so, more than a year ago now, i was driving toward the southwest, loosely following what used to be Route 66. It was Christmas Eve when I was driving from Springfield, MO to Amarillo, TX. All through Oklahoma (Tulsa, Oklahoma City) were reminders of christianity and xmas--many office buildings with lights left on in big crosses. It was getting later in the evening (most of this trip, i slept til 11am, got on the road at around noon, then drove til midnight or one a.m.) and I was in the middle of nowhere in the Texas panhandle, finally out of Oklahoma, and then out of nowhere, in the dark, there was this huge glowing cross. I mean huge, like way bigger than any of the farmhouses or whatnot that were around.
i don't think i can express how much it scared me and how completely incapable of conciously addressing it i found myself.a few days later, on my way home, i found it again, this time just at sunset. i decided i had to go have a look to try to understand what this thing was. i parked a good bit away (which meant i parked off on the shoulder of some road and walked past nothing for a few hundred feet before getting there), since my car has both a Darwin fish and an Evolve fish and i didn't really know what kind of fundamentalists i might be facing. What i found was perhaps even more scary than i could have imagined. the cross has to be at least ten stories tall, probably taller. the base was probably ten feet by ten feet. all around it were life-sized crucifixes, i think representing the stations of the cross. off to one side was some sort of platform with three crucifixes, off in the other direction was a weeping virgin mary and some plaque about unborn children. it was all i could do to take pictures and get out of there. I'm not sure that any of my friends or family really understand how eerie it was.