‘Curated, ostensibly, by the Rangers and run by the most bored man in the American South, ‘The Sunburn Experience’ is one of many cautionary adventures presented by the Wayside. In typical Wayside fashion, ‘The Experience’ draws inspiration from older fables in that its moral is ambiguous at best but delivered with enough trauma that one can’t help but recall the wisdom it imparts, subconsciously or otherwise.’

It should be said, somewhere, that I also visit the more mainstream national and state parks as I bounce between oceans. It would be impossible not to visit them, sometimes, they being a source of clean bathrooms and comfortable benches and water fountains in landscapes otherwise parched. More than that, though, I enjoy visiting them. It’s a worthy system, run by enthusiastic people. I have annual passes just about everywhere I go: a better value for me than most.

But I stand out at these parks.

Traveling has instilled the sort of paranoia in me that makes others afraid- a paranoia that doesn’t ever really wane but that certainly intensifies in environments that I have been conditioned to find dangerous. National and state parks, having much in common with their rejected Wayside cousins, are enough to trigger that response. The response is enough to agitate others, an ancient raising of hackles. I find myself tailed, sometimes, by well-meaning staff. Mostly, I find myself alone.

All this to say that I am in my element when I step into ‘The Sunburn Experience’ because it is a Wayside destination and I am already waiting for the other shoe to drop when a blast of UV radiation strikes me in the face as I open the door. I recoil and swing around a corner where I find the restrooms and a water fountain.

“Sorry,” a man’s voice calls, “That’s been acting up. It’s… hold on. It’s off now.”

I pull my sleeve over my hand and reach around the corner at head-height. I am promptly high-fived by the owner of the voice.

“All clear, like I said.”

‘The Sunburn Experience’ could very well be one of the smaller state park sites, consisting mainly of a single large room with several quick exhibits. Immediately opposite the door is a counter with four hatches, each increasingly difficult to look at for all the light blazing from underneath. Other displays are less… vibrant.

“Gotcha good,” the man says.

He’s not wrong. A mirror near the glowing hatches reveals a four-inch square of raw, pink skin centered on my nose.

“What are these for if not this?” I ask, gesturing to my face.

The man presses a button on one of the hatches and it swings open again. I shield my eyes and see him hold his own hand in front of the display. He shows me his arm when it closes- tan, perhaps, but unburned.

“We’ve got a selection of sunblocks to trial over there,” he says, pointing to something that looks like a soft-serve machine, “Some sunglasses… These are just for experimenting. So, they’re for what happened to your face, only you expect it.”

“Seems dangerous.”

“Lotta lobsters walking out of here,” he shrugs, “But they know better next time.”

The man looks about the room, betraying a certain pride that makes me like him a little more. I follow as he walks to another wall.

“Over here we’ve got our timeline- folks who start with this normally don’t get caught by the box-light. That’s a fresh burn- still hot.”

The timeline consists of several human backs embedded in the display, ranging from bright red to dry and peeling. The man presses his hand into the first and we watch the shape of it slowly fade from normal, to pinkish, and finally back to crimson.

“Try it out.”

I begin to spell my name with my finger and the display shifts uncomfortably.

“Sheesh, man,” he says, “Take it easy on the interns.”

I recoil and he laughs in a way that makes it difficult to tell if he’s being serious. He leads me past the timeline, casually pulling a strip of peeled skin from the last display, and toward a glass cage, the contents of which are a relative model of the desert that surrounds us.

Inside is a single, shaved rabbit, its skin motley with tanning. Above it are a variety of filters and, above those, an impressively large, thankfully-inactive lamp.

“Seems up your alley based on your performance back there,” he says, “Dial in a pattern on the display and get to toasting.”

The man taps through several animal prints and holds down a large, red button. Blinding light fills the little cage for a second or two before he lets off. The rabbit has become faintly tiger-striped and its bowl of celery has wilted.

“Hector!” the man calls through the glass, “Looking ferocious!”

The rabbits eyes are pale white. It picks lethargically at the celery.

‘The Sunburn Experience’ has no real security to speak of, but, upon shimmying open the door in the dead of night, I do forget about the malfunctioning counter and stumble blindly through the dark for several minutes before my sight returns.

Hector is a hefty, leather lump: naturally calm or tormented past a point of traumatic serenity. I spend exactly five minutes trying to convince him to wander off into the brush before admitting to myself that I would survive in the desert longer than the broken creature at my feet. He goes back into a comfortable kennel and the kennel goes on the back of the bike, insulated against wind to the best of my ability. I’ll look up shelters when I’m back in cell range.

‘The Sunburn Experience’ burns to the ground, not so strange considering the high intensity bulbs and the faulty displays. The story is picked up in the local papers and, by then, Hector and I are miles away.

-Traveler

A thin sliver of cell service reaches me at just the right moment and, rather than risk losing it for a more convenient pullover, I balance the motorcycle on the far edge of the shoulder and wait for the map to load. ‘The Hair Dump’ is not a tourist friendly place- not hidden, exactly, but purposefully unadvertised to prevent gawkers and fetishists from hanging around the front and trying to take pictures or collecting stray hair.

I confirm where I’m headed and pocket my phone in time to see a brunette tumbleweed flop lazily down the center of the highway.

Rumor has it that bribing one’s way into ‘The Hair Dump’ isn’t particularly hard, but I think I’ll content myself with the view from the gate.

‘One assumes the government could manufacture a reasonable explanation for its federally funded collection of disposed human hair but it chooses not to. Instead, it all but refuses to acknowledge the existence of ‘The Hair Dump’ and speaks in threatening legalese to those who broadcast its location.’

A day later I stand over the bike in the parking lot of a department store, watching it shudder and choke and wondering what I could have possibly done to the thing. A man, loading groceries into his SUV, breaks away from his family and approaches, wordlessly kicking the exhaust with his boot. The pipe coughs out a baseball-sized clump of hair: jet black with blonde highlights. It expands slightly and rolls off in the breeze.

“What it is to be young,” the man chuckles, watching the thing depart.

Now, when I think of aging, I think of that little ball of hair and I wonder what wisdom the man had hoped to impart.

-traveler

Out in the far west of Minnesota, hills and forests settle to flatland and, eventually, to pavement. A mile out, the air becomes thick with the chemical smell of cracked asphalt but I recognize ‘The Lotland’ from a longer ways off, the autumn’s unseasonable warmth releasing heat shivers into the atmosphere above. A multisensory mirage of a mirage, ‘The Lotland’ doesn’t look the way it should from a distance, but it doesn’t look like anything else either.

‘The well-traveled will have heard numerous variations on the American gold paradise, the recessive specter, no doubt, of its violent colonizers (their lust for treasure, their violent means). An exhaustive study of its supposed manifestations would fill several novels, suffice to say that the great American jackpot is not a where so much as it is a will-o-wisp: shiny, ever-distant, and ultimately fatal. The truth of the matter is that humanity understood the price of gold from the days of human sacrifice- wealth arrives at the expense of others. For all our great humanitarian leaps, ‘civilization’ is really just the understanding that the requisite death need not be a spectacle.

All this to say that ‘The Lotland’ is famous only for being one of the few remaining question marks on the map. It is a paved wasteland so vast that its peculiar heat signature plays tricks with satellite imagery and so distant that no locality can be pinned with ownership. The terrain is unapologetically grim, such a scab on the earth that most life is instinctively repulsed. Those few that can’t help but pick at it are sure that a parking lot so massive must serve something equally immense at the center and they seek this thing, disappearing with such confidence that their boisterous mortality furthers the legend- a series of celebratory sending-offs and muted, off-screen deaths.’

There is an aspect of me that is drawn to these sorts of things- a curiosity that supersedes health. Luckily, I’ve survived long enough to recognize the tendency and to mitigate it. Perhaps unluckily, the mitigation has taken the form of walking up to a theoretical point-of-no-return rather than crossing it entirely and so, in approaching ‘The Lotland,’ I am constantly performing the subtle calculations of the impoverished traveler, checking and re-checking mileage and gas and water and food, considering, even, the slope leading toward my destination and how it will make coasting out impossible. All this tedious worry to avoid what is abundantly clear: the safest course of action is to avoid the wasteland entirely.

I park at the turnoff and make a few final notes. I chalk the gas gauge, erect a small flag from sticks and a bright orange cap I picked out from a gas station discount bin. I set off into ‘The Lotland’ and immediately understand why a person might lose themselves here: freedom.

The stretch of interstate previous to ‘The Lotland’ is a single straight shot, the landscape a repeating cartoon backdrop and the sky an unbroken blue. The interstate system as a whole is a series of relatively straight lines and, given a fixed destination, the choices one makes there are mostly arbitrary – there is, at most, the short way, the scenic way, and sometimes the detour. Arguably, ‘The Lotland’ presents two choices: inward or outward but, in practice, the choices are endless.

There are lines painted along the pavement of ‘The Lotland’ that present guidelines for traffic and parking, but they quickly lose meaning as I attempt to keep my exit ‘flag’ directly behind me. When the orange cap disappears in the shimmering distance, I stop for a drink of water and try to discern where the lines would have me go, finding they mean less than I had even considered. Some branch in a pattern that appears meaningful and others would guide a vehicle in endless circles. ‘Exit’ is painted on the ground in several places, each arrow pointing another direction which is true, in the sense that there must be technical exits on all sides, but dangerous in that several sides of ‘The Lotland’ must open onto fields where cars and motorcycles would struggle, further stranding the lost.

The map on my phone fails to load and the GPS struggles to make contact with its network, both situations I expected. Two old compasses twitch in the sun before agreeing on magnetic north. I mark the position of the disappeared flag and hop back on the bike. Plenty of fuel yet.

After an hour of driving in a relatively straight line I begin to notice cigarette butts on the ground and it isn’t until I stop to verify their reality that I realize how dizzy I’ve become with ‘The Lotland’s’ mirage. I stumble and stretch and close my eyes against the sun for a while. The butts are real and scattered about like frozen insects, occasionally turning over in the wind. I re-check the compasses and find that I’ve been veering east- a slight mistake that, over an hour, has probably put me a few miles off-course. I correct and remind myself to pay closer attention, staring out in all directions with my hand a visor to my forehead like a wide salute to ‘The Lotland’s’ trickery.

I find a skeleton after an hour- a skeleton car and a skeleton driver, both dead for a long time. To the extent that I allow myself to investigate I recognize that everything useful has already been taken. The last item of interest is a chalked compass on the dash that disagrees with both of mine entirely. Not a good sign. A sign so ominous, in fact, that I begin to consider turning back early and am congratulating myself on the personal growth when I notice the shadow of a structure in the man’s rearview mirror. Something is out there and it quickly overcomes my budding sense of caution.

The structure is a long way off and not at all in the direction I was planning to go. I’m sweating underneath my jacket by the time I cover the distance and confirm what I had begun to expect with a sense of both disappointment and awe:

It’s a parking structure, casting a long honey-combed shadow across ‘The Lotland’ and the top of which disappears into the wavering blue sky. I stop outside, again, to check my compasses and fuel. Rough calculations suggest that I can either delve further into the heart of ‘The Lotland’ or explore the lower levels of the structure. Attempting both would be a half-measure at best, a dangerous stretching of resources at worst.

When I lift the cracked visor of my helmet I spot movement from within the structure- cloth or tarp billows intermittently from a space ten or twelve stories above me. That more or less settles it.

I quickly find that the misleading nature of the painted lines take a dangerous form within the structure. They’re easy to ignore on flat terrain but the spiraling climb of the structure calls upon so many previously ingrained habits that I’m soon lulled into following them. The first time it happens I realize I’ve been driving between the same two levels over and over, following ‘further parking’ signs up and down needlessly.

A waste of fuel.

The second time is the first indication that the lines are random only to disguise occasional malevolence. Up until the eighth or ninth floor, the guides suggest a relatively straightforward path until the intersections become switched. Past that, the base of the structure narrows and an inner wall falls away, revealing a deep cement shaft at the center. The lines begin to divert traffic just before the proper intersection, a detour that passes between two pillars which obstruct the driver’s view to what lies beyond them. The new path leads directly into the center shaft- a swift death I avoid only for riding in the opposite lane (my attempt to break the rhythmic stupor of the place). By then, the darkness of the shaft is too deep for any of my light sources to penetrate fully, but the smell of spilt gasoline rises up from the shadows there.

I take the next several floors slowly and eventually reach the billowing tarp, finding the abandoned remains of a shelter. Another car, in better condition, looks out onto ‘The Lotland’ and somebody rests in the backseat- a body, I assume, because the doors are locked and the blanket-covered form is dusty and skeletal. It’s hard to tell from the empty cans of food and beer, from the semi-permanent tarp walls and the improvised furniture, whether this woman chose to stay or became stranded. The cardinal directions are spray-painted along the pavement and differ in their opinion of north both with my compasses and with the broken compass from the previous car.

Not a good sign.

New calculations suggest this is the end of the road for me. Assuming I coast easily down the structure and make it back to the hat/flag in something of a straight line I should have gas to get me back to the nearest station. Hopefully, by then, the mystery of ‘The Lotland’ will be distant enough that I don’t feel compelled to return.

It’s damned hot, though, so I check my watch and wait until the sun begins to set before heading out, sharing space with the woman for a while and helping myself to an ancient soda.

When I do finally roll out of the structure I see a light further into ‘The Lotland’ and this is where Shitholes saves me. I remember the will-o-wisp and keep my back to it, finding that the tempting light is as good as my makeshift flag was to start.

It represents the exact wrong direction.

-traveler

Facing the yellowlight windows of a rural bar/diner, I come to the conclusion that I may be consuming the best basket of fries I have ever yet had. Cooked evenly. Well-salted. Even the portioning is right- enough to avoid dissatisfaction, not so much that it congeals into a ball of potato and grease inside my stomach. The trouble, of course, is that good and bad french fries are so close to the same for me (which is to say my bar is set so incredibly low that anything constructed of root vegetable and fried will earn points) that I am likely to lose this moment to my lifetime’s fry eating. As it stands, I don’t remember eating a particularly bad set of fries and, until this moment, I don’t remember a basket of fries that has so left an impression.

I should write it down somewhere.

A shadow passes over me: a vehicle rambling down the highway outside. Six men and four women slowly churn their feet at the base of a rolling bar. They look exhausted, hungover. One of the men anchors himself on the seat and vomits out onto the pavement. A woman steers from behind and a man in the center begins shaking a new cocktail. Hearing the rattling contraption outside, the owner/cook of the restaurant I watch from steps out to the porch to take a look for himself. He spits casually into the gravel parking lot and shakes his head.

It’s a party bike, hundreds of miles away from any city that should support one. I’ve been waiting to tick this one off my list- not at all an easy thing to find and, knowing my luck, an easy enough thing to lose. I stuff the rest of the fries into my mouth and wipe salt and oil into my jeans, passing the man on the porch his money on my way out.

I make a mental note to write about the fries.

‘With no official criteria with which to serve as a diagnostic guide, there is a good deal of disagreement regarding what constitutes a case of ‘The Boonies.’ It manifests mainly as a sudden, irrational resolve to remain on the Wayside- a sudden, insatiable need to remain in transit. What sets it apart from similar disorders (and the reason for which it is not formally recognized) is that it is as likely to occur in groups as it is in the individual.

A family, returning home from a visit to the country, will miss their exit, will miss dozens afterward. Night will fall and they’ll shake their heads and pat themselves on the back for their clever spontaneity, paying for a room in a hotel and vowing to return after continental breakfast. They’ll pile into the car the next morning and keep going. A city bus full of people will drive through the downtown of a faraway capital, the passengers thinking occasionally of signaling for a stop, but never reaching for the cord. The most obvious cases are those that occur among strangers practicing strange modes of transport, which is why the public understanding of ‘The Boonies’ is so tied to the party bike. These glorified refreshment stands are palatable, if not annoying, in the balmy, slow-streeted cities where they originate. But to see one attempt a sloping interstate exit? To see one shaking delicately on an unpaved forest road? These stand out among the lost families asking for their picture to be taken with unremarkable vistas and among lone motorcyclists, anonymous beneath their helmets and shades. These are the cases that make the occasional headline.

And so, ‘The Boonies’ is a disease associated with the party bike, where a group of four to sixteen people pedal together into the great American unknown, sustaining themselves on the sugar and fruit of expensive cocktails and never needing to stop for gas. Upon spying them, consider passing silently and with signals. They mean no harm except that which they inflict upon themselves.’

The party bus has made impressive progress by the time I catch up. I realize, late, that hovering behind will make my gawking obvious, so I limit my study to only a few minutes of ‘will he pass, or won’t he?’ They’ve been at it for a while, I’d think. Every bar attendee sports chiseled calves and a sickly, distended stomach that hangs vaguely between their thighs. The same man throws up again, a spray I avoid easily enough.

They’re straining, I realize, because the highway is sloping mildly upward, an ascent I wouldn’t have registered except that as I shift down I see a sort of terrible relief cross their faces. The sort of relief that breaks a person.

-traveler

It’s not often that I stumble upon something strange about the Wayside that Shitholes has neglected to warn me about. More often than not, it’s a case of my overlooking some chapter or subsection of the guide (though I have not yet ruled out that it may be growing in complexity, the font becoming smaller and denser, the pages splitting toward impossible fractals as I sleep). There must be things it doesn’t know, however, and there are certainly things so similar and numerous that they are condensed into generalized write-ups. Take, for instance, a series of signs I begin to see as I straddle the border between Wyoming and Colorado:

“Fresh-Squeezed Lemonade: $100”

The signs are childishly hand-painted and I don’t think much of the missing decimal until a later sign clarifies:

“Lemonade by the Glass: One Hunderd Dollars.” [sic]- if it isn’t already obvious.

So now, as I lean against an already-leaning fencepost across the street from a grim looking child with a jug of iced liquid, flipping through my haunted book and considering the current slimness of my wallet, I have to wonder: is this under

‘The Wayside houses expertise in the way that a trench sometimes houses a fine, name-brand sweatshirt, which is to say, expertise sometimes falls to the Wayside in the same way a newly purchased garment may be sucked, unnoticed, through the open window of a car on the way back from the store. It is a rare occurrence and tragic in that most things fallen to trenches are lost to the muck- an meaningless waste.

If one is to find a ‘Lost Connoisseur’ along the side of the road, consider that they are among the scavengers lucky enough to enjoy its foreign opulence while likely contributing to its decay, a maggot in a thing so fresh it may be mistaken for sleeping.’

or,

‘Popular media has trained the American public to read benefit in hardship, suggesting, all else being equal, that a difficult path may be more righteous than a simple one. While sometimes true in nature, the shortcut is often worn less for a reason, be it danger or difficulty outweighing the convenience. There is reason behind the Ranger’s insistence that a traveler stay on the path.

Predatory aspects of the Wayside have capitalized on this mismatched perception of trial and consequence, creating ‘The Obvious Wrong Choice,’ a situation or service so clearly malicious that it becomes intriguing enough to inspire deviation. These ‘Choices’ rarely last long, either producing enough survivors that more specific portents begin to spread, or so few survivors that the areas surrounding ‘The Obvious Wrong Choice’ are consumed by overgrowth.’

I look up from my reading at the child and watch it grimly stir the contents of the jug. I smile. It looks up at me in response, unsmiling.

Stirring.

-traveler