101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [59]
Whatever it is, it only costs a dollar—and besides, it’s the only rest stop for miles.
But before you plan a family vacation around the Thing, let’s clarify what you’ll see. After you walk through a cave-like entrance in the gift shop, a path of yellow footprints leads you through two metal sheds, each filled with antiques and art of dubious quality and authenticity. In addition to a large caged display of wooden figures being tortured, the first shed is home to a car carrying several grumpy-looking plastic men. 1937 rolls-royce, a yellow sign above it announces. THIS ANTIQUE CAR WAS BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN USED BY ADOLF HITLER… THE THING IS, IT CAN’T BE PROVED.
The second shed is filled with objects of such supposed value that the designers of the Thing arranged them on scraps of polyester carpet in glass-faced plywood boxes. Among them: a so-called “ancient” churn dating all the way back to eighteenth-century Kentucky, an old grocery scale, and a sculpture of cows having sex.
Resist the urge to linger. The third shed is the home of the legendary Thing, housed in a white cinderblock box below a final yellow sign—and it’d be a bad idea to allow your excitement to build up for too long.
So what is it? An alien? A live dinosaur? No, my friends. The Thing is a desiccated mummy, holding another baby “thing” in its arms, its nether regions covered by an oversize hat. No further explanation is provided.
Believers point to the Thing’s shriveled face and exposed rib as proof that it’s a real mummy. But when the Phoenix National Public Radio station KJZZ did an investigation into its origins, it discovered that the Thing might actually be the work of a man named Homer Tate, a former miner and farmer who found a second career in creating props for sideshows. Using papier-mâché and dead animal parts, he spent his retirement crafting curiosities like devil babies and shrunken heads, which he advertised as “a wonderful window attraction to make your mother-in-law want to go home.” Regardless of who’s looking at it, the Thing is likely to have the same effect.
Colin Gregory Palmer/Wikipedia Commons
Chapter 97
Four Corners
There’s something reassuring about the boxy shape of the states in the American West. It’s as if surveyors got sick of dealing with the complicated borders of states like Maryland and just started drawing lines. The cleanest examples of this are the boundaries separating Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Their straight, perpendicular borders meet at a spot called Four Corners, which is famous for being the only place where four states touch.
In 1912, this intersection was commemorated by a small cement pad. Clearly inadequate for such an important site, it was replaced in 1992 by a bronze disc embedded in granite. Emblazoned with each state’s seal and bordered by the phrase FOUR STATES HERE MEET IN FREEDOM UNDER GOD, this new, larger plaque is much better suited for the main tourist activity at Four Corners: getting down on all fours so that you can take a picture of yourself with each limb in a different state.
If you go to Four Corners, make sure that you too engage in this geographic Twister. I say that because except for a small demonstration center where vendors hawk Native American jewelry and fry bread, there’s not much else to do. As the Four Corners’ PR department itself admits, “The area is very remote” and “The scenery immediately surrounding the Four Corners monument is somewhat bleak.”
Adding to the confusion over why the monument counts as a tourist attraction: according to research by the National Geodetic Survey, it’s actually in the wrong spot. In April 2009, the survey found that the Four Corners monument is a bit over 1,807 feet east of where it should be. Perhaps fearing the wrath of the tourists forced by parents and spouses to pose for embarrassing photographs in a spot now known to be meaningless, the NGS surveyors were quick to point out that since Four Corners has been legally recognized by all four states as the intersection of their borders,