Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Tomb With a View


This past Monday I took the day off from work to do something fun with my boys who were on Spring Break. But what to do? Given that we live in a suburb of Phoenix, which is the fifth largest city in the United States, the possibilities were endless. Amusement park? Zoo? Museum? Movies? Bowling? You name the activity and we could have done it. We ended up settling on doing an hour’s worth of strenuous physical activity culminating in visiting a tomb in the middle of nowhere. Trust me, it’s more fun than it sounds.

The tomb in question was that of George W.P. Hunt, Arizona’s first governor, and six other members of his family; and when I piled the kids in the car on Monday morning, visiting this relatively obscure landmark was the furthest thing from my mind—largely because I did not know it existed. Our goal was to hike in Papago Park, which we did—the tomb was an unexpected bonus.

Papago Park is a hilly desert park with lots of hiking trails. The most popular trail by far, though, is the one that leads up to Hole in the Rock, a local Phoenix landmark that is…well…basically a giant hole in a giant rock. It is distinct for two reasons: 1) when you stand in the giant whole and look west, you have an amazing view of the city; and 2) it holds the Guinness World Record for least creatively named landmark. (I’m guessing if The Grand Canyon was named Hole in the Ground, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular.)

When we got to the Papago Park area and I looked up at Hole in the Rock, I realized that we were not the only ones who had this idea on the first day of Spring Break. Dozens of people were standing in the hole, so I knew this would not be a very solitary hike for three of us. I parked and we hiked up to the giant hole, dodging a plethora of other hikers along the way. It felt less like communing with nature than it did going to the mall on Black Friday.

After spending ten minutes in the hole taking pictures from various angles, we started to trek back down, at which point my nine-year-old son asked a question that was seemingly out of left field.

“Can we go see the illuminati?”

Now I should mention here that this particular son is obsessed with the illuminati symbol—that bizarre pyramid-shaped eye on the back left side of a dollar bill. He thinks the symbol is the funniest thing ever and he will often position his fingers in the shape of a pyramid, hold it in front of his navel, say “the illuminati,” and laugh hysterically. So when he asked if we could go see the illuminati, my first reaction was to look down at this belly, as I fully expected him to be making the symbol. But instead of making the symbol, he was pointing in a southward direction.

I looked in the direction he was pointing and saw, off in the distance, a white pyramid on the top of a hill. I had certainly seen this structure from a distance before, having hiked in Papago Park many times, but I never had any idea what it was and never ventured in that direction to find out.

“Well, it’s not the illuminati, but I don’t know what it is or if we’re allowed to go over there,” I said.

“There are dead bodies in there,” my eleven-year-old said ominously.

“What? Give me a break, there are not. Don’t try to scare your brother,” I said.

“No, really, there are. I saw it at Boy Scout Day Camp last week.”

It was true that my older son had gone to Papago Park for Boy Scout Day Camp the previous week, but the only activities he mentioned were cooking, whittling, and learning how to use a compass; he said nothing about seeing dead bodies. Frankly, I’m not sure that the Boy Scouts offers a merit badge for that.

“So what—are you telling me there are zombies in that thing?” I asked.

“I didn’t say anything about zombies. It’s a tomb. People are buried in it,” my son said, soberly.

“Oh, that makes much more sense. Should we go check it out?”

Both boys were gung-ho to make the trek to the tomb, and now that I knew we wouldn’t be greeted by the undead, I was happy to hike over there, as well. The good part about this unplanned excursion is that we were now putting Hole in the Rock—and by extension, the crowds—behind us. The bad part was that the extra uphill climb made me realize how horribly out of shape I am. I huffed and puffed the entire way up there, while my sons steadily marched away. Fortunately, they were nice enough to wait for me whenever I lagged behind, and eventually the three of us made it to our destination without having to dodge one person along the way.

Once I caught my breath and took a couple of pictures of the boys in front of the illuminati, I started reading the plaques, which is when I discovered this was Hunt’s Tomb, honoring Arizona’s first governor. But I also learned by reading the plaques that Hunt was also our state’s second, third, sixth, seventh, eighth, and tenth governor! This guy was clearly dedicated to public service. (Either that or he really liked the free mustache waxings the governor’s office afforded him.) He was also really dedicated to sharing his tomb, as his wife, sister, daughter, son-in-law, father-in-law, and mother-in-law are all buried in there with him. Yes, the illuminati is spacious.

Our quest complete, we started heading back toward the car, which although a good distance away, was mercifully mostly downhill. Although I was exhausted by the time I sat in the driver’s seat taking a long swig from my bottle of water, I was pleased with how our morning went. We got to see Hole in the Rock with a throng of fellow Phoenicians and Hunt’s Tomb, totally by ourselves. It was only an hour-long adventure, but it was a memorable one and was thankfully not marred once by any encounters with the undead.