The Meteor and a Boy in a Batman Suit

After we drove to Abernathy, we found a nice little place to pitch our tent and set up camp for the night. Early the next morning, a kid ran by wearing a Batman costume. He stopped and said, "I'm just on my way to get gas for my bat car." I said, "Your...your bat car?" He said, "Do you have a bat car, too?" I said,"No, we don't have a bat car." The boy said, "Why don't you?" I said, "There's no such thing as a bat car." "I have a bat car and it's little and it's blue," the boy said. I said, "Well, I'm here to search for a treasure. Do you want to come?" "No thanks," he said. Then I said, "Why not? It's full of adventure." He said, "But, I've got bad guys to fight, so I better get that gas now." And that was the last I saw of the boy in the Batman suit.

Dad cooked us breakfast over the campfire and then we were off to look around and see what we could find. Mom and I drove north of the town. When we got five miles north, we went east a little bit and then I saw a hole in the ground. I said, "Stop the truck! I see a hole." Mom stopped the truck and we ran to this spot where something had obviously crashed there a while back. "Mom, do you think this is the spot where the Golden Wing crashed?" She said, "It sure looks like it. Let's see if we can find any pieces of the plane." I hadn't been looking for too long when I found something. "Mom, come look at this. I found a strange looking rock." Mom ran over to me. She looked at it and said, "I don't think this is a rock. I think this is a piece of a meteor." "Oh," I said. "That would explain this big hole in the ground." Mom suggested we go back to town and see if we could find someone that might know something about it.

We got back to the tent and showed dad. He said, "I bet someone at the courthouse can give us some information." So, we went to the courthouse and a nice lady told us to go talk to the librarian. The librarian found us a newspaper article that told the story of when a meteor landed there in 1882. It said that one night some Quakers were going home from church and saw a bright flash in the sky. But, they never found anything. About a year later, a cowboy found a huge meteor, broken in two pieces, about a foot from the hole. So, it must have hit and then bounced. No one moved it until 1892, when Mr. R.A. McWhorter moved to the area and moved it by wagon to his dugout. He used it for a washstand. Mom said that is a place where they put water, soap and a towel so you could wash your hands and face before you went in the house. A few years later, Mr. McWhorter sent a little piece of it to a museum in Washington to see if they would buy it from him. They wrote him a letter and told him to wrap the meteor in two sacks and write "iron ore" on the sack. They sent him $500 for it! A friend of his went to the museum a few years later and there was the meteor with Mr. McWhorter's name on it.

So, we didn't find the Golden Wing yet, but we did read a really interesting story about a meteor. The search continues.