In 2004, a group of people walk out of a bar in Wallace Idaho, drink in hand, stroll out to the middle of the street, and declare to themselves “This is the center of the Universe”. That makes complete sense to me. I’ve had some of the greatest and worst epiphanies in bars just like that one. At the time, every single one of them made perfect sense.
The Center of the Universe is a manhole cover in Wallace, Idaho simply because it is.
Since then it’s been flocked to, posted, and selfied to death (guilty), reported on, over-intellectualized and occasionally mocked. But to do so, you have to get there first. That’s the hard part. To get there you have to travel along I-90 through the mountains in northern Idaho. When you get to one of the last segments of I-90 to be constructed (part of this story), you get off the interstate and quickly find yourself in one of the nicest-looking old mining towns you’ll ever get to.
The first time I drove through Wallace I had to stop because the place looked so amazing. It’s a tiny town on a curve in the Bitterroot Mountains that pops up out of nowhere. Full of 100+-year-old buildings with plenty of Victorian architecture. The last few times I drove through Wallace I was behind on time and couldn’t stop. But this last time my schedule was more loose. The fun in something like this is finding it without GPS. Not a particularly hard feat as Wallace is pretty small. There are signs, but I wasn’t paying attention to them. I knew it was a manhole cover outside a bar, [probably in an intersection, so I just combed the downtown and within no time I drove right over it.
That made for the “Oh shit! There it is!” Moment. Which is always the fun part about finding roadside attractions.
Over-intellectualizing some good clean fun
Like all good roadside attractions, It’s intentionally a bit of a goof. So I looked into it when I had more time. I’m always interested in the thought that created the thing. Apparently, there’s more to the manhole cover than a drunken idea in a bar. Not to disparage drunken ideas in bars.
The over-intellectualization of it was my favorite part though. Several articles and news segments have compared it to Probabilism. An idea rooted in Greek philosophy that poses an idea, lacking disproof, must be correct. Or in the words of the locals, “Prove it isn’t.”
That word popped up in too many articles about it. The more I looked the more I found it. As it turns out, it’s their main talking point as part of the towns PR.
Probabilism has everything to do with why Wallace, ID went from being self-labeled the Silver Capitol of the World to the Center of the Universe. There’s a deeper story in there I wasn’t expecting that involves big mining companies, the EPA, Superfund sites, lead contamination, Landmarked buildings, and an interstate. “Prove it isn’t” has a lot to do with the fact that the town still exists as it is.
Sucked into a rabbit hole
This went from writing about a neat little roadside attraction to something that made me go, “Hmmm”. If you’re interested in how much more there is to this manhole, I’ll link to some articles. But, in brief, and not in order, Interstate 90 threatened the existence of the town so the community landmarked the town to protect it. Also. the EPA found a massive amount of lead and other heavy metals in the groundwater, resulting from decades of mining, and turned it into a superfund site threatening the town’s existence. The town argued that the EPA couldn’t prove the lead wasn’t already there naturally. Probabilism.
Prove that it isn’t.
I wasn’t planning on getting sucked into a rabbit hole, but I did. I didn’t see any information about this in the short time It took me to park the car, walk over and take pictures, Then again, I wasn’t looking. Diving down the rabbit hole took much of the fun out of it. Now that I’ve looked into a small amount of the backstory I’m ambivalent. Ambivalent enough to look no further. I can see validity in the arguments of both sides. There’s nothing like getting bamboozled into someone’s protest against the EPA.
Maybe there really is a black hole at the center of the universe.
Links (there’s a whole lot more than this, but this is more than enough):
EPA
KNKA Public Radio
Atlas Obscura
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/center-of-the-universe
104.3 Wow Country
https://1043wowcountry.com/the-real-story-behind-wallace-idahos-center-of-the-universe-attraction/
KTVB