Anything, bush, cattle, vehicle or human, immediately turned to silhouette against the bright sky. With the combination of heat and light, the air had a frail white quality. The whole sky seemed closer to the road in these parts and I could barely stand the magnesium glimmer of light burning up my lower body. My arms stretched to the steering wheel, I was skimming over the pale gray asphalt and the speedometer was measuring between eighty and ninety miles per hour. The road was so flat in stretches, or there was so little in the landscape to distract the eye, that it was impossible, without looking at the dashboard, to tell when I was speeding. It was a landscape for drifting, where time expands and contracts and vision is replaced by memories; small filmlike bursts of bodies and situations, some months ago, some years ago.
I was headed toward Meteor Crater. Itâs a blemish on the earthâs skin where twenty-one thousand years ago a half-billion-ton chunk of iron blew through outer space and slammed into the planet leaving a hole three miles in circumference. The collision has been calculated as having had the force of a multimegaton bomb, and now, twenty-two thousand years later, some enterprising jerks charge you seven bucks to look at the hole.
Four miles from the service road to Meteor Crater, I pulled into the lane of a highway rest stop and coasted up a slight incline to the parking spaces. Dazed tourists in pastel clothes wandered briefly from their cars to the small building housing the toilets. Some stayed inside their cars, windows rolled up tight, air-conditioning blasting the interior. They looked like critters with hair-dos in aquariums and as I passed the line of cars they turned to look with a small panic in their eyes. It was incredibly hot and the air felt like it would burst into flames. Next to the walkway leading to the toilets was a sign: $1,000 FINE FOR DEFACING THE ROCKS , referring to a large group of sandstone boulders maybe eight feet high and fifteen yards long and wide. Maybe they were boulders that flew out of the hole three miles away when the meteor hit because they looked foreign to the landscape, as if lifted straight out of a flintstones special. Nearby was a second sign: POISONOUS SNAKES AND INSECTS INHABIT THIS AREA. On the walkway by the twin-roofed entrances to the toilets, a Native American family was seated before two blankets filled with cheap turquoise trinkets and hunger. The turquoise was actually blue plastic with mineral veins printed on it. A couple of tiny speakers above the doors to the MEN âS and WOMEN âS rooms spit out a steady stream of weather information that hovered in the air in a series of metallic echoes. A pretaped program offering tips on how to avoid dehydration in the concrete streets of large urban centers drifted through the menâs room as the door swung shut behind me. An old white-haired man rubbed his hands under the electric dryer. I chose the second stall and opened my belt, dropped my pants and sat down on the toilet seat. To my right, about waist level on the dividing partition were two large holes peeled through the metal. An eye was peering through one of them. I leaned forward slightly and through the second hole I could see a disembodied hand pulling on a large uncircumcised dick. I bounced my own dick in the palm of my hand so the eye could see it. I waited a few minutes till the sounds of the rest room door opening and closing subsided, then stood up and pulled my pants back up and motioned toward the hole, giving the guy a signal to meet me outside.
I was making like the first man on the moon walking the deep creviced surfaces of the flintstones landscape. I was hoping to spot a rattler or a scorpionâà fter almost a decade of wandering through the southern and western states Iâd never come across a rattler in the wild. Too many rattlesnake roundup jubilees and development moves have been killing them off. From the
I was headed toward Meteor Crater. Itâs a blemish on the earthâs skin where twenty-one thousand years ago a half-billion-ton chunk of iron blew through outer space and slammed into the planet leaving a hole three miles in circumference. The collision has been calculated as having had the force of a multimegaton bomb, and now, twenty-two thousand years later, some enterprising jerks charge you seven bucks to look at the hole.
Four miles from the service road to Meteor Crater, I pulled into the lane of a highway rest stop and coasted up a slight incline to the parking spaces. Dazed tourists in pastel clothes wandered briefly from their cars to the small building housing the toilets. Some stayed inside their cars, windows rolled up tight, air-conditioning blasting the interior. They looked like critters with hair-dos in aquariums and as I passed the line of cars they turned to look with a small panic in their eyes. It was incredibly hot and the air felt like it would burst into flames. Next to the walkway leading to the toilets was a sign: $1,000 FINE FOR DEFACING THE ROCKS , referring to a large group of sandstone boulders maybe eight feet high and fifteen yards long and wide. Maybe they were boulders that flew out of the hole three miles away when the meteor hit because they looked foreign to the landscape, as if lifted straight out of a flintstones special. Nearby was a second sign: POISONOUS SNAKES AND INSECTS INHABIT THIS AREA. On the walkway by the twin-roofed entrances to the toilets, a Native American family was seated before two blankets filled with cheap turquoise trinkets and hunger. The turquoise was actually blue plastic with mineral veins printed on it. A couple of tiny speakers above the doors to the MEN âS and WOMEN âS rooms spit out a steady stream of weather information that hovered in the air in a series of metallic echoes. A pretaped program offering tips on how to avoid dehydration in the concrete streets of large urban centers drifted through the menâs room as the door swung shut behind me. An old white-haired man rubbed his hands under the electric dryer. I chose the second stall and opened my belt, dropped my pants and sat down on the toilet seat. To my right, about waist level on the dividing partition were two large holes peeled through the metal. An eye was peering through one of them. I leaned forward slightly and through the second hole I could see a disembodied hand pulling on a large uncircumcised dick. I bounced my own dick in the palm of my hand so the eye could see it. I waited a few minutes till the sounds of the rest room door opening and closing subsided, then stood up and pulled my pants back up and motioned toward the hole, giving the guy a signal to meet me outside.
I was making like the first man on the moon walking the deep creviced surfaces of the flintstones landscape. I was hoping to spot a rattler or a scorpionâà fter almost a decade of wandering through the southern and western states Iâd never come across a rattler in the wild. Too many rattlesnake roundup jubilees and development moves have been killing them off. From the
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