Catherine Price (11 page)

T
here are a lot of idiotic activities out there, but dB—short for decibel—drag racing must come in toward the top of the list. It’s an obscure international sport in which people outfit their cars with tons of sound equipment. Then they compete to see whose stereo can make the loudest noise.

When I say tons, I mean it literally: one dB drag racer profiled by
Popular Science
was the proud owner of an eighteen-year-old Dodge Caravan that weighed ten thousand pounds. Too heavy to drive, too cramped to carry a passenger, the car’s sole purpose was to make a 74 Hz sound—known in the dB drag racing world as a “burp”—as loudly as possible.

Competitors soup up their cars in all sorts of ways. To increase sound pressure inside the car, which in turn raises the intensity of the noise, racers bolt the doors shut and fill them with concrete. They replace the windows with Plexiglas—many of the burps are loud enough to shatter glass. During competition, teammates gather around the car and push against it from all sides, sometimes lying spread eagle on the roof to try to increase pressure at the moment of the burp. The resulting noise is what the writer from
Popular Science
described as “what you hear when you inadvertently turn your home stereo on with the volume all the way up and a loose speaker wire: a rattling, destructive, marrow-fluttering hum.”

So far the world record is 180.5 dB, achieved in 2007 in a concrete-filled Volvo. To give you a sense of how loud that is, a 747 jet emits about 140 dB at takeoff, and every 10 dB increase represents a doubling of noise. But who really cares about the specific number of decibels produced? Were you to be stupid enough to shove aside the amps and subwoofers and sit inside a car during competition, that eardrum-bursting burp would probably be the last sound you’d ever hear.

T
ucked into a hidden valley in the Himalayas and watched over by a Tibetan lamasery, Shangri-La is supposed to be paradise: a place where everyone is permanently happy and no one ever grows old.

Only problem is it’s imaginary. Our Western notions of Shangri-La come from the 1933 novel
Lost Horizon
by James Hilton, in which a British diplomat named Hugh Conway happens upon it when he survives a plane crash in the Tibetan mountains. After discovering that this remote lamasery comes complete with hot water, central heating, and a fetching young Manchu woman named Lo-Tsen, he decides to stay awhile.

Hilton’s novel didn’t get much attention until he published his best-known work,
Goodbye
,
Mr. Chips
, but it then became a bestseller. The mythical land so captured the American imagination that for a brief period of time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt renamed the presidential retreat Shangri-La in its honor. In 1956 it even inspired an unsuccessful Broadway musical.

Entrepreneurs have been trying to co-opt Shangri-La ever since the success of Conway’s novel. In 2001, the Chinese county of Zhongdian officially renamed itself Shangri-La in an attempt to lure tourists; there’s a Shangri-La resort in Northern Pakistan’s Skardu Valley, and a worldwide Shangri-La hotel chain. But no one’s really sure where the actual inspiration for Shangri-La is located. Maybe it’s in Sichuan Province. Or the Yarlung Tsangpo Canyon. Or, for that matter, Bhutan.

Regardless of what place Hilton was thinking of, the myth on which Shangri-La is based far predates
Lost Horizon
. It’s thought to be related to the legend of Shambala, a hidden kingdom in the mountains of Tibet where all the residents were peaceful and happy, living in what some say was a state of enlightenment. This myth may have been based on the ancient city of Tsaparang or a civilization called Shang Shung—it depends on which trekker you speak to. Regardless, would-be visitors beware: traveling to either spot requires a long journey at high altitudes and a large budget for pack mules.

An easier option is the Shangri-La in Orange, Texas. The creation of a philanthropist named H. J. Lutcher Stark, it’s an enormous nature preserve highlighting Stark’s favorite flower, the azalea. Opened to the public in 1946, it was a favorite vacation destination for over a decade until a major snowstorm hit East Texas in 1958 and destroyed much of the park. Recently reopened, the Texan Shangri-La might not be able to promise eternal life or happiness, but at least it has a really nice garden.

I
f you like fields full of rotting corpses, visit a body farm. Technically called “forensic anthropology facilities,” they’re outdoor sites devoted to the study of how human bodies decompose. Strewn with partially rotted bodies, they could also be mistaken as sets for horror movies.

Why would anyone want to watch a body being eaten by maggots? To help solve crimes, of course. By studying how bodies decompose in a variety of circumstances (buried, unburied, underwater, in the trunk of a car), forensic anthropologists are better able to reconstruct the causes of death.

Luckily for the squeamish, there are only three body farms in the United States. The oldest, in Tennessee, was founded in 1971 by a scientist named Dr. William Bass. Police kept asking for his help analyzing bodies in criminal cases, and he figured that in order to answer their questions, he needed a better understanding of how corpses disintegrate. That meant getting a body, putting it outside, and watching what happened next.

Dr. Bass’s original facility could only accommodate one person, and most of his corpses were unclaimed bodies obtained through the medical examiner’s office. But these days the farm is a three-acre complex with enough room for up to forty bodies at a time. If you’re interested in the full experience, the facility has even launched a donation program so that you can bequeath your corpse to the cause.

Crime shows like
CSI
have glamorized the field of forensic anthropology, but the reality of a body farm is, to put it bluntly, revolting. Tissues begin to release a green substance; lungs leak liquid through corpses’ mouths and noses. “Truly, this work is not for the faint of heart,” researchers at the University of Tennessee warn would-be forensic anthropologists. “Rotten smells, decomposing flesh, maggots, and body fluids are everyday occurrences, and you will be elbow deep in them.”

Unfortunately, they’re not being figurative.

T
his is not one of the twelve steps.

A
t ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit, the sun is a strong candidate for the worst vacation destination in space. So are black holes. Not only do they suck up and destroy everything around them, explained an astronomer whom I asked to select some of space’s worst spots, but they’ll tear you apart atom by atom—a process that sounds even worse when you realize that black holes can slow down time. We considered Venus (750 degrees Fahrenheit and surrounded by clouds of sulfuric acid); we thought about deep space (“great for those worried about a hectic itinerary”).

But the eventual winner was Io, one of Jupiter’s four main moons.

With a mottled surface covered in splotches of orange, yellow, red, and dark brown, Io is said to look like a pizza, but I think it more closely resembles a rotten orange. You could also skip all food analogies and compare Io directly to hell.

The most volcanic known object in the solar system, Io has over four hundred volcanoes, which spew sulfuric plumes up to 310 miles high. Its surface is covered with flowing lava and giant calderas. And yet, ironically, it’s also freezing: volcanoes are the only source of heat on a planet that routinely reaches –230 degrees Fahrenheit.

Io does offer fantastic views of Jupiter, but the beauty is offset by the fact that Io is bathed in sulfur dioxide, which would fill your last gasps with an overwhelming stench of rotten eggs. Io has no native water, but if its volcanic gases got into the liquid in your Nalgene, you’d be drinking sulfuric acid. And while Io’s low gravity would make it a hit with the kids, their enjoyment would be short-lived—nighttime temperatures are so cold that at the end of every forty-two-hour day, the atmosphere collapses.

Io and Jupiter

NASA

J. MAARTEN TROOST

Splitting the Czech

O
ne morning in southern Turkey, in the vicinity of Bodrum and the sun-dappled waters of the Aegean Sea, I fell over a waterfall. I hadn’t intended to do this, of course. Nowhere on my itinerary did it say
FALL OVER WATERFALL
.
Languid swims, yes. Edifying hikes up to the ruins of the ancients, sure. Fall over waterfall, no.

But fall over I did. I would like to think that in that terrifying moment when I lost my footing—that awful instant when I merged with a stream that rushed inexorably toward an unknown abyss—that time slowed down. Perhaps I had a moment to ruminate and ponder the admonitions of my guide. “Don’t climb up there,” he’d said moments earlier. “Last month, two men died climbing above the waterfall.” Where were they from, I’d asked. “They were Czech.” I’m only half Czech, I’d said. Ha ha. No problem.

Alas, I have no memory of my thoughts as I hurtled toward the lip of the falls. I’m told I screamed, so they were presumably not happy thoughts. And it’s no wonder, really. It’s endless all the ways water, rocks, and gravity can conspire to hurt you (three fractured vertebrae, shattered feet, concussion, lacerations, in my case). But since then, no matter how unpleasant the travel experience, I’ve always managed to look at the sunny side of things. I’m alive. I’m still walking. And I’m only half Czech.

J. MAARTEN TROOST
is the author of
Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid
.

A
s a vacation destination, Picher, Oklahoma, has one thing going for it: privacy. Come for the weekend and you’ll likely be the only person there—the government paid everyone else to leave.

That’s because the town, which was once home to about sixteen thousand people, sits on top of huge deposits of lead and zinc. Its mines yielded nearly five hundred thousand tons of ore in 1925 alone, and metal from Picher was used for bullets in both World Wars.

But after World War II ended, Picher began to collapse. Literally. Thanks to huge natural and manmade caverns beneath the town, its main street was fenced off in the 1950s for fear that it would cave in, and in 1967, nine homes sank into an abandoned part of the mine.

Things went downhill from there. After the last of Picher’s mines closed in the 1970s, a local rancher noticed orange spots on the coats of his white horses. He followed them to the field and discovered that the water in nearby Tar Creek was orange from acidic liquids seeping up from the abandoned mines; it turned out to have such high levels of heavy metals that in 1983, Picher was named as one of America’s first Superfund sites.

The town survived, but then in the mid–1990s, a local nurse and doctor noticed that a suspicious number of Picher’s kids were having trouble in school. They also noticed that one of the children’s favorite leisure activities was playing in the hundreds-of-feet-tall mounds of gravel mining waste that surrounded the town. They encouraged families to have their kids’ blood tested, and the results confirmed their fears: more than 190 of the students had lead poisoning.

You’d think that all this—the collapses, the Superfund site, the lead-poisoned children—would be enough to make people move on their own. But when the federal government launched its buyout of Picher in 2006, motivated by a report showing that an even more substantial area of the town was at risk of collapse, a surprising number of residents refused to leave.

But fate had it in for Picher. On May 10, 2008, a devastating tornado hit the town, killing at least six people and destroying about half of Picher’s remaining homes. It was the last straw. Now devoid of residents, Picher’s only remaining attractions are its dilapidated buildings, its infamous orange creek, and a swamp filled with floating tires.