The thought occurred to me last weekend, driving down Interstate 10 south of Tucson, that it's easy to live in a cocoon. Isolated in a car with the windows sealed, the air cranked, and the radio booming, the desert becomes a silent abstraction speeding pa st like a wraparound movie.

My friend Dave and I were enjoying I Want to Tell You, the tape O.J. Simpson recorded in early 1995 while still in prison. There was a seductive naivet­ about it, O.J. relating his trials like a man suddenly awakened, emerging from his own cocoon of super stardom and marveling at the Common Man's world. "For the first time in my life," he sighs sadly, "I realized there was racism in America."

The combined surreality of desert comfort and O.J.'s bewilderment, I'm convinced, is what ultimately lead us to exit the highway and visit The Thing. I say this because it's the sort of thing we wouldn't normally do - delay our plans to appreciate a local tourist attraction.

The Thing has to be the one of the most publicized attractions along Arizona roadways, joining like-minded attractions such as Meramac Caverns in Missouri and the Hollywood Wax Museum in California. Scores of yellow billboards span what seems like hundred s of miles, "THE THING?" emblazoned in blood-red horror, like the posters to the 1951 horror film.

We quickly wrapped ourselves in cocoons of anticipation and pulled into The Thing's parking lot.

Granted, the location wasn't spectacular, but we figured this was part of their plan to lull vacationers into a false state of comfort. It's an old trick used in the movies: build suspense, provide a false release, and spring the real horror. The Thing wa s located in a cheap tourist store connected to a Dairy Queen. We knew the owners thought this innocuous setup would trick us, but it didn't. Bring on the terrors, we thought.

We entered the store, paid our 75 cent admission, stepped through a wooden door that resembled a mine shaft entrance, and found ourselves standing in someone's junky backyard. Tall weeds half-obscured rusty contraptions scattered around a mobile home. I t hought we had opened the wrong door, but the oversized yellow footprints leading to a gleaming shed convinced us The Thing lay ahead.

The shed was an open-ended shelter filled with several exhibits. The first was a dusty 1937 Rolls Royce, badly in need of waxing. Above it was a large placard: "This antique car was believed to have been used by Adolf Hitler. THE THING is, it can't be pro ved."

For a brief moment, my brain attempted to roll upside down and wave tendrils in defense. Speechless, my gaze followed the footprints leading outside the shed, and I decided there was some hope the automobile wasn't really The Thing itself. Humanity is an ugly creature sometimes.

What followed were three successive sheds piled with old junk posing as museum exhibits. Garish wooden sculptures of medieval torture scenes, a deteriorating covered wagon, broken rifles, rusted swords, a crooked antique bed with a new mattress thrown on top, and an assortment of old bowls and vases lined the unswept floor. We were the only visitors in sight.

Now, despite our initial enthusiasm, we really hadn't expected a world-shaking revelation of wonder. But we had expected some sight of note. If The Thing "museum" was a monument to anything, it was a monument to consumer ridicule, the signs laughing at us in mocking glee: "This wagon was really THE THING in 18..."

In the third shed we wearily stumbled upon the actual, indisputable, 100 percent genuine The Thing. It sat encased in a glass booth, a sign above offering theories of its origins.

"I wonder if it's actually real?" Dave asked. It really didn't matter.

We walked back through the trinket store of plastic Kachina dolls and orange water pistols, got back in our car and drove back onto the highway in silence, feeling the bumps and shifts of the road more fully than before, connected again to reality after l eaving our cocoons at The Thing.