“I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee. Also in the rest of my body.”
Spotted on Carlisle Blvd Ne in Albuquerque, NM
Spotted on the Roadside: “I’m using a red arrow so I know who I kill”
Category West
The Turquoise Trail to Tinkertown
I don’t think I’ve ever been cagey about how badly the winters in Seattle affect me: the days themselves are surpassingly short and spots of sunlight among the nigh-constant cloud cover are fleeting at best. From the moment the holiday lights snap off in January, I feel dragged down emotionally and physically. Light therapy doesn’t help, exercise doesn’t help, a healthy diet doesn’t help, a junk food diet doesn’t help. I don’t want to write, I don’t want to make art, I don’t want to go outside. All I want to do is sleep, like a form of hibernation for the modern useless person. And this winter has been particularly difficult, as it’s been hard to feel hopeful about, well, anything since late January. So this year for my birthday, instead of throwing a massive party like last year, I wanted to get out of town for a while, feel the sun on my face, experience an emotion other than anxiety and despair. I decided that the timing would be ideal to head back to New Mexico to do all of the things we ran out of time for on the Harpies road trip last summer, plus a plethora of other things across a larger swath of the state that were entirely out of reach previously.
My first stop was Tinkertown, via the “singing road” on eastbound Route 66 outside of Tijeras. I’d read that as you drive over it, you hear the strains of “America the Beautiful”, but only if you’re driving the speed limit of 45mph. Neither Jason nor I believed it would be all that impressive, potentially just a series of rumble strips that you could convince yourself was “America the Beautiful” if you were singing it in your head at the same time, the same way you could click a pen in time to Katy Perry’s “Firework” and hear different tones out of that pen click, that it was all about the power of suggestion. Nope.
This musical rumble strip was funded and put in place by National Geographic in 2014 as part of a show aimed at changing public behavior. Speeding is a factor in a lot of accidents, so this was a way to incentivize people to drive the speed limit, at least for that small stretch of road. It’s one of only a few musical strips of road anywhere in the world–there’s one in Lancaster, California that plays the William Tell Overture, and another in South Korea that plays “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. I’m not certain that National Geographic approved of me whipping around so I could drive it twice but they’re going to have to build something else to prevent that particular human behavior. A spike trap, maybe.
Then it was on to Tinkertown, a museum collecting the life’s work of Ross Ward. Ward, an admirer of roadside attractions, set out to construct his own: collecting, carving, and painting everything during the time, as he was known to say, “while you were watching TV”. I do watch a lot of TV, Ross. Particularly in the winter. In my defense, it’s pretty good. Or, you know, not good but beats wandering out into the soggy gray wasteland or trying to write about all the nothing I’m doing–it’s not like I’m a TV blogger.
For a mere $3.75 per person, you gain admission through the gates into the circuitous route of rooms packed to the rafters with stuff, surrounded by walls made of over 50,000 glass bottles. I spotted at least one bumper sticker from House on the Rock inside and even if I hadn’t seen it, it would have been clear to me that Ward was inspired by that notable Wisconsin attraction. Although touring through Tinkertown was not nearly as arduous an experience as House on the Rock (owing to the fact that Ward made many of the exhibits, whereas Ross mainly purchased/commissioned them) the feel is remarkably similar. At various locations throughout the exhibit, you can insert a coin or two to bring the dioramas to life. A grandmother bursts through a window to tell some musicians to stop making such a racket. God and the Devil play tug of war over a mortal soul, complete with flashes of lightning. A maquette equipped with a cleaver chases a chicken around and around a wooden box. There’s so much packed into each diorama that one could easily note a new detail every single time they look–and from a quick peek at the guestbook, some people had been back for more than one gander, noting that the displays were currently in better repair than their last visit.
Tinkertown also shares some common themes with House on the Rock–there’s a sizeable sideshow and circus display in both places. Among his many other talents, Ross Ward also used to paint circus and sideshow banners as well as carousel horses, and so at least a portion of the banners on display were painted by Ward’s hand.
Here I’m stepping into the shoes of Louie Moilanen, of Calumet, Michigan, who stood at a whopping 7’9″. His promo photograph and the Tinkertown tag have him listed at 8’4″, which is not terribly surprising as many people in the circus had their stats exaggerated to better sell tickets.
At a time when at least two world leaders are actively jazzed at the idea of using nuclear weapons on a populace, this quote feels particularly apt. 
My trip to Tinkertown happened on a fortuitous day, as local notable figure Anand Naren Oma and his tarot reading goose, Princess Esmeralda, were on site plying their trade. There was absolutely no way I was not going to have a goose divine my future, because if there’s any creature on this earth who can know the future, it’s birds. How else can you explain how they know exactly when a shiny clean car will pass directly underneath them to use as their personal toilet? You can’t.
So how does goose tarot work? The cards are shuffled, and each of us chose two. Upon flipping a card over, Princess Esmeralda would make various goose sounds (and also bite at Oma and Jason, just because she knows the future doesn’t mean she’s not a goose) and Oma would translate for her, telling us the meaning of the cards we chose and how they might relate to our lives.
The cards we chose were Abundance, Existence, Mind, and Healing. Of course, any card based divination can be applied to any situation if you reach hard enough, but considering I came to New Mexico to do some soul searching and mental healing, these felt particularly apropos. I left Tinkertown feeling truly lighthearted for the first time in months.
Climbing Cinnamon Mountain
Why do people climb Mount Everest? Conventional wisdom declares that they do it because it’s there. For Jason’s 34th birthday, I wanted to do something similarly life-affirming and reckless: eat the biggest cinnamon roll in the world. Because it’s there, and so are we. Not by coincidence, the world’s largest commercially available cinnamon roll (in other words, not a Guinness attempt, but something that could be acquired without trying to make it myself) is found a couple hours’ drive away in the town of Longview, Washington, at Stuffy’s II, a restaurant which prides itself on serving all manner of “stuff”, biggie-sized. They’ve got pancakes the size of wagon wheels, massive 5lb cinnamon rolls, and other giant platters of food available, but only one item is so large, so full of potential energy, so Hulk gut-bustingly huge that it requires 24 hour advance notice of one’s intention to order: their 10.5lb cinnamon roll, aka the “Bear Roll”. Like its namesake, the bear roll is both massive and dangerous, containing a whopping 8,000 calories. If you can finish a bear roll by yourself in less than an hour and fifteen minutes, you’re inducted into the Stuffy’s II hall of fame. It’s one of those bucket list items, in that, if you go it alone, there’s a good chance you’ll kick the bucket.
As dedicated as I am to eating, and as much as Jason likes cinnamon rolls, I knew there was no way we’d be able to defeat it by ourselves, so we assembled a team of adventurous souls to make the trek with us for a full afternoon of face-forking. Even so, with seven of us in on the quest, we’d each need to eat 1.5 POUNDS of cinnamon roll in order to declare victory. It wouldn’t be easy, but I was convinced it could be done. For us. For posterity. Because it was there. To pump us up on the trip to the restaurant, I assembled what is possibly the most banging cinnamon roll based playlist in the world.
I’d seen photos of the bear roll. I’d watched a video of someone eating one. I thought I was prepared. When we arrived, I saw some cinnamon rolls rotating in a case and thought “That’s large, but doable.” I was wrong. Those rotating rolls were their regular cinnamon rolls, which bore only a passing resemblance to the behemoth our waitress delivered to the table. Prior to its delivery, we’d been contemplating ordering entrees to balance out the roll. The waitress wisely suggested that we spend some time with our bear roll prior to ordering more so we could better gauge what accoutrements the situation called for.
We tore into the roll gamely, each slicing off a slab for their plate. As we sliced, still more frosting oozed out of the beast as though it were a bottomless fount. It seemed like everyone enjoyed their first few bites. Unfortunately, after that point, we all hit a wall. The sheer sweetness was overwhelming. When all that sugar hit my system, my body heated up like a furnace, and it felt like every cell in my body was on alert. My mood was high. I was almost delirious with sugar-based happiness. Shortly thereafter, however, I felt as though I couldn’t possibly eat another bite. It wasn’t the sort of taut-stomach fullness I anticipated I might feel after a large meal, but rather a hollow sort of nausea that roiled around and told me that I shouldn’t so much as even think about taking another bite. A look around the table confirmed that everyone else felt similarly and it became clear that although we’d made a valiant effort, the bear was simply too massive a beast for us to conquer.
Luckily, I was prepared for both outcomes.
