Jack Christian

THREE MEOW WOLFS

1.

AT FIRST I WANTED TO do a summer road trip through the four-corners states, but my wife didn’t want to go, not with our two kids anyway, and especially not after I revealed my preferred itinerary required about thirty hours in the car. So, I got in touch with Chuck. Chuck lives in Denver and enjoys road trips maybe even more than me. Also, Chuck works remotely and tours constantly with his “bootgaze” country rock band. When I mentioned what I had in mind he replied simply: “Yeah!” Chuck and I became friends fifteen years ago on our first day of grad school. I have no other friend like him, and certainly not one who could fit a two-thousand-mile adventure into his weekly schedule.

The idea to visit three Meow Wolf locations—in Denver, Santa Fe, and Las Vegas—developed later. After relocating to North Texas in 2018 I became newly interested in the art and landscape of the American Southwest, but have found the region’s most ambitious landscape art difficult or impossible to see: James Turrell’s Roden Crater remains closed to the public, and admission to Michael Heizer’s recently completed City is harder to come by than Taylor Swift tickets. Meow Wolf’s various iterations, meanwhile, maintain the generous hours of big-box stores and are open to anyone willing to fork over forty to fifty dollars. Their quirky, maximalist warehouse spaces are at the forefront of immersive art experiences that have been opening across the country in the last decade. These include 3D projections of Impressionist paintings like Immersive Van Gogh, glorified Instagram backdrops for selfie aficionados, and much in between. Picture a funhouse and a museum that got tangled up: neon lights, hidden rooms, secret passages; all of it presented not as mere amusement, but as art. In the spring of 2023, it seemed to me that Meow Wolf sat at the intersection of the interesting and the possible, and perhaps even the uplifting. I was game. More and more I desired immersion in anything that would have me, desired it as an antidote to my job dissatisfaction, which, because I moved across the country for my job, felt at times all-encompassing.

That spring, my job dissatisfaction had overwhelmed me. On the phone with my parents, the night after my annual performance evaluation—an evaluation in which I was deemed to have “exceeded expectations”—I’d begun to howl while simply describing my day. In my retelling, the story of my performance evaluation erupted into a dire entanglement in which I felt myself trapped inside a career cul-de-sac while hurtling through middle age and living in a place I didn’t want to live, so that briefly I became a blubbering teenager. In the aftermath I was thankful, if embarrassed, for how my parents consoled me while I moaned.

In the days that followed, I experienced a renewed resolve to make the best of a not great situation. Concretely, this meant adding structure to Chuck’s and my road trip. In this spirit, I emailed a Meow Wolf PR rep about our travel plans, outlining a vague intention to connect Meow Wolf with the landscape of the West, and requested complimentary tickets. I thought this was a long shot, but she replied with “A RESOUNDING YES!”

Meanwhile, on the internet, I’d been viewing, wistfully, the national parks I might’ve visited if I’d been undertaking this trip with my family, which allowed me a not entirely unpleasant feeling that Utah’s sandstone arches were what I wanted, but Meow Wolf was what I got, just as a stable teaching job east of the Mississippi had been what I wanted, but a dysfunctional university in Texas was what I got. I say this feeling is not entirely unpleasant because in my experience it turns out to be conducive to conciliatory indulgences, whether they be a couple extra beers on a weeknight, or half-baked road trips with grad-school buddies.

Earlier in the spring, I’d come across Guy Davenport’s book Every Force Evolves a Form, and copied into my notebook his maxim that “A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.” At first, I liked Davenport’s idea for how it deflated my national parks fantasy. Taken as works of art, the force the western parks articulate is Manifest Destiny: as if their curated landscapes were a perk of colonial domination, and as if our awe when confronted with those landscapes might redeem us. I know I’m far from alone in desiring new ways to understand myself and my geography. So, I began to wonder: what forces does Meow Wolf make intelligible?

2.

Meow Wolf describes itself as “an arts and entertainment company that creates immersive and interactive experiences that transport audiences of all ages into fantastic realms of story and exploration.” It began in 2008 as an informal collective of Santa Fe artists who derived the name “Meow Wolf” by drawing words from a hat. Its mission is “to inspire creativity through art, exploration, and play so that imagination will transform our worlds.” Meow Wolf’s About page neglects to mention that the company is now run by executives who have previously worked for Viacom, Universal Studios, and Walt Disney World, and who bought out the original artist collective. But this story is well documented, or at least there is a documentary about it, which I watched one night after my kids went to bed.

The doc shows how a group of Santa Fe creatives collaborated to make a wild art space in an old bowling alley with the unlikely financial support of George R.R. Martin, their rich Santa Fe neighbor. The original collective included a guy named Vince Kadlubek, who, energized by their early success, became intent on further monetizing the project. Kadlubek’s art was venture capitalist fundraising, he realized. Ergo, not one Meow Wolf, but three, and soon to be more. And there I had it: an American “success story” that grows ever more ubiquitous. In this case, how Meow Wolf zipped from the communal to the corporate in less than a decade. I suppose I could’ve guessed that was the force it made intelligible.

Oh well, I thought, as the documentary ended. If I’d viewed it before I bought my plane ticket, I might’ve backed out. But my travel money was already spent, and I was looking forward also to the immersive experience of a road trip with Chuck.

Because Chuck lives in Denver, we started at Convergence Station. Opened in September 2021, Convergence Station was, at that time, the newest Meow Wolf and at ninety thousand square feet also the largest. It sits in a gargantuan building tucked into the cloverleaf where US-287 crosses I-25, but the convergence of highways is mostly just a coincidence and not something Convergence Station really converges with, especially given that the concept for it predated its eventual location. Instead, Convergence Station offers a convergence of four pretend worlds represented by its four levels. There’s an ice world and a water world and a sky world, maybe. A mud world? I don’t know. It’s all politely postapocalyptic. One room displays street trash fashioned into a drum set that plays by itself intermittently. In another, a gooey mermaid oozes over a fake stalagmite. From the outside, the building looks like a misshapen trash can from which an enormous Oscar the Grouch might emerge.

Upon entry, I became so overwhelmed with flashing lights, fake smoke, and an omnipresent musique concrète that I couldn’t follow much that our tour guide, PR manager Erin Barnes, told us. Barnes is tall with dark hair, probably in her forties. She wore a leopard print skirt and a leather jacket. She, like all the Meow Wolf PR people I encountered, was professional, polite, knowledgeable. Where I’d assumed that Chuck and I would simply wander the spaces by ourselves, the Meow Wolf people wanted to meet us, and, if we would let them, to guide us.

While we stood in the lobby, Barnes described her background working in off-kilter, immersive spaces, such as Black Monarch Hotel, a supposedly haunted former brothel in Victor, Colorado where tourists can stay overnight. When she’d heard Meow Wolf was coming to Denver, she’d emailed their corporate offices and, “four short years later,” landed her job. Meow Wolf, she told us, is a great place to work. “We practice something called radical inclusivity,” she said. “Radical inclusivity” can also be a valuable rhetorical injunction against unionization, which Meow Wolf has so far resisted.

The brief tour Barnes planned before “turning us loose” stretched longer and longer as we proceeded through rooms and tunnels and unlikely doors. This was unavoidable. There was so much to see. At one point we had to go back and collect Chuck, whom we found staring into a case of old boom boxes made into dioramas that depicted a small town and a tornado.

Barnes was keen to show us some of Convergence Station’s hidden features. Like cheat codes in video games, these are things savvy visitors can discover and teach each other. Meow Wolf seems to hope these discoveries will result in return visits that must eventually form a greater portion of their ticket sales. Such a formulation put a lot of pressure on the features Barnes demonstrated. In one, she recruited other visitors into a cave-like room where we were instructed to place our hands on glowing fake rocks that lined the walls. When all the rocks were touched, strange noises filled the space. Were we blasting off? Were worlds converging? For a few moments, we eight or so participants glanced around with minor astonishment. Then, the person nearest the exit slunk off into the next room, ending the collaboration.

In a nearby room, Barnes turned me over to an attendant dressed like a Wookiee from Star Wars, who helped me align planets that were projected above a giant ice cathedral constructed from brightly colored, translucent sheets of plastic. After I aligned them using a small control pad, a light show erupted on the ceiling. “We’re entering a wormhole!” the attendant exclaimed. He looked up with practiced reverence. The pretend ice people were traveling somewhere! This was their heaven or something! I didn’t really get it. My neck started to hurt from looking up. It felt like witnessing the climax of a New Age church service in a sanctuary that doubled as a movie set. Later, Barnes told us about a teenage superfan of Convergence Station, who, after she learned how to align the planets, did so repeatedly until security was called.

By this point I’d decided the hazy story about exiled make-believe peoples belied an anxiety about Convergence Station converging with any actually exiled people. It was easy to imagine Meow Wolf’s execs talking themselves into broad-brush narratives about nomadic ice tribes that might add to visitors’ experiences a froth of profundity. The backstory felt focus-grouped and data-driven in a way that made it as unobjectionable as it was uninteresting. This confirmed what the documentary had led me to expect: that what had really converged in Convergence Station were stakeholders’ attempts to take Meow Wolf’s original creative energy and commodify it. As a result, Convergence Station resembles a corner of Disney World without the rides, or else an enormous escape room from which you too easily escape.

In Convergence Station the local art is everywhere and nowhere at once. Visitors see all kinds of objects that someone made, but you never learn who, or why, or how. Instead, the artwork congeals into a singular suspension. Rooms swim with peculiar visions: glowing seaweed in one; in another, a whole “library” in which a desk, fireplace, and mantle are molded entirely out of plastic-coated books.

At the entrance to one space, Barnes pointed to a small, polka-dotted creature that resembled a cross between a groundhog and a mushroom. She informed us that it was the creation of a Denver woman who designed the piece for precisely that spot. The information caused Chuck to scoff. The provenance of the mushroom marmot was rendered irrelevant by its overcrowded surroundings. This was true of nearly all the bespoke creations in Convergence Station. Much of it was spectacular, but learning who made what would be like tracking down the farmer who grew the kale in your super-greens smoothie.

The baroque design of the place, in its hugeness and its intricacy, trumped all. For this reason, the best thing I saw at Convergence Station was a handful of bespoke cubbyholes that had just enough room for two people to sit and look out at everybody else. These were coveted spots, especially among teenage couples. A real place to cuddle inside an imaginary apocalypse.

I wandered solo for a while, and then found Chuck sipping water in the café. At one point, Barnes had described the whole of Convergence Station as “like a psychedelic experience without the drugs.” In Chuck’s opinion she’d “greatly undervalued psychedelic experience.” I left him once more and went in search of undiscovered rooms but kept rediscovering the same spaces over and over. When I found Chuck again, we spent a moment brainstorming other quasi-immersive experiences we’d enjoyed better, including New York City’s High Line, Chuck’s visit to Houston’s Rothko Chapel, my childhood field trips to Busch Gardens, and, we speculated, the drive through the mountain pass above Raton, New Mexico while listening to Townes Van Zandt’s “Snowing on Raton,” which we would commence the next day.

“We have to go to two more of these?” Chuck said when we reached the parking lot.

We were all portal-ed out.

3.

We spent the rest of the afternoon preparing to depart for Santa Fe and points west. As we did, Chuck informed me that he was “not super liquid right now.” He’d recently submitted several invoices that remained unpaid. To ease the financial burden, I said I’d cover the rental car and we agreed to split expenses after that, which we did. He intended to spend Sunday evening writing up a report, but instead spent Sunday evening realizing he didn’t have enough information to write the report, which meant he’d need to do a few phone interviews while we were on the road.

The next morning, I was up with the sun, my habit since becoming a parent. Chuck slept until 8:50 a.m. before stumbling into the office room in his rented house for a 9 a.m. Zoom meeting with the project manager he freelances for. He then disappeared out the side door and returned minutes later with his usual, an iced coffee and breakfast burrito from the neighborhood café. While he ate, he talked about wanting to get up earlier so that he could enjoy his mornings more, but not wanting to go to bed earlier because of how much he enjoys his evenings. I said I admired his ability to do a Zoom meeting in his first ten minutes of wakefulness. He said it wasn’t that hard. All he had to do was turn on his computer.

From a pile on the kitchen table he pulled a medical bill from months ago when he’d gotten Covid-19 for the second time and ended up in the emergency room because he couldn’t swallow. He’d been sent home with a prescription for steroids. Even with his Obamacare health coverage, the visit cost him twelve hundred dollars that he hadn’t gotten around to paying. And, his tour van had cost him nine hundred dollars recently for new brakes that still weren’t right, which was why we’d decided to rent a car. And his partner had been out of work for months, so he’d been covering both their bills. And, and, and.

In short, the freedom to immerse ourselves in a road trip came with some large expenses, monetary and otherwise. For me, my teaching schedule provides time for my kids and time to write that I’m so far unwilling to part with despite the ills of the place where I work. For Chuck, workweek freedom preserves the opportunity to play music. When I asked him about his recent tour, he said, “Which one?”

By this point in his musical career, Chuck had graduated into hiring other musicians to tour with him, which made him happy with the sound quality, but rendered him as much of a manager as he was a lead singer. Lately he’d been successful enough to run the whole operation at “only about a 40 percent loss.” Each time he returned to a city, he found the audience maybe 15 percent bigger, which was nice to see. But this also highlighted how for all the travel to become sustainable, at some point his fan base would need to expand exponentially. This was hard to imagine. It would remain unimaginable, he suspected, until it happened.

4.

Maybe it was our lowered expectations, or maybe it was the ebullience of travel, but Santa Fe’s House of Eternal Return, the original Meow Wolf, opened in 2016, exceeded our hopes. The House of Eternal Return is constructed to resemble the façade of a Victorian farmhouse. You enter through the front door and are welcomed immediately into something warm, weird, and human. In one section, a living room set appears caught in a whirlpool. In the fake house’s kitchen, the refrigerator opens into a secret passage. The passage leads eventually past a benevolent snow monster that glowers down at you while a computerized voice says, “You are okay. Please proceed.” You do proceed into a chamber made from a mastodon’s ribcage. The bones glow pink and purple and make music when struck with provided mallets. Chuck recruited me into an impromptu performance. When we finished, the people waiting behind us cheered, and we bowed, and they laughed. Laughter, that was something missing from the Denver Meow Wolf. The House of Eternal Return was filled with it.

We kept exploring up and down staircases that felt slightly dangerous, like those leading to a ramshackle tree house. We were allowed to feel mischievous in our explorations. The rooms kept revealing themselves as bigger than we’d guessed. In one, bright bottle caps surrounded a shrine that featured a doll baby framed by empty packets of birth control pills. In total the rooms had the color and eclecticism of Santa Fe. They were made of Santa Fe stuff. Whereas in Denver it seemed Meow Wolf had subsumed the art it contained, the House of Eternal Return presented a glorious hodgepodge. Where Convergence Station appropriated artwork for a bland vision, in House of Eternal Return we felt the camaraderie of the artists working together, which mirrored our own camaraderie while exploring.

Chuck was as impressed as me. He’d lived previously in Santa Fe and been through a bad breakup there, which made him want to keep a low profile while in town. Predictably, as soon as we entered the House of Eternal Return he ran into two of his ex’s friends. These were exactly the people he didn’t want to see, and whom he told me later he’d “been kind of rude to,” which, because he is Chuck, meant that he’d only talked with them for about three minutes instead of the five, or ten, or twenty minutes he reserves for small talk with people he truly enjoys, which are most people. The House of Eternal Return had returned him, briefly, to his original enjoyment of Santa Fe. I snapped a picture of him springing into a new room with childlike enthusiasm. In a corridor full of mirrors, we took a surprisingly touching photograph of ourselves that could support the caption “Best Buddies.”

Afterwards, we got margaritas at Tiny’s, which Chuck claimed is the best dive bar in Santa Fe. It was a Monday night, and we had the place to ourselves. NBA and NHL playoff games showed on wall-mounted TVs. We sat beside a case full of Elvis figurines, including a headless Elvis that wore blue suede shoes.

I asked Chuck, “Do you think Meow Wolf’s corporate officers can’t see the difference between Convergence Station and the House of Eternal Return, or can they see the difference but don’t care?”

“Definitely the former,” he said.

I said, “Don’t you think that ignorance is indicative of the complete bullshit of an ever-widening sector of contemporary life in which the one poses as synonymous with the other?”

“Probably so, dude,” Chuck said.

5.

The most immersive thing of all might’ve been if Chuck did his remote work from inside the various Meow Wolfs we visited. Instead, he conducted phone interviews from the passenger seat while I drove Interstate 40 west into Arizona. While hunched over his MacBook, he asked a series of small-business owners who purport to participate in the creative economy to connect their life experience to their corporate practices. He got into long conversations with each of them and took pages of notes. I had nothing to do but listen to how, one after the other, he established rapport with these people, prompted them to link their formative experiences to their current work ethic, affirmed how interesting their stories were, promised to connect them with other people he’d met. He did all this in his everyday uniform of black jeans; heavy metal T-shirt; battered Reno, Nevada baseball hat; and size-twelve pink Nike Air sneakers. Basically, he was more productive in two hours than I’ve been in whole weeks in the several desk jobs I had before becoming a teacher. Eavesdropping on him resulted in a stark portrait of all the skill, smarts, and care that his employer was getting for free, given that Chuck wasn’t paid for his time, but only for the report the interviews would allow him to write.

We stopped in Winslow, Arizona to take a picture on its famous corner. I bought postcards in a gift shop while Chuck did another interview. Then, we left singing the Eagles’ song, but changed the lyrics to “Doing a quick phoner in Winslow, Arizona.”

The next morning we waited in a short line to pay the entrance fee, and, before 10 a.m., stood peering into the Grand Canyon’s incomprehensible distance. Your mind can’t handle the distance, which makes the canyon air seem to shimmer. On this particular morning, smoke from controlled burns enhanced the shimmer. There’s the idea, expressed by Walker Percy, Jean Baudrillard, and others, that you can’t really see the Grand Canyon, but while we stood at Mather Point I told Chuck I’d pay any amount of money for that view. I meant it.

Chuck waxed philosophical about how our minds construct the space in the same way our mind constructs brushstrokes into a painting. “You know how you’re seeing it is wrong, but there’s nothing you can do to correct it,” he said. A visual paradox, in other words. To stare into the Grand Canyon is to feel yourself upended. You can’t handle it. It swamps you. The immersion is ephemeral but substantial. Gig work, freelancing, insurance, the whole stupid economy, and even the idea of nation-states are revealed as ludicrous while staring into the Grand Canyon. The view is so powerful that standing before it I understood that for the United States to go on existing, the government must charge admission; otherwise it would upend the idea of a government. Walking back to the car, Chuck wondered if we’d merely imagined all the things we claimed to have felt while staring into the chasm, so he trotted back to the edge and felt it all again. And then we drove away.

6.

That same afternoon we arrived at our discount Las Vegas hotel, the Tuscany Suites and Casino. Our stay coincided with an annual conference of biker cops who all wore thin-blue-line jackets and were often having finger-gun shootouts with one another as they posed for pictures. Dave Hickey, an art critic I admire, spent the latter part of his life in Vegas and claimed to be smitten with what he called Vegas’s “democratic honesty.” I had hoped to see Vegas similarly.

After we came out $50 ahead playing an electronic roulette wheel, Chuck and I drove over to Omega Mart, our third and final Meow Wolf. Omega Mart is located west of downtown in the AREA15 complex, an entire shopping mall of immersive entertainment experiences whose motto is “Enter Curious. Leave Different.” At the entrance, we met PR manager Michael Duffield, who we found easily by following his advice to look for the only guy wearing a blazer.

Duffield is short and stocky and appears to be in his mid-fifties. He signs all his emails “Have an Omega Day.” And there were so many emails. By the time I shook his hand, we’d checked in and touched base no less than ten times in two days. We checked in so often that at one point I, due to the difficulty of sending an email from a moving car, accidentally sent him a blank email. This meant that we checked in once more about the blank email I’d sent.

As its name suggest, Omega Mart is styled as an enormous pretend grocery store, complete with a produce section and a butcher shop with a sign above it that reads, “Where Family Meats Freedom.” The aisles are stocked with goods that pun on actual grocery items. These Duffield relished in showing off. He held up products such as Simply Spiders macaroni product, Lemon Frenzy cleaning fluid, and another cleaner, this one pale yellow, named Who Told You This Was Butter? He chuckled at all of these, and also at Bliss Xtreme bath salts, a can of Moth Milk Rose Beef, a flask shaped like a banana, a coin purse shaped like an avocado, a tattooed chicken in the butcher shop, and a tube of Tooth Slime. He showed us air freshener in assorted scents including Forbidden Wisdom and Primordial Dawn. Finally, he held up a jar labeled dehydrated water, which he put back after I asked if the name was in direct homage to Steven Wright’s 1985 comedy special that features a box of the same stuff, i.e., air. “Not sure about that,” he said.

In the produce section, he told us Omega Mart’s story. The narrative centers on Walter Dram and family, who took over the struggling Alpha Mart food store and turned it into the thriving Omega Mart with the use of a mysterious nutritional additive that led to skyrocketing sales and a cultlike employee training culture headed by Walter’s daughter Cecelia. Duffield resisted connecting any of this to Las Vegas itself, despite Las Vegas being the mecca of the service industry. Omega Mart’s connection to Las Vegas, he told me, owed to the Plenty Valley, a fictional valley that Meow Wolf imagines as surrounding Las Vegas, in which Walter discovered the best vegetable he’d ever tasted and began selling it in his grocery store. I thought maybe Duffield hadn’t understood my question, so I asked again and got the same response. Omega Mart’s connection to Las Vegas existed not in the real world, but only in Meow Wolf lore. Had fictional bombs ever been tested in the fictional valley, I might’ve asked, but that would’ve killed the vibe.

Next, Duffield handed us “Boop Cards.” These were like credit cards that could be swiped at kiosks scattered throughout the space, where we could learn more about Dram Corp. The Boop Cards would even allow us to undertake Dram Corp training programs as if we were potential employees. After we watched an instructional video telling us where and how to boop, Duffield said he would cease to “hold us verbal hostage,” and bid us adieu, but not before telling us of a new wrinkle in the narrative, in which a group of anarchist former employees are seeking to wrest control of Omega Mart from the Dram dynasty. Every so often the lights flickered as this guerilla group commandeered the store’s intercom system to convey messages of liberation.

When Duffield had vanished, Chuck and I exchanged looks. Had Duffield been character-acting as an executive of Dram Corp? Would this explain the umpteen emails, and the funky email signature, and the belly laughs at all the punny products? Who knows? He was probably just an enthusiastic PR person, whose professional role brings him very close to inhabiting the corporate culture that Omega Mart spoofs and that Meow Wolf earnestly indulges.

As we expected to by then, we found the secret entry into Omega Mart’s interior inside a drink cooler. A glowing pool of runoff ran the length of the floor. A staffer in a hazmat suit directed us to follow it. The walls displayed a light show that alternated between swirling colors and a figure in the lotus position. On the second floor, office-type rooms were plastered in send-ups of motivational posters. One read, “Teamwork: One Wrong Move and You’ll Be Left Behind.” Another: “Responsibility: It’s Only Your Problem Until It Belongs to Someone Else.”

While Omega Mart was more enjoyable than Convergence Station, the schtick eventually wore thin. We tried boop-ing at a few Boop Stations, but found it tedious. Why would we want to pretend to be employees? Weren’t the travails of employment what we were attempting to escape?

In total, I felt as if we’d arrived at the self-serving terminus of the capitalist imagination that at some point can think only to poke fun at its own power. I even began to read the side story about the resistance forces attacking Omega Mart as stand-ins for the local artists whose labor Meow Wolf exploits, and I found it annoying to be posited inside Meow Wolf’s crisis of conscience. More than that, Omega Mart clarified for me the narrowness of how Meow Wolf interprets its mission. The goal might be to exemplify imagination’s ability to transform our world, but the means of doing so are limited to displays that are grotesquely safe. As a result, whatever transformation is reduced to clever juxtapositions that you can admire for a moment before shuffling on. Chuck and I left feeling we had completed Omega Mart, which is not to say we were particularly moved by it.

7.

The last full day of the trip, I insisted we visit Zion National Park in southwestern Utah. But the time change coming from Nevada into Utah worked against us, and we found ourselves boxed out of parking at the visitor’s center, where we’d intended to catch the shuttle that takes you on a scenic tour of the Virgin River Valley. Instead, Chuck drove us up Route 9, which heads east through the park, toward the Zion–Mount Carmel tunnel. As he did, I noticed he seemed pale and was scratching his cheek in a peculiar way. I noticed also that he was driving very slowly up the switchbacks that led to the tunnel. When he pulled over to let the hundred or so cars behind us pass, I suggested that I drive. When we started again, Chuck’s posture in the passenger seat was stranger than before. I asked what was wrong, and he said, “All the winding.” We had no choice but to proceed through the mile-long tunnel, which features cut-out windows from which you can see passing views of the dramatic valley before plunging again into mountainside. I exclaimed about the awesomeness of each of these. Chuck said nothing.

On the far side of the tunnel, we turned around and went back down. As we descended, he improved enough to tell me that the queasy feeling in his stomach, coupled with the important Zoom meeting he had later that afternoon in which he would update his supervisor on the interviews he’d been conducting, coupled with his fear of heights, coupled with his worry that we’d be stuck in the park without cell phone reception, had spiked his anxiety.

“So much for the freedom of remote work,” I said.

Chuck supposed he was free to have a panic attack in almost any remote location he desired.

As we left the park, by way of commiseration, I told Chuck more about my phone call with my parents and how I’d been mostly unaware of how upset I was until it all came flooding out. I recalled how, at the end of my meltdown, my parents suggested that I was catastrophizing and I’d agreed with them. Witnessing Chuck’s anxiety, however, led me to acknowledge that just as he’d been momentarily overwhelmed by real pressures he’d spent the week holding off, it wasn’t as if I was somehow dishonest in my crying. In fact, it was the other way around. Everything was as bad as I said it was: Texas is a terrifying place to live, the institution that employs me does consistently drain my job of value even as I get older and the thought of starting over in a different industry seems increasingly arduous. But these are all things I mostly ignore, to such an extent that my outburst remains remarkable.

In the silent miles across Utah I thought more about the psychological state of catastrophizing. Hyperbolic as it can be, catastrophizing also reveals our alienation in a fallen world. While Chuck zoomed from a Love’s Truck Stop, I wandered the large convenience store, allowing myself to imagine it as a roadside Meow Wolf. Was the hallway to the showers actually a secret passage? Was there a room hidden behind the drink cases? No, there wasn’t. This was just a way to pass the time while I waited for Chuck. But, browsing those aisles, it did occur to me that if I were to make a map of my catastrophizing, I would draw a structure rife with obscure hallways and clandestine staircases leading to mysterious compartments that would seem impossibly bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. Basically, I would end up with a blueprint that looked like Convergence Station, or the House of Eternal Return, or Omega Mart.

This is the most hopeful thing I can claim about immersive art. If I squint, I can see Meow Wolf’s labyrinthian spaces as forms that make intelligible our experiences of fragmentation, but also offer unlikely paths of connection. Just as the flip side of anxiety is excitement, the flip side of catastrophizing is an experience of the world’s fullness. To immerse oneself is to express a desire for that fullness, which was why I had gone on this trip.

No wonder immersive art is all the rage. No wonder our immersive spaces are so ill-matched to our desires. Despite Meow Wolf’s compulsion to impose explanatory narratives, each location manages to dramatize our proximity to the enormous, interrelated crises we face—crises of work, of climate collapse, and of our care for one another. They meet us where we are, in our lives mediated by hyperobjects, and in the acute failure of old myths.

In each iteration, Meow Wolf accomplishes this not by representing these crises directly, but by metonymizing our relationship to them. If anything remains important about Meow Wolf now that it has entered into increasingly glib, franchised expressions, it’s this. The old way was to stand before the shimmer of the Grand Canyon while the atmosphere filled with carbon. The new way is to climb inside that shimmer, and to figure out how to live with the pollution, if not what to do about it. I’m not saying any of the Meow Wolfs I visited accomplish this. I’m just saying, upon reflection, that I found their spaces unique in how they relate to our current states of catastrophe, and because of this they make it more possible to imagine immersive artforms that go beyond hawking the synthetic feeling of discovery, and lead instead to the apprehension of new futures. If I ever hear of such a place, I will email the PR rep and ask for complimentary tickets.

JACK CHRISTIAN is the author of the poetry collections Family System (Center for Literary Publishing / U Colorado Press) and Domestic Yoga (Groundhog Poetry Press). His recent essays have appeared in ArtForum, Cleveland Review of Books, and Diagram.