Heavy Metal Is Forever

Recently, I was with my parents and we drove by Hole N" The Rock on our way out of Moab. It's hard to miss, painted white letters, feet high, bright against the orange sandstone.

My mom asked what it was, and I told, I had never been there. So, we decided to stop.

The place screamed tourist trap. They had a petting zoo full of sheep doing their best to hide from the desert summertime sun. Weird metal statues decorated the grounds. Several signs pointing to the back of the property promised a Bigfoot sighting. Upon following the signs, behind a row of overgrown prickly pear, a faded statue of a four-foot-wide foot with a overgrown toenail awaited.

Then there was the actual Hole N" the Rock itself. We entered the subdued store font built into the base of a sandstone cliff and found ourselves in a gift shop full of rock statues and T shirts. A sign proclaimed twelve minute tours of the Hole N" The Rock. The store was a cave, hollowed out from the base of the cliff, with a traditional drywall front set against the mouth. It was cool and dark and weird.

"How often are the tours?" we asked the kid running the register. He was probably in his late teens, but he had a baby face and a bowl cut, and the combo made him appear way to young to have a job.

"The next tour happens in eleven minutes," he said. "I'll turn on the air raid siren when it's time."

Of course an air raid siren was involved. I looked at my mom. I had no idea if she were willing to wait eleven minutes to go on a twelve minute tour we had to pay for.

"Okay, well we didn't stop here for nothing," she said.

"I'll give you a discount since you have to wait so long," the kid said, scanning the $6.50 barcode and not the $7.00 barcode.

Eleven minutes later, he rang the air raid siren, and my parents and I lined up at the saloon doors at the back of the cave. The register kid came forward and announced he would be our guide.

We followed him through the saloon doors and further into the cave. This room was painted hospital green, and I mean the walls, ceiling, and floor were hospital green. It was a kitchen, with a window to the outside. It looked surprisingly airy and clean.

Our guide told us that a man named Albert Christensen would built this cave house. He would start the 1940's and open a diner where he would deep fry chicken and fries for passing miners. Unfortunately, Albert would paint his deep fryer, down to the oil pipes, with the same green paint he used for the rest of the room.

"Yes, he would paint his deep frier with lead paint," the guide said, waving his hand at all the lead paint we were surrounded by.

Side note: In 1952 a man named Charlie Steen would discover uranium in the Moab area, kicking off the uranium boom. So if it wasn't the radioactivity that got the miners, it was the lead in their lunch. Based on my entirely unscholarly study of American West mining history, I've come to the conclusion, there were a lot of ways to die in a mining town.

Albert would get married a woman named Gladys and would continue to build their dream cave house until his death. He would die in 1957. We followed the tour guide out of the kitchen and into the main house.

The cave house was pretty cool. Albert did a great job of making windows that let in the light from the one outdoor facing wall. Most of the Christensen's original furniture and projects were still in there. I say projects because Albert had a painting habit. Countless paintings of Jesus, all in profile, filled a room. Each painting was nearly a copy of the others, although one of the painting had silver, glittery stars painted in the background.

And Gladys had a doll collection. One room was filled with classically creepy old-timey dolls. Our tour stared at them, and a woman asked if the cave was haunted. The tour guide stated to say no, and the woman's cell phone went off. The ring tone was a creepy doll laugh. The tour guide looked at her, she looked at him like her phone wasn't going off, and finally they broke eye contact, and he turned to show us the next room. LITERALLY NO ONE said anything about the horrifying ring tone sounding at the exact moment we looked at a bunch of possibly possessed dolls. In fact, I seemed to be the only one even aware of the unsettling timing and ring tone selection.

I know it happened.

But, onto the next room. Apparently Albert also had a taxidermy habit. Our guide said he would find a dead horse and colt in the La Sal mountains. He would then bring the dead horses down to his house and to practice taxidermy on them. I was a bit adrift at this point from the whole doll situation, but I did indeed see a full-sized taxidermied horse and colt just chilling next to a settee.

It was about this time I realized why else I felt adrift.

"Albert and Gladys would meet in Montrose..." the guide said. "Albert would die in 1957..."

The tour guide gave the entire tour using the auxiliary verb of would. Albert didn't die in 1957, he would die in 1957. Albert and Gladys didn't get married, they would get married. The longer I listened to the tour guide, the less I was assured that time was linear. In fact, it became possible I would walk out of that house cave and end up in 1952 to Albert selling deep fried, lead chicken to miners in exchange they helped him enlarge his cave with hand tools.

"You can see here," the tour guide said, "Albert would go on to have many skills. These are his barber tools. He was a barber too."

I looked into a crowded glass case. The guide was motioning to something on the bottom shelf. My dad saw it the same time I did.

"That's a horse comb," my dad told me. "Either he was a very bad barber, or he only worked on horses."

"And here are more paintings," the guide said, waving his hands at a giant easel covered in half finished paintings, some of which were, again, of Jesus looking to the the right. "We don't know why they are unfinished," the guide continued.

Someone muttered that Albert had died, but the guide was now pointing to yet another taxidermied animal, this one a donkey.

"This would be Albert's best friend. And he preserved him in death to remember how great a donkey he was. He moved many cubic feet of rock out of this cave."

The donkey was wearing a straw hat decorated with fake flowers. I moved so I could see it better and found myself staring directly at its nose. It's left side was facing the wall, and I immediately saw why.

It appeared Albert was still getting the hang of taxidermying when his donkey died. A large section of its fur was missing, possibly burned off, on the left side of the donkey's face. And then a series of criss crossing Frankenstein scars ran across it's face and nose.

The thing was the most fucked up, metal taxidermy I had ever seen. With it's straw hat with fake flowers, I immediately found it a source of undying creativity for a horror writer. I loved it.

"And now we are in Gladys' lapidary," the guide said. "She would take bottles from the bar and polish them in her rock polisher and then sell them as rare rocks. She was a con man!"

I looked at the low, rock roof and then the rock tumbler machine. I had a feeling Gladys was probably deaf when she died.

When the tour was finally over, we stepped out of the gift shop and back into the real world. I was both relieved and disappointed that I was still in 2025 and not in the 1950's. The temperature shot up forty degrees (the cave stayed 62 degrees all year long) and I blinked at not just the blinding sunlight but the startling difference between the outside and the time warp we'd just left.

"That was a very good tour," my mom said. "Way better than I expected."

And weirdly, it was. I would go back. It was both incredible in terms of innovation and weird in terms of, well, everything.

If you find yourself driving by The Hole N" The Rock. You should stop. There are worse ways to spend between $6.50 and $7.00. Just don't lick the walls. Heavy metals are forever.