Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [96]
With the centres of population and civilisation now much further apart, I was having to get used to travelling longer distances each day. But after leaving Payson, I soon arrived at something I suspected would divide households across Britain. I suspected that every man would say, ‘Oh, interesting,’ while every woman would lose the will to live and say, ‘So what? It’s just a hole in the ground.’
I have met thousands of men – possibly millions – and I’m sure that every single one of them has, at some point in his life, taken a stick, sat on the ground and dug a hole between his legs for no reason whatsoever. Meanwhile, I’ve never met a single woman who has done the same thing. So, my theory is that a fascination with holes is what truly separates men from women. And now I was visiting a really interesting – some might say spectacular – hole.
It’s 570 feet deep and 4,000 feet across (I also know that every man will be desperate to have these details), and those people who are good with calculators say it could hold twenty football stadiums and seat two million people if it were an arena. Quite why anyone would want to work out such meaningless statistics is a mystery to me, but at least they give an indication that this is a really vast hole in the ground. What makes it even more interesting, though, is that it was made by something really extraordinary – namely, a meteorite.
About fifty thousand years ago, a meteorite with a diameter of about 160 feet, made of nickel and iron, came flying out of the sky and belted into the Arizona desert – although in those days it was neither Arizona nor a desert, but probably open grassland dotted with woods and inhabited by woolly mammoths. Flying at a speed of maybe 45,000 m.p.h., the 300,000-ton rock hit the ground with as much force as ten million tons of TNT. That’s about the same as 650 Hiroshimas. Bosh! Of course, it flattened everything for many miles around. The surrounding landscape is still as flat as a pancake until you come to a range of mountains in the far distance, so the shockwave must have travelled a very long way before something stopped it.
Midway between Winona and Winslow, it’s at a place appropriately called Meteor Crater and the way in which it was formed plays a large part in making this such a fantastically atmospheric place. What’s so great about it is that you can’t see into it until the very last moment. You approach up the side and then – boof – there it is, revealed in front of you. Standing on the edge of the crater is like being in some kind of weird experiment. It has a magnificence and a grandeur. It’s very windswept, too, which apparently has something to do with the crater’s shape, the altitude and the flat environment all around it.
Before the moon landing in 1969, American astronauts trained in the crater because it was thought to resemble the lunar surface. On one of these practice sessions, one of the astronauts tore his suit as he was clambering around near the rim. If he’d done that on the moon, he would have been a dead man. So they strengthened the material and, of course, Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon took place without incident.
Although I couldn’t find much to say about the crater for the TV show, it was certainly one of my highlights of Route 66. It’s well worth paying a visit … but only if you’re a bloke. If you’re a woman, there’s a nice wee shop in the visitors’ centre.
My rib was still agony, and the bandages on my leg needed changing twice a day, but I had to push on if I wanted to see everything before the end of Route 66 at Santa Monica. My God, sometimes it’s hard being