RoBoTNiK

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

On the morning of my actual birthday, Pete and Derek bought me admission to the granddaddy of all mystery spots, the Oregon Vortex. First discovered by the white man in 1864, the “natural, historical, educational, scientific, authentic” Oregon Vortex is, we were told, the oldest and “most respected” gravitational vortex in America. The science behind this authentic natural wonder is a little too educational and historical to get into here, but suffice to say the vortex is a “famous” circular area with “unique” phenomena: balls roll up hill, squirrels fear to tread, and the harsh mistress of gravity takes a nap on the job.

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

It took forever to get out of Dallas and Fort Worth. The two cities bleed into one another across the Texas plain in a great bland sprawl of strip miles and flat industrial buildings like a hundred miles of Mississauga. Finally we escaped on a little two lane highway going west through bobbing oil derricks and religious compounds bristling with barbed wire. Those dropped off too after about an hour, and at last it was just us, the road, and the setting sun.

You-Had-To-Be-There Moment #33

Peter: “If it says ‘Snack Bar’ in there, I’m going to rub my butt in your face!”

The cool silent drive with a case of beer in the back seat cooler was a good cure for the sticky heat of Texlahoman Shuburbia. It was dark by the time we crossed the Brazos, and we drove long into the night on that little road across the Texas plains. Wow! They say everything is bigger in Texas, but I’d just taken that tomean big tall hats, big gas-guzzling cars, big fat beer bellies, big like super-sizing your Big Mac combo, not like COSMIC big. The horizon stretched farther away than it had any right to on a planet of this size. There was some kind of thunderstorm maybe a hundred miles north of us. We never saw a drop of rain and could barely hear the thunder, but the distant sky crackled and flashed and the thunderheads turned red with dust.

Somewhere between the little towns of Rule and Old Glory we just had to stop the car and get out under the sky. The storm had rolled off to another part of the world and there were no clouds, just the big black sky and an unbelievable number of stars. We lay back on the dry scrubbly grass and talked about infinity and UFOs and tried to comprehend the size of it all.

You take the good, you take the bad…

And if you think that was cool: When we finally did stop for the night (which meant getting the proprietors of the Brown Town Discount Motor Lodge out of bed at three in the morning) The Facts of Life was on!

Next Stop: Crash landing at Roswell.