Finally saw Echo Ampitheater
Years after writing about it in Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, I finally saw Echo Amphitheater:
The "amphitheater" is a concave rock face which echoes really well. That's it. When I was the staff writer for WTWTLW, I had to write location-specific material for a bunch of cities in the US, and Echo Amphitheater was, I think, the Santa Fe thing. I can't quite remember what happened here, but I think Johnnemann gave me a list of locations to research... though I think I picked some on my own? I'm not sure. At any rate, a lot of those places were in cities I'd never been to. I watched a lot of YouTube and read a lot of Wikipedia pages to come up with ideas for how to approach the material.
While I was researching it, I believe I only ever saw a far-off picture of Echo Amphitheater. So seeing it up close was a bit of a shock:
The "amphitheater" itself was apparently created by water running down the cliff face and excavating a cavern. You can see water still runs from the top of the arch into the cavern and leaves these little spidery trails of dark coloration on the rock.
It's crazy huge!! The echoing wasn't particularly strong - what impressed me was how fucking big it was. The bottom was flat, like the bottom of a dry pond, and there were mountains of crumbled sandstone and silt in the cavern that were so big, made of such large blocks of stone, that it was hard for me to judge how large they really were. This seems to be a trend with colossal desert stone structures, huh?
We yelled into it a bunch. It sure as hell echoed. The funny thing is that it was much easier to hear the space's "unusual acoustic properties" while standing far away from it. While we were inside the cavern, we could definitely hear the echoes, but it wasn't a particularly striking experience. While we were standing further away, we could hear other visitors shrieking and howling unusually clearly. It was definitely a weird experience!!
I think if I'd been here physically before I worked on WTWTLW, I would have written about the place very differently. I don't want to say that I didn't understand the amphitheater before visiting it - I think what I wrote was adequate - it definitely pays to have been somewhere physically. I'm sure that would be the case for pretty much anywhere I wrote about in the game! But this place is very, very strange in a way that you can only truly experience by standing inside it. I'm not sure that what I wrote really communicated that.
The strangest thing about the spot was how thickly the canyon is filled with trees. To approach the cavern, it feels like you have to pierce some kind of eerie barrier which maintains the oddness and secrecy of the cavern itself. The path to the cavern winds from side to side and up and down just enough that it prevents you from seeing in a straight shot down to the rock.
When I wrote about it for the game, I'd imagined it just sitting there on the side of the road, naked and plain, so that you could just effortlessly walk up to it. Instead, it feels like walking through a curtain to take your place on a stage. The viewing platform where you can shout at the rock is raised, so approaching it feels ceremonial, almost.
It feels sometimes like everything worth seeing in this part of the country is bigger than a city block. The desert is monumental. I've been in this part of the country before, as a child, but I don't think I really appreciated it back then. You can only appreciate how unusual and weird these places are if you build up a lifetime of experience not looking at things like chimney rocks and colossal canyons and stripey mountains.
Today it rained very hard in Santa Fe, and I found myself wishing I could be back there at the amphitheater. I bet it looks much, much cooler with wet rock...