The large circular sign reads, 5 MINUTES UNTIL IMPACT! The first of several we pass on the road which leads to the crater. It’s sunrise in the painted desert, Arizona. Ochre colored light refracts through the car window, gilding the vertical stream of bowel shuttering coffee-vapor rising up from my thermos. A few miles later, abdominal anticipation is further unsettled: 2 MINUTES UNTIL IMPACT! Why all the theatrics on this lonely desert road? In addition to stimulating the slurpee-ringed smiles of children, inciting suspense into the thousands of family vans which make the detour off highway 40, toward Meteor Crater National Landmark, every day; for me, the signs excite a peculiar anxious nausea I sometimes feel toward the strange breed of highway consumerism found only in the American southwest.
Curiously though, this sensation is difficult to differentiate from the kind of gut-churn rendered at the precipice of a public lecture or musical performance ––and in a way, both are why I am here: to ascultate the crater itself implies it may still contain the echo of its own making. Is it so preposterous ––to assume that by appropriating archeoacoustical methodologies, (namely the projecting of musical tones and pink noise into the impact site, then capturing and isolating the resultant echo), could, in someway, reveal characteristic traits of that unimaginable violence, generated by hyper-velocity impacts?
