Catherine Price (17 page)

A
s a kid, I used to eat dog treats. I didn’t like the taste—I ate them because as an only child, gnawing on a Beggin’ Strip gave me a sense of solidarity with the closest thing I had to a sibling: our family dog. But that was before I learned about rendering plants.

At its most basic, rendering is just a form of recycling. From slaughterhouse waste and expired meat to euthanized pets and deadstock, rendering plants take every type of nonhuman body part you can imagine and recycle it into protein, fat, and bone meal. Once isolated, these materials are used in everything from livestock feed to paints, lubricants, jet fuel, cosmetics, tires, and, yes, dog treats.

Gross though they may be, it’s a good thing rendering plants exist: according to the National Renderers Association, America’s rendering plants process about fifty-nine billion pounds of inedible animal by-products every year. If we didn’t render, we’d be left with some pretty unsavory options: burying the carcasses (where they can leach into groundwater), incinerating them, or composting them (i.e., letting them rot).

None is as efficient as rendering, but that doesn’t mean you want to visit a plant. Let’s take the example of what happens to a dead cow. After being dragged into a truck and hauled to the rendering plant, it’s put in a pile of other dead, bloated creatures, all covered in swarming maggots. A plant worker makes a small incision in its hide and inserts a tube that blows air between its skin and flesh, making it easier to remove the hide, which an employee then does by hand with a knife, being careful not to puncture the bloated gut. Once separated, the hide is preserved for leather, and the skinned carcass is ground into bits. This might very well be the most memorable sight from your visit: a dead, skinned beast, chain around its ankles, being jerkily lowered into a giant grinder like the dead body in
Fargo
’s infamous wood chipper scene. Brains, bones, organs, everything gets ground up in a roar, coming out the other end in a pulverized goo that’s then boiled down to separate its ingredients.

Intrigued? You’ll have to sign up for a tour. As for me, I’ll never eat a Milk-Bone again.

P
eople’s willingness to sit within inches of one another in a giant cigar tube with uncomfortable seats and stale air depends on a simple, but unbreakable, agreement: if you stay put and shut up, the plane will take you where you want to go.

So if something goes wrong and the plane can’t take off—as was the case on December 29, 2006, with American Airlines Flight 1348 from San Francisco to Dallas/Fort Worth—airlines should take aggressive steps to avoid mutiny. In this particular case, strong storms in Dallas forced the plane to be rerouted to Austin, where American Airlines decided to keep it on the runway till the weather passed. Unfortunately, not only did the storms linger for hours, but they spread to Austin, making it impossible for the plane to take off.

In retrospect, American Airlines should have found a gate for the plane to park, or at the very least trucked food and water to the stranded passengers. But none of this happened. Instead, concerned about the hassle of rerouting an entire plane full of passengers during holiday season, American Airlines kept everyone on the plane. As time dragged on, flight attendants began running out of water; the only food on the flight, whose 6:05
A.M.
scheduled departure was so early that many passengers hadn’t eaten breakfast, was a box of pretzels. Despite the lack of beverage service, the plane’s bathrooms began to overflow, and even after an airport worker emptied them five hours into the delay, the stench lingered throughout the cabin. Parents ran out of diapers for their children; one man exclaimed loudly that he had reached his last piece of Nicorette gum.

The plane languished on the runway for two, three, four hours. Finally, after eight hours of waiting, the captain, who admitted that he was “embarrassed” for American Airlines, made the executive decision to find a gate for the airplane himself. It took another hour for the plane to deboard. By the time the passengers got off, they had spent nearly fifteen hours on the plane—and still hadn’t made it to Dallas.

I
t’s hard to know how to react to museums dedicated to sex (specimens exist everywhere from New York to Prague). In theory, they seem like they should be titillating. But as is the case with the Amsterdam Sexmuseum, they’re often less interesting than their subject matter would suggest.

Jessica Curtin

To its credit, the museum does have a fine selection of ancient stone dildos. But still, it’s tough to fully explore sexuality in an institution whose most basic rule is that you should look, not touch. This is especially true in Amsterdam, a place where art and illicit intercourse happily coexist—the museum is just blocks away from De Wallen, Amsterdam’s red-light district, which is helpfully indicated on museum maps. If you really want to see a twentieth-century wooden toilet seat painted with a bottom-up view of a dangling scrotum, then definitely stop by. But if you prefer a more hands-on approach to your education, there are other places in Amsterdam you might want to visit first.

F
ew things can put a damper on a family camping trip like the eruption of a supervolcano. So you might want to avoid being in Yellowstone National Park the next time it blows up.

It turns out that nearly all of the park’s 2.2 million acres sit on what is one of the world’s largest volcanoes—a volcano so massive that its full caldera is only visible from space. Its last major eruption was a thousand times as big as that of Mount St. Helens (the most violent eruption in modern American history) and emitted a plume of dust that spread over nineteen western states, plus parts of Mexico and Canada. As
National Geographic
describes it, “Dense, lethal fogs of ash, rocks, and gas, superheated to 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit . . . rolled across the landscape in towering gray clouds,” which “filled entire valleys with hundreds of feet of material so hot and heavy that it welded itself like asphalt across the once verdant landscape.”

These days, many of the park’s attractions—its geysers, its hot springs, its bubbling mud pots—are made possible by the fact that the park sits on a giant magma chamber some forty-five miles across and up to eight miles thick. To give you a better sense of how massive this is, consider this quote from Bill Bryson’s book
A Short History of Nearly Everything
: “Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of.”

According to the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, “If another large caldera-forming eruption were to occur at Yellowstone, its effects would be worldwide. Thick ash deposits would bury vast areas of the United States, and injection of huge volumes of volcanic gases into the atmosphere could drastically affect global climate.” Luckily, they insist that there’s no indication that a catastrophic eruption is imminent. But Bryson points to a different statistic: the supervolcano has erupted, on average, every 600,000 to 700,000 years. The last major eruption is estimated to have happened around 640,000 years ago. As Bryson puts it, “Yellowstone, it appears, is due.”

Even if the supervolcano remains dormant, there’s another threat: a giant earthquake. Yellowstone lies on a major fault line. In 1959, it was hit by a 7.5-magnitude quake that was so sudden that it caused an entire mountainside to collapse, sending some eighty million tons of rock hurtling off the mountain at more than one hundred miles per hour and killing twenty-eight campers.

G
ustave is not an irascible Frenchman; he’s a giant crocodile in Burundi with a taste for human flesh. Thought to be more than sixty years old, Gustave is said by locals to have killed and eaten more than three hundred people.

This number is likely exaggerated, but scientists agree that unlike Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, the huge croc actually does exist. Experts say it’s quite possible he is twenty feet long and weighs around a ton—four times more than a typical crocodile. As one observer described him, Gustave has the girth of a killer whale and teeth the size of railroad spikes.

They also don’t dispute the idea that he preys on humans. Corroborating reports from witnesses all describe a giant crocodile with the same distinctive dark scar on its head (thought to be an old bullet wound), and Patrice Faye, a researcher (and irascible Frenchman) who’s been studying Burundi’s crocodiles for more than twenty years, claims to have seen Gustave with people in his jaws. In 2004, he allegedly killed four swimmers in the span of eight days.

In addition to his stomach capacity, Gustave has impressive powers of evasion. Faye has made several attempts to catch him, including one involving a massive, 32´ x 5´ x 7´ cage baited with a live goat, chickens, and, at one point, a sorcerer’s unwanted dog. Gustave simply lingered in the river, his glowing eyes captured by nighttime cameras.

According to Faye’s research, Gustave likes to alternate between an area of river in the Rusizi National Park and the banks of Lake Tanganyika, one of the world’s largest freshwater lakes. When he eats, Gustave goes for quantity over quality, gobbling up easily detached body parts like heads, limbs, and abdomens and leaving the torsos behind. Satiated, he then retreats for up to months at a time. But don’t be fooled by these temporary disappearances. Crocodiles have a neat trick where they can turn off their production of stomach acid and survive without new food for up to a year—just long enough for wary swimmers to let down their guard.

T
he night of July 18, 64
A.D.
, was not a good time for Rome. A fire broke out that evening in a shopping district near the Circus Maximus and quickly spread across the city. By the time it was finally extinguished more than a week later, ten of Rome’s fourteen districts had been damaged or destroyed.

The causes of the Great Fire of Rome, as it was subsequently dubbed, remain mysterious. It could have been an accident—an estimated ten fires a day broke out in the city. The emperor, Nero, could have had the fire started to clear out a section of Rome where he wanted to build a new palace. Or, as Nero himself claimed, it could have been the Christians—there’s evidence that Roman Christians of the time believed that Rome was destined to be destroyed by fire in 64
A.D.
, and someone could have just been trying to ensure that the prophecy came true. But then again, when it came to religious minorities, Nero wasn’t the most reliable source: he liked to feed them to lions before gladiator matches.

Regardless of its causes, the fire had a lasting impact. Nero built the palace of his dreams, and the Circus Maximus, Rome’s legendary chariot stadium, was completely redone. It remained open for races until sometime around 550
A.D.
, and besides casualties among charioteers (a frequent occurrence), the Circus steered clear of major catastrophe. Except, that is, for one day that’s also worth avoiding: in 140
A.D.
, an upper tier of the balcony collapsed, killing more than one thousand people—sacrificial Christians not included.

D
ear 2.6 million residents of Nevada:

It’s not my fault. When I asked friends and family to suggest places not to see before you die, six people independently insisted that I include the entire state of Nevada as an entry in the book. “But what about the salt flats?” I protested. “Or Red Rock Canyon? Or the Nevada State Mining Championships, held each year in Tonopah? There are good things in Nevada! And besides, people in Nevada buy travel books!”

But these friends didn’t want to hear it. They wanted to talk about the heat, the emptiness, the atrocity that is Lake Las Vegas, the nuclear waste, the alien sightings, the fact Criss Angel calls it home. So for them, the Nevada haters, I am including this entry. Please forgive me.

A. The Vegas Strip

There are many, many things to dislike about the Las Vegas Strip, the main drag of Sin City that’s known for its casinos, clubs, and, in the case of the Bellagio Hotel, a dancing fountain show set to “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.” Complete with a fake Statue of Liberty, the Strip is also an example of Americans’ willingness to accept reproductions of famous sights as adequate alternatives to the real thing. (“It’s just like the one in New York City!” I heard a woman say, pointing at a replica of the Eiffel Tower.)

Some of the Strip’s theme hotels are fun to walk around in, like the Venetian or Mandalay Bay. But most have no redeeming qualities. Consider the Luxor, a giant black pyramid guarded by an enormous sphinx. Despite having only opened in 1993, it has already managed to achieve an authentic feeling of decay, with dark hallways, faded faux-hieroglyphics, and unstable railings that provide only the slightest protection against falling hundreds of feet onto the casino floor below. The result is impressive, even for Vegas: a building that combines the despair of an existential crisis with the ambiance of a parking garage.

B. Nuclear Fallout

Nearly 80 percent of Nevada belongs to the federal government, which decided to take advantage of its vast deserts not for a drug-fueled art festival (see Burning Man, p. 217), but for nuclear explosions. Pockmarked with craters and larger than Rhode Island, the Nevada Test Site is the most notorious of the government’s testing grounds. Between 1951 and 1992, it was home to more than one thousand nuclear detonations. While the tests’ full fallout, if you will, remains unclear, in 1997 the National Cancer Institute concluded that atmospheric tests done in the area had contaminated large parts of the country with radioactive iodine–131 in quantities big enough to produce ten thousand to seventy-five thousand cases of thyroid cancer. I consider that reason enough not to visit. But others disagree—and for them, the U.S. Department of Energy has joined forces with NTS to offer free monthly tours.

C. Nuclear Garbage Dumps

When you do that much nuclear testing, you have to have someplace to put your garbage, and for a long time, the plan was to dump it at Yucca Mountain, conveniently located within the Nevada Test Site. Designed to hold more than seventy thousand tons of nuclear waste, the mountain seemed ideal: no one lives around it, its water table is deep, and besides, it’s in a location
already
contaminated by nuclear waste. The federal government spent more than two decades—and billions of dollars—hollowing out the mountain in America’s largest-ever public works project. Then in 2009, the project was scrapped. No one yet knows where America’s homeless nuclear waste is going to end up (its eventual location will be another place not to visit), but in the meantime, there’s at least one good reason to abandon Yucca Mountain: in 2007, geologists realized that part of the complex was situated directly on top of a fault line.

D. Aliens

Living in Nevada can make a person paranoid. If the government already used the state to test nuclear bombs, goes the logic, who’s to say it’s not up to other things? For example, concealing evidence of alien landings. Don’t believe me? Go to Rachel, Nevada, a tiny town—or, rather, trailer park—some sixty miles from the nearest gas station on a road whose official nickname is the Extraterrestrial Highway. Tucked next to the mysterious Area 51 (a top-secret air force base), it’s a mecca for some of America’s most fervent believers in extraterrestrial life. And Rachel encourages them—its official Web site lists its population as “Humans 98, Aliens ??” and signs on telephone poles advertise an alien-sighting hotline. These days the town’s main gathering place—and only business—is a motel called the Little A’Le’Inn, where visitors gather to swap stories of alien sightings over burgers and cups of coffee. It’s worth a visit, but be careful—if you stick around long enough you have a high chance of being invited over to someone’s house to watch home movies of UFOs.

The Sphinx at the Luxor Hotel (underneath is valet parking)

Tobias Alt/Wikipedia Commons