There is a mandatory sort of costume to be worn at ‘The Big Boy Saturday Morning Surprise,’ a destination that qualifies as a bed and breakfast, I suppose, but is really something else entirely. The costume consists of thick adult-sized pajamas with the childish ‘BBSMS’ logo printed in rainbow colors across the surface. It’s available in one and two pieces- I choose the latter in order to preserve what little dignity I feel I’m owed at this stage in life.

“And what about your little bun-bun?” The man at the counter speaks in baby-gibberish so thick I can hardly understand him.

I shrug my shoulders. “Can I leave him in the kennel here and come back to walk him?”

“Hmm- you’ve been a good little guy so far. I think it’s okay if he sleeps in your bed just this once okaaay?”

I grit my teeth while the man snips the toe off a ‘BBSMS’ sock and watches me stuff Hector through it. He’s used to wearing little jackets and takes to the process without a fuss. As I stand, I realize why I’ve been intimidated by the man at the counter. He’s higher off the ground than he should be. The desk and everything behind it is slightly large than life-sized. Confronted with it, I feel small.

The man taps his computer and hands me a room key. “Don’t lose this,” he chides, and then his voice grows more adult, “And I have to remind you that ‘The Big Boy Saturday Morning Surprise’ is a non-sexual experience. Please keep it clean in there, young man.”

He’s said this all three times already, which means they get a lot of fetishists or they get a few and they all look like me. I try not to take it personally and drag my pack and my rabbit down a hallway that grows in size as I walk. By the time I reach my room, the door knob is level with my chest and takes two hands to open.

‘Regression is never a good look and ‘The Big Boy Saturday Morning Surprise’ does its customers the courtesy of frosting all outward-facing windows. This, paradoxically, does make it seem a lot more like a sex thing than it is and police will sometimes raid the place and prudes will sometimes protest it and none of them ever seem to know why they’re there or what they’re working to stop.’

From the outside, the ‘BBSMS’ looks like some sort of factory or storage facility- all industrial-sized warehouses painted in sickly pastels. The room explains it- everything inside is sized to make me feel like an eight year old. I have to hoist Hector over my head onto the bed. By the time I’ve clambered up after him, he’s already cozied up against a teddy bear that’s at least as tall as I am.

Seeing him settled, I decide explore the room. There’s a chest of children’s toys in one corner. A closet in the far wall that rattles and groans at odd times but doesn’t open. I’ve been assured by multiple internet reviews that this is a ‘monster simulation’ and presents no real danger, but I keep my distance anyway. I check under the bed to make sure I haven’t gotten one of the nightmare rooms and, finding the coast is clear, I pull myself back up onto the mattress and settle in for an early night.

I wake to the sound of a vacuum somewhere. It’s morning, earlier than I would have liked to be up and I know most of the noises in the ‘BBSMS-’ an excited puppy, a creaking stair, a stormy night, parents arguing- are manufactured and piped in through subtle speakers. I climb down and carry Hector like a baby doll through a winding hallway until I come to the living room where people like me gather around a massive screen, mocked up to look like one of those old boxy TV sets. Cartoons are playing and shortly after I sit down a woman brings me a bowl of cereal and a cup of juice and she ruffles my hair as she turns. It’s all very condescending but the longer I sit the more pleasant it becomes.

Another woman, dressed in a onesie, sits down next to me and starts in on a bowl of cornflakes. An episode of some nineties super kid show ends and I see her push a note toward my leg. It says: WANNA PLAY DOCTOR?

-traveler

‘Every county has a ‘Snow Day Stick,’ though it’s not always a stick and it’s not always for snow days. A ‘Snow Day Stick’ can be anything, really, and it’s often disguised as something mundane, to keep attention at a minimum, or dangerous, to keep people away. A ‘Snow Day Stick’ is more of a concept, than an actual physical object, though its physicality is integral. A ‘Snow Day Stick’ is the item a county uses to measure weather conditions and precipitation.

I suppose we could have led with that.

As the name suggests, most ‘Snow Day Sticks’ used to be some variation of a yardstick standing in a bowl or cup made to capture rain and snow. In the pre-wireless days it was the job of some unlucky gofer to trek out to the thing at regular intervals to take the measurement and they did so with little to no training. It was the perfect example of an ‘it ain’t broke’ system right up until the early internet emerged with its dangerously unmoderated chatrooms and a kid in North Dakota described how he could make snow days by piling the snow just right against the ‘Snow Day Stick.’ The ineptitude or indifference of the county’s gofer and the failure of anybody at the news station to question hard data formed the perfect storm.

As luck would have it, conditions were primed for a storm across the country.

With this pre-lifehack lifehack unleashed on dial-up, the fictional storm ‘Balthazar’ seemed to rage across the nation, cancelling schools in the north for snow and in the south for the likelihood of flash floods though nobody seemed to be experiencing conditions outside of the norm. It was two full days before meteorologists and civilians who had previously convinced themselves that they had just ‘gotten lucky’ started talking to each other and discovered the foul play. ‘Balthazar’ had only ever been the meddling of a couple hundred kids who found their local ‘Snow Day Stick’ in tandem.

The initial reaction to this short-lived phenomenon was the right one. Gofers were trained and some went on to become the meteorologists we know and love today. The story doesn’t end there, however.

The original ‘Snow Day Stick’ story made the rounds again in 2013, drudged up from the depths of the internet and made into a sort of meme-legend. The new generation of troublemakers quickly discovered that the well-trained gofers had been done away with and that most ‘Snow Day Sticks’ had become wireless measuring tools and were, therefore, even easier to fool than humans. ‘Balthazar’ was reborn for a short, 24 hours of meteorological confusion.

These trans-generational shenanigans are why, today, a ‘Snow Day Stick’ may be a statue in town square with subtly marked inches and a graceful pool for collection rainfall. It may be a hollow false tree that hums with electricity under its bark and kills birds unlucky enough to roost there. It may be the foundation of a house, marked inconspicuously with coded graffiti- kept that way: pristine and unfinished. It may be a bird bath that appears in your lawn one day with a menacing chickadee and a thick cord of wires that disappears into the ground nearby. These are the desperate measures that weather stations have taken to fool the youth and to keep ‘Balthazar’ from waking again. They will tell you there is no such thing as a ‘Snow Day Stick-‘ that these measurements are taken by a diverse series of complex tools with multiple redundancies.

Don’t be fooled, young readers. Every county has a ‘Snow Day Stick.’ All you have to do is find it.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘The ‘Hallshead’ chain of highway motels is largely confined to the Midwest, with something of a tail that works its way southeast as far as New Mexico. Like its many cousins, ‘Hallshead’ was at its peak in the days of the nuclear family, catering specifically to the road-weary traveling salesman who, after a day of hauling encyclopedias, would want nothing more than to slide into a warm bath shaped exactly like their own body.

Yes- exactly.

It is the ultimate validation of the masculine ego, the form-fitting bath. This is not the opinion of the author but a sample taken directly from ‘Hallshead’s’ fairly intense advertising campaign, one that centered on the bathtubs and largely ignored any other amenities, including the rooms. Billboards featured illustrations of a man perfectly encased in porcelain, his eyes wide and his genitals graciously censored by a cloud of soap bubbles. The man did not look relaxed. He looked as though he was having a revelation.’

Research suggests that the ‘Hallshead’ franchise went under sometime after this copy of Autumn by the Wayside was published, but a little digging churns up an address in western Minnesota: the ‘Hallshead Motel’ that held out the longest.

Hector and I drive by a few times before I realize what the problem is: the building is gone, or else its so fallen into disrepair that it can no longer be seen from the highway. Once that’s clear, I take a chance on the likeliest exit and, sure enough, find a sun-bleached sign still pointing the way to an old foundation, thick with weeds and rebar.

We’re far enough off the beaten path, by then, that I give Hector the run of the place and he gets to work, chewing down some dandelions that have lasted into autumn and I get to work scouting the place for anything of interest. Near the back, I find a place where a wall has collapsed and I spy one of the motel’s famous tubs underneath. The wood is rotted and light. I’m able to clear it after a few minutes.

The bath is too clean to have been exposed to the elements, though nothing else around me suggests that the collapsed wall was some sort of clever camouflage. It’s a strange make, too, consisting not only of the signature silhouette-style tub for a man about my size, but also a small, oval-shaped basin to the side. I circle the tub and lean forward, trying to align my arm with the arm-shaped indention. My hand slides into it and I feel the ceramic tightening comfortable along my fingers- a perfect fit. It hasn’t occurred to me that I might want to climb into the tub until now.

Something tugs at my jeans an I jump. Hector has found me again and he sniffs curiously at the old wallpaper. I pick him up before he can eat any and have nearly turned away when it hits me. I lower Hector into the basin and his eyes go wide. A perfect fit.

I don’t know if you’re supposed to bathe rabbits. I’ve never given Hector a bath but it seems a shame not to take the opportunity now. A small creek runs behind the foundation- runoff from rain in the mountains, I think. Its cold but Hector doesn’t mind and he emerges from the bath cleaner and calmer than I’ve ever seen him.

-traveler

Among Autumn by the Wayside’s myriad appendices is a section that sets destinations aside and considers, instead, the agencies that try to bring order to the Wayside and the factions that frustrate them. I’ve memorized this section to the best of my ability because if somebody is going to give me trouble, it is inevitably a member of some loose organization that claims a moral authority in the realm of traveler behavior.

And, look. I’m not opposed to following rules- even arbitrary ones. I just need to know what they are ahead of time.

This brings me to ‘The CBA’ or ‘The Cleanest Bathroom in America,’ in name if not in title.

‘The Wayside is generous in it’s use of the word ‘best’ and, for the most part, the American traveler is not so bothered by a little roadside hyperbole if it means cutting to the heart of what a business believes is its finest quality. Those who do take umbrage might be members of the fringe group ‘Actual Best’ which, like any standard-setting agency, is respected or reviled depending upon how closely one’s own tastes align with theirs.

‘Actual Best,’ is something of a mystery, having no digital presence whatsoever and a scant trail of physical records, mostly in the form of the ‘Actual Best’ award certificates. Unlike most standardizations, the certificates are not annual. When a restaurant advertising the best cheeseburger in America starts to cut corners, an agent of ‘Actual Best’ will appear to remove the certificate by any means necessary. The swiftness with which these agents appear after a colleague is arrested or killed has led some to believe ‘Actual Best’ is more a possessing spirit than an organization of actual people but, like most crack-pot theories, very little can be done to verify or debunk the notion.’

‘The CBA’ exists in the back of a large, but otherwise unassuming gas station. It’s certified by ‘Actual Best-‘ a fact that’s hard to miss given an ad campaign that crosses the borders of two states and leans hard into bathroom cleanliness where, really, they must do most of their business in gas and esoteric jerky meats. It all makes a little more sense when one realizes that internal signs for ‘The CBA’ forgo a straight shot to meander through the aisles. The gas station, unnamed as far as I can tell, doesn’t have a lot else going for it.

Hector and I follow the signs for full immersion in the experience and also to work up the need to pee which, I suppose, amounts to the same thing. I gather a candy bar here and a small jar of pickled eggs there and find a basket holding system near the restrooms for people like me who might, otherwise, remember that they came to use the restroom and put everything back.

Things go wrong fairly quickly after that.

My first clue should have been the separation of ‘The CBA’ from other clean-looking but mostly mundane restrooms. I assumed this was for those who wanted to skip the line and were okay with a restroom that was slightly less than the cleanest in the nation. My second clue should have been the speed at which the line moved through ‘The CBA.’ No bathroom line moves that quickly. The third, fourth, and all clues after that were likely included in the guidelines posted outside the door, which I failed to read because a spritz of pine-scented bathroom deodorant spooks Hector such that he becomes an undulating leather sack of rabbit bones, trying to work his way from my hands. I have good intentions going in, thinking that of all the rules, unwritten or otherwise, those who curated ‘The CBA’ probably wouldn’t want stray animals milling about on their immaculate ceramic.

Hector calms a bit inside ‘The CBA.’ It’s hard not to. ‘The CBA’s’ cleanliness presents like a tangible static. It’s difficult to look at- bright and overwhelming and smelling of aerosol and asthma inhaler. Air purifiers hum quietly in the corners. Calm music plays overhead. The door closes behind me with a sharp click and the exit sign beside it lights, pressing me to act or get a move on.

I stumble forward.

The water in the toilet sparkles cleaner, no doubt, than the mildewy sludge I have sloshing about in my bottle. That maybe should have been my final clue. ‘The CBA’ is too clean to have seen regular use.

Something crashes outside, startling me mid-pee. I crane my neck and press harder, having read somewhere that it wasn’t healthy to stop- not for anything. A second crash aligns with an impact on the entry door. Frantic knocking follows. Someone is shouting on the other side, their voice muffled.

Operating on sheer habit, I shout “Occupied!” and zip up and then, probably unwisely, check my hair in the mirror.

The hair check ends up being in my favor for, at that same moment, both doors collapse inward with a press of bodies. I end up behind the exit as gas station employees attempt to wrestle the ‘Actual Best’ certificate from a woman that I have to assume is an agent of the titular group. As soon as they have her pinned, a huge man flings himself inside, dogpiling the woman and the employees alike and snatching the frame from all of them. He’s grabbed from below before he can retreat and the fight carries on.

Hector and I slip out before any more ‘Actual Best’ agents materialize and it’s then that I notice the fairly large ‘For Display Purposes Only’ warning above ‘The CBA.’

So… my bad, I guess. Undoubtedly my bad.

-traveler