It takes about three days before I admit to Hector, and to myself, that I may have gotten us lost. It doesn’t really sink in until that evening, when I’ve finished rolling strips of old billboard vinyl into tight logs for a fire we can’t enjoy too closely without inhaling psychedelic adhesive fumes. This is what being lost is: assuming everything will sort itself out around one too many bends. More specifically, being lost in ‘Billboard Hell’ is allowing one too many signs to guide you in the wrong direction. It’s second-guessing the intent of an advertisement for a burger joint that should just be five minutes away left- going right because you suspect some sort of guerilla reverse psychology is at work. It’s tearing through a billboard to find yourself facing a second, smaller sign for the same company, congratulating you for ‘thinking outside the box’ and offering its services in sign repair.

We have another couple days of food. Probably a day’s worth of water unless it rains.

There is an engine running, somewhere, and we head that direction in the morning. There’s nowhere else to go.

‘It stands to reason that, because Vermont maintains a state-wide ban on billboards, there must exist a concentration of billboards somewhere else in the country to offset the deficit. This is the less-than-scientific explanation for ‘Billboard Hell,’ which stretches over several states but seems to be confined mainly to the rust belt. Where it exists exactly is hard to say because there are a lot of places in the US that might qualify as a billboard hell and the ‘Billboard Hell’ is always shedding old roots and branching ever forward.

The Rangers suggest travelers wishing to avoid ‘Billboard Hell’ remain within the boundaries of Vermont and ignore any signs that might be trying to coax them across the border.’

­-traveler

‘‘The Fridge-Magnet Safe-Hold’ (or FMSH) is relatively new to the Wayside and was a small, unadvertised venture until 2022 when fictional mob boss Tom Get (of the series, ‘Getmen’) uttered a now signature phrase: ‘sleeping with the fridges.’ This euphemism, seemingly misspoken, resolved itself at a scene filmed on-site at the ‘FMSH,’ in which Tom reveals that the business serves as a convenient way to ‘keep the fuzz from taking hold of ‘em’ (itself, a colloquialism for police investigation, not an allusion to mold). The episode proved popular enough that the ‘FMSH’ tactic for hiding bodies featured several more times- right up until a real body was discovered there.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves.

‘The Fridge-Magnet Safe-Hold is a fridge dump and magnet-storage solution all in one. It was founded with an understanding that many American families are upgrading to refrigerators that, through shape or material, are unable to hold the magnets that had become sentimental on previous models. For a small fee (discounted with the simultaneous donation of a fridge) a family can rent fridge space in a building that is, in all other ways, your average storage beehive. Units consist of a single fridge behind a clear plexiglass door so that the stored magnets can be viewed but not touched. For five dollars, anyone can walk the halls of the FMSH and admire the collections housed within except on Wednesdays and Saturday, when entry is reserved for unit holders only. This is likely when most people take a moment out of their week to store figurative skeletons in their closets, these fridges being mostly airtight and just inconspicuous enough to allow for the storage of petty secrets. The expectation for these skeletons to be ‘figurative’ is why the dead body felt like such a party foul to those who used the place as intended.’

Hector and I arrive at ‘The FMSH’ on a Thursday- a slow day, I’m told. Those other visitors I see around me tend to slot into a few categories: the true crime enthusiasts, the ‘Getmen’ fans, the fringe art students, and the miscellaneous drop-ins, like myself. The true-crime and Getman folks are crowded around a rather drab looking display in the northeast portion of ‘The FMSH.’ I stand near the back for a while before I understand why: the stench.

Something is rotting in the fridge.

A man, a tour guide I assume, has drawn the attention of the crowd to the plastic letter magnets on display, there, suggesting very generally that theoretical hitmen might (and fictional hitmen certainly would) leave coded messages in letters like these to ensure their fellows in crime might understand the nature of what is inside. The crowd eats this up, some trying to decipher the magnets, others asking if it might be wise to call the police, secretly hoping, I’m sure, to be on-site when a new discovery is made.

The guide deflects the latter suggestion in a way that makes me think whatever group he’s associated with has filled the fridge with meat for effect. The crowd moves on.

A group of children eat lunch at the opposite end of the property, taking advantage of an otherwise empty hallway. I step over and through them and despite my rush, despite my worn-ragged clothes and body, they stop me to ask question about Hector, who eats his fill of sandwich lettuce and baby carrots while the chaperones grimace nearby.

In a lull that threatens to be awkward, I ask about the drawing of a house on one of the nearby fridges and soon find myself on a miniature tour of schoolwork. This hallway has been rented to the school, it seems, and the children post their exemplars here for viewing. They seem proud, and rightfully so, especially given such a strange audience as me and my rabbit. I go and spoil things at the end, though. I suggest, to one of the teachers, that if I were going to hide a body in any fridge, these make a lot more sense than the rest.

-traveler

‘‘The Free Mattress Dump,’ ‘The Spring Brambles,’ or, in some circles, ‘The Tetanus Garden,’ is a thousand mattresses decaying in an otherwise abandoned Connecticut field. The seed of this strange crop was planted when a local farmer, disgusted at the surreptitious furniture dumping of his neighbors, offered a place to toss mattresses right where everyone would see them daily: on his plot of land next to the freeway. This shaming tactic failed spectacularly, the farmer having underestimated the number of old mattresses that were stored in houses for the perceived cost-prohibitiveness or geographical inaccessibility of local dumps. Too stubborn to admit he was wrong, the field has been lost to the mattresses.

Some say there is a treasure in the fields and that the farmer’s mistake was actually a ploy to frustrate would-be thieves and their amateur metal detectors. This is likely half-true by way of the country’s overall saturation with hidden treasure. This is a nation that buries things- valuable and dangerous. This is a country that sometimes forgets which is buried where.’

I don’t have the money to board Hector again so he comes with me into ‘The Spring Brambles’ and, being careful from all his many years of blindness, passes between the rusted springs without much issue. I don’t fare so well, which makes me thankful for the booster shots I sometimes pick up at free clinics and for the haphazard mess of papers in my bag, among which I found proof of a semi-recent tetanus vaccine and a suggestion that, finding myself torn ragged by dump-metal, I would only need to seek out an additional injection to cover my bases.

I am not quite ragged after an hour in ‘The Bramble,’ but the thrift-store leather jacket I bought as armor for this particular outing is missing a few of its unseemly patches and I am lost, despite being able to see the motorcycle and the freeway in the distance. The nature of the mattress springs is that they have a tendency toward entropical shift. Tangled as they are, a single break can release the tension required to reshape the web of metal as far as half a mile away, closing paths that were once safe and opening new, unmarked exits.

I was prepared for this and, as night falls and I experience the disorientation caused by a flashlight beam playing across the old mattresses, I make camp at the first available clearing and resign myself to a lightless evening under the stars with the mad twanging of tense metal as the only sound but for the distant passing of a car on the freeway. It’s said that Ranger visits ‘The Spring Brambles’ on Mondays and Fridays, armed with heavy wire cutters and puncture-resistant armor to help those who find themselves stranded as I do now.

Like most Americans, I have yet to shake my suspicion of rest. But it’s Wednesday which means, barring a clearing collapse, I will have a rare day of peace made mandatory by threat of harm.

Just the way I like it.

-traveler

The top review for ‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ states, simply: It was much worse than I imagined. Reading that, I suspected I could adjust my expectations accordingly but I could not. ‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ is a site that resists seeing- a painful checkmark on any traveler’s list. It starts with the dust.

‘The dust of ‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ is a known carcinogen. Grayish-black. Powder-thin. It works its way into engines and electronics and clothes, emerging months- sometimes even years- after a visitor leaves the park behind. Law firms sometimes volunteer to press charges on behalf of those affected but there is no one to sue. It is nature at its most cruel.

‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ is, realistically, just piles of this dust. Piles tall enough to be considered landscape. Beneath is a field of sharp rocks, the tips of which sometimes break off and work their way up into the dust. Amongst the rocks there are biting insects. Amongst the insects there is disease.

There is a sport people play only in ‘Horrific Wastes’ and that sport is survival. People attempt to stay in the ‘Wastes’ longer than anyone else and then must survive at least 90 days afterward, proving they did not consume too much of the dust too quickly or contract the ‘Horrific Wasting Disease’ from the insects. The record is a week and a half, set by a man who died 91 days after his stint.

A hit and run.’

I board Hector before heading into ‘Horrific Wastes.’ It doesn’t seem worth trying to shove him into the suits they’ve made for hiking dogs, but it does leave me explaining that I am not the one responsible for his hairlessness and the charred complexion of his skin. It leaves me worried I’ll be reported somewhere, even if all signs point to Hector being healthy and well fed in the present. I leave him with sunblock and that seems to help put their concerns to rest. Anybody who buys top shelf infant sunblock for their rabbit must be good to pets.

Right?

I leave my number and tell them I’m going into ‘Horrific Wastes’ for a night. They recite the names of the people they’ve known who have died there and I assure them I’m taking all the normal precautions: renting a safety suit from the Rangers nearby, spending just one night, and fasting the entire time so that I only have to breach the lower portion of the suit while relieving myself. It seems like too much to be telling strangers, but they nod as though it’s business as usual.

The ‘safe zone’ of ‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ is maintained such that the dust is regularly flattened, some, and that there is a hospital nearby. I struggle to set up my tent in the swirling wastes before realizing it won’t make a difference. I lie down in the dust and wait for the evening to pass.

And the dust swirls about me in clouds.

And the insects hover like stars on the bubbled glass of my suit.

And it’s nice, almost, until I have to pee and feel the stinging of the cancerous terrain on the most sensitive portion of my body.

And until the bugs get inside my suit.

It is much worse than I imagined it would be and I only stay a few hours.

-traveler