Home > Travel Writing > The Thing: A Surreal Monument in Arizona

The desert highway between El Paso, Texas, and Los Angeles, California, is pocked with indifferent eateries, places where a tuna melt and a plate of fries won’t necessarily kill you, but won’t fill you with a sense of well-being, either.

Newlin Restaurant, on Exit 322 of Interstate 10 fifty or so miles east of Tucson, Arizona, is one of them. It differs from the countless other greasy spoons along that arid lizard-smeared stretch of road in one critical respect, however: Newlin has The Thing.

If you’ve made the trip down that long and dusty highway, you’ve seen the inescapable billboards advertising this curio with the minimalist message, “The Thing?”

If you’re like most motorists, you went sailing by the exit, shunning the invitation to enter the barnlike structure where The Thing is housed, reasoning, and quite rightly, that you can always get a Coke or an ice cream sandwich a few miles down the road.

The next time you’re passing, though, suspend your disbelief and your elevated taste for a moment. Pull off. Cough up the $.75 admission fee. Take in the mysterious Thing for yourself. It is, after all, a bona fide Arizona landmark, a Taj Mahal of tackiness, a place worth seeing just to say you’ve done so.

And besides, The Thing has weird and monstrous powers. You cannot resist.

Consider this: A Tucson-based rock musician, well known in the hipper quarters of Europe, once told me that in a fit of jolly felony, he and another musician stole an elfin statuette from the Newlin Restaurant parking lot.

Off they went on tour, elf in the trunk, this way and that, to Los Angeles and points north, then to Chicago, and eventually home. Along the way, he reported, they suffered strange mechanical and nervous breakdowns. Incident after incident of bad luck befell them; their homes were burglarized, musical instruments taken, and no one came to see them on the road.

Under cover of darkest night, they returned the elf to its rightful station.

The dark cloud of fate that had hung over them vanished, and today they are making records and singing happily.

The Thing had spoken.

What is this curious, well, thing? As I recall, drawing deep from memory’s ever -murkier well, along about 1975 a sign was posted at the door leading into The Thing’s sanctum. It promised that The Thing was the mummified corpse of an American Indian woman, an equally mummified infant clutched to her breast, that had been discovered somewhere in the southern Arizona sands.

Of course, until 1965, when it was housed in another tourist trap hundreds of miles away, The Thing was said to have been discovered near Death Valley, California.

Issues of Native American funerary remains now being politically touchy matters, no such sign is now posted, so that The Thing has no context. Without a pointer that it’s supposed to be a mummy, you’d be forgiven for thinking The Thing to be a salvaged bit of roadside debris. And indeed, it bears the mashed potato-and-cottage-cheese look of inexpertly applied papièr maché, something that Boris Karloff might sport on a very bad day.

Call it fakery, kitsch, or tidbit of vanishing roadside Americana. Whatever you think of it, The Thing is as much at home in the surreal landscape of Arizona as, say, Biosphere II or Arcosanti. It’s weirder and much cheaper than most offbeat venues, and it requires no effort. You need do nothing more than stop in, gawk at the covered wagon and the Rolls Royce reputed to have been owned by one Adolph (or so the sign spells it) Hitler, gaze at The Thing itself, and submit to the dumb wonder of it all.

Or you can just drive on.

Read more travel writing by Gregory McNamee