looked in danger of imminent failure, dashing the eggs on the ground.
Gravity will destroy stonework of this sort.
The building was beautifully situated, on a fine eminence which had the building appear much taller than it actually was. A bathroom had been added to the building, which did not look old so much as ruined. There was no indication of what it might have been used for, though of course I presumed it had been a home.
Beneath the hill were two abandoned cars, left there decades ago to no apparent purpose. Someone had spraypainted RANDOM on the trunk of one of the vehicles. As I climbed back into my truck I looked at the weedy, potholed road the ruin lay on; the road stretched off into the distance. It had not been built to reach this one solitary house; the house had occupied a fine site on the road. This must have been old Route 66. I did not know how far I could drive it, but still I preferred to go forward rather than back. As I went along a large pickup truck came down the road in the other direction. We were both going slowly, so I waved the driver down easily.
“Excuse me, what road is this?”
He appeared to be an Amerindian of some sort. “This road? This is Route 66.”
“I thought so. Do you know what that old stone building was?”
“It was a store… they sold souvenirs and ice cream. They closed when the road closed.”
“How far does the road go now? Does it go through to Winslow?”
“I don’t know where it goes. I think it just stops right at the rest stop about a mile down the road.”
“Well that’s all right. I like following the old roads. I’ll see. Thank you.” And we each drove off.
Sure enough, the road went to the rest stop, but there was a barrier there and I had to turn back. The old road obviously crossed the highway there, and so I could follow it no further.
Route 66, Meteor Junction.
There was no room at the inn at the Grand Canyon, so after spending the day there I headed for Flagstaff, which had a youth hostel. I figured I could relive my youth as well as be down only $20 for the night, as opposed to 50. I got to bed around midnight, entering into a room with – what else – three snoring Germans. They snored loudly and distressingly all night – at times they would stop snoring and it would sound like they were choking to death, then resume their snoring. The room stank too, a small room improperly ventilated for four sleepers. I would have opened the window, but it was in the 20s that night and I always presume (and am basically always correct) that other people do not like it to be 50 degrees and breezy in their bedrooms, as I do.
I called the sleeping efforts quits at 5 a.m., grabbed my backpack and headed out of Flagstaff. The place looked grimy and bleak, but it was 5 a.m. after all. I failed to find a place to eat breakfast, and by 6 a.m. I was at my next stop, Meteor Crater. Surprisingly this was privately owned and the site did not open until 8 a.m. I drove to the locked gate, where there was no parking, then headed back down the road to find a suitable pull-off. I walked to the barbed wire which surrounded the crater but found no break in it. So I returned to my truck and dozed off a few times over the next two hours.
My sleep would occasionally be interrupted by cars going to the site and then returning disappointed from its locked gates. This struck me as bad business, especially since 1) the site is not that far from I-40 traffic from New Mexico, where Daylight Savings Time is observed and it is 9 a.m., not 8 a.m. 2) it is an exposed, sunny site which is best to visit (and photograph) early in the morning. Nor did they at least keep their parking lot open to give visitors like me a place to wait.
I ended up being the first person in the door that day. There was a little museum, where I read about the Hodges and Peekskill Meteorites, and I then took a look at the crater itself.
Meteor Crater
This is one of the places that looks exactly like the pictures, neither better nor worse. There’s not much to see there – they don’t let you into the crater and they only let you walk the rim with a guide, which I saw no reason to do. It is undeniably an impressive sight, though the lack of anything to do makes a visit likely to be brief. As an unusual topographic feature of the earth – there are not very many meteor craters – it is surprising that the crater is privately owned, though beyond the incompetence there doesn’t seem to be any problem with this arrangement.
It was apparently difficult to determine that the crater was the result of a meteor impact, for the simple reason that no meteorite was ever found that could at all correspond to the size of the crater. (The largest fragment was about two feet across and found not in the crater but a slight distance away – certainly not sufficient to explain a crater a mile across. Very few fragments, in general, were found). Information in the museum on meteor impacts convinced me that their physics may not be very well understood, or perhaps the speeds and forces are too great for human common sense, which is all I had to rely on, to work effectively. Large meteorites have been found without impact craters, and large impact craters have been found without meteorites. The Tunguska Event in Siberia is an example of a massive explosion which leveled forests but produced no crater.
I remember studying Inyo Crater on a geology field trip trying to determine precisely this question, whether the explosion that produced the crater was volcanic or meteoritic. The absence here of any typical traces of vulcanism is the best evidence, and the rock at the site is limestone and sandstone, the same stuff as the Grand Canyon, with no traces of volcanic rock anywhere.
Cars give us this power, to string together a series of disconnected desiderata and call it a trip. My next stop was Petrified Forest National Park.
The Hodges Meteorite.
31-Mar-12
A notable page from the chronicles of absurdity is the Hodges Meteorite, which on November 30th, 1954, formed a fireball visible in mid-day across three states, on its way to Talladega County, Alabama, where it crashed through the roof of a suburban home in Oak Grove. It bounced off a wooden console radio, and struck Mrs. Ann Hodges, who was napping on her couch. The pomelo-sized extraterrestrial object severely bruised the woman’s hip. A U.S. Air Force helicopter showed up shortly thereafter and took the meteorite away, concluding what must have been the strangest hour in this woman’s life.
This is the only fully documented case of a person being injured by a meteorite.
The Grand Canyon.
30-Mar-12Definitely the best and biggest thing I saw in Arizona. Probably best in pictures, of course.
Thomas Browne.
30-Mar-12“It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come, unto which this seems progressionall, and otherwise made in vaine; without this accomplishment the naturall expectation and desire of such a state, were but a fallacy in nature, unsatisfied Considerators would quarrell the justice of their constitutions, and rest content that Adam had fallen lower, whereby by knowing no other Originall, and deeper ignorance of themselves, they might have enjoyed the happiness of inferiour Creatures; who in tranquility possesse their Constitutions, as having not the apprehension to deplore their own natures. And being framed below the circumference of these hopes, or cognition of better being, the wisedom of God hath necessitated their Contentment: But the superiour ingredient and obscured part of our selves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting contentment, will be able at last to tell us we are more then our present selves; and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their own accomplishments.” – from Hydriotaphia
Grand Canyon with People.
28-Mar-12
To Williams, Arizona.
27-Mar-12
Route 66 runs on high ground in central Arizona, and the town of Williams, where I stopped for the night, has an elevation of 6,800 feet. After sunbathing before lunch surrounded by bikini-clad beachgoers in Lake Havasu City, in Williams I slept where the snow was piled high in the streets. I was refreshed by the cool air and the pine trees; it was a pleasure to see snow and people wearing coats. I was back in the mountains. I took a room in an old hotel on Main Street (Route 66), and it seemed refreshingly normal: not a motel, not surrounded by asphalt, but a real, old building with on-street parking only. The downtown area was dense and village-like; there was a coffee shop, a diner, a pizzeria, and two bars, all within walking distance. I felt like I was home.
I headed to a bar across the street, where one of the decrepit locals bought me a drink and I played some kind of manual shuffleboard game with the barmaid. We slid weighted pucks at each other across a sand-covered wooden table about fifteen feet long. I had never seen such a game in a bar before.
In the morning I got breakfast – a bagel! – what a luxury! – and a good one! not from Bruegger’s or Einstein! – and found that everyone in the town, with the exception of the one bar I had walked into last night, was a German tourist. They were obvious enough, as they were all good-looking, well-dressed, and had not an ounce of fat on their bodies or a hair out of place (they also were speaking German). As might be imagined for tourists they followed more or less the same itinerary: intrepid ones did Route 66 from Chicago to L.A., and others did a loop from San Francisco, down to L.A., east via Route 66, then up into Utah and back to the Golden Gate. The scenery, they all agreed, was fantastic: “we have nothing like it in Germany.” Nor, indeed, do we have anything like it in New York, I thought. Except in this particular little town. Walking around the snow-clogged streets it looked like it could have been in upstate New York.
Marilynne Robinson.
25-Mar-12This woman sounds astonishingly promising for a contemporary professional writer. She has a shot at being interesting. I’ll find a way for a copy of something she’s written to get into my hands.
Again, the Absurdity.
31-Mar-12Another display of the universe’s fearsome absurdity came on October 9th, 1992, when a meteor streaked across the entire eastern United States, breaking up over Kentucky and being filmed in Pittsburgh and elsewhere while streaking to its destiny of knocking out a taillight on a parked 1980 Chevy Malibu in a driveway in Peekskill, New York.
The Peekskill Meteorite car remains the only car known to have had a taillight knocked out by a meteorite. As such it has toured around the world and celebratory events can be expected this October, twenty years after the original event.
Jesus may or may not have had reasons for fucking with this man's car, but at least it's funny that he did.
When I hear stories like this, it becomes obvious that the only theological answers possible are 1) denial of all meaning and theology 2) an absurdist, comic theology. Out of all the good uses of the smiting powers of Providence, sending a giant fireball across half a continent to rendezvous with a parked Chevy Malibu in – of all the cities of the Northeast – Peekskill (or the story of a meteorite smacking a fat woman asleep on a couch at a quarter to three in the afternoon in 1950s Alabama) must be the work either of a stupid Nothing or a Comic Genius. The story does actually improve when you imagine Someone taking specific aim at that Chevy.
I can’t imagine what more important thing I had to do in October of 1992 that made me completely miss this story. I think I was at a debate tournament in Monticello, not that far from Peekskill. Why we didn’t cover this in theology class the next Tuesday I can’t imagine.