My knowledge of classical music, of the composer or era of any particular piece, is probably just about average for my generation of Americans. I know ‘Flight of the Bumblebees’ when I hear it. I can recognize the, uh… ‘Mountain King’ one. And there are plenty others that I will recognize by tune as being important or even for being a sort of go-to soundtrack to certain Hollywood emotions. I wouldn’t be able to name them, though, and I certainly wouldn’t have any idea about how they fit into the history of music- about their importance as it might have been originally.

Unlike much of the population, I assume, this ignorance is something I actively maintain. I spend a lot of time in places-between-places and classical music tends to crop up there. Elevators. Lobbies. On hold with under-paid customer support staff. With the exception of country music, classical is also just the most likely thing to be on the radio waves in those stretches between civilization, where oil derricks swing their heavy arms and deer jump out to be splattered on the road.

Without their names, these pieces mean nothing to me and I am able to exist in ‘The Waiting Room’ for a little while without losing my mind entirely.

‘Immortality, or something much like it, is available to all US citizens but, like all government services, it is offered at a price. Those interested might find a number of tutorials online, each different, perhaps, at the beginning but all inevitably leading to ‘The Waiting Room’ in D.C. These tutorials appear daunting due to length alone but be assured, dear reader, that the steps are not so hard. Immortality is the work of bureaucracy and bureaucracy is the closest thing we have to ritual magic.’

The first 40 or so steps to attaining immortality involve racking up a great deal of debt. The more complicated the better. Passed that, several steps detail how one might ignore the debt in whatever way is most obvious to the lending parties. These lending parties should be as legit as possible. Mediation should move toward the government and away from private parties that might rely on violent methods. Once the government calls for mediation, there are several layers of appeals to make for which a flow chart is readily available online. The last path of this chart should stream debtors into ‘The Waiting Room,’ where people wait for their case to be resolved.

I have no monetary debt, which is a relief. I’m likely beholden to a number of people and deities for some bail-outs over the years, but these debts are entirely spiritual and beyond the scope of the American government. In short, I have no reason to be in ‘The Waiting Room’ and am shortly escorted back out onto the street. Not before seeing the people, though, their faces both desperate and determined. Not before seeing the food available, which seemed to be thin, room-temperature sandwiches and water.

Not before hearing the music, which I could not name. It’s good, I think, that my mind holds no details about classical music- that it slides off my brain. Otherwise the melancholy piano of ‘The Waiting Room’ might have followed me out.

-traveler

‘Of all the risks one might take on the road, ‘The Sharp Drop to Santa Monica’ is perhaps the one place where a traveler should heed the road signs and mind the mirrors. An artifact of the defunct ‘Inter-I’ (or ‘Inter-Interstate’), ‘The Sharp Drop’ is a scattered and fading phenomenon: a sudden dip in the road that inexplicably drops a vehicle in Santa Monica, California. ‘The Drop’ used to exist in a dozen places around the states and as far away as Virginia but, as of this writing, it has shrunk to just one: an unsigned exit off a Texan strip of I-35.

The rancher that owns the land just off this exit has taken to leasing the space for advertising and this offer is happily accepted by a number of West Coast resorts which will usually plaster an indulgent, billboard-sized image of their property right about where vehicles tend to move from one state to the next, making it seem as though the passengers have driven directly into a dream. Rumor has it that mischievous Texan businesses will sometimes lease a similar billboard on the Santa Monica end, making it seem, through the rearview mirror, as though the car has escaped from a high-speed chase or emerged from the buttocks of a trending model. It’s rumored that this sign sometimes simply reads ‘Good Riddance.’

These are all rumors, of course, because nobody who has entered ‘The Sharp Drop to Santa Monica’ has ever been seen in Santa Monica or ever again and because the businesses sometimes advertised tend to have alien amenities and uncanny features. It’s best to read the road signs approaching ‘The Sharp Drop to Santa Monica’ because most recommend avoiding it at all costs.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

In all of this traveling, I’ve seen a number of drinking holes called ‘The Bar.’ A wink of the eye. A little smirk. Each of these places thinking they were clever, distilling themselves to the obvious. ‘The Bar’ outside Belle Fourche, South Dakota pulls it off straight-faced. Dark and foreboding as an open mouth. Blacked-out windows. Cheap plastic signs draping onto the sidewalk, advertising any number of get-drunk-for-cheap deals. A stain on Main Street, as close to anywhere in the U.S. as it can be.

‘‘The Bar’ may have been constructed in a metaphysical shadow. It may have been founded by a bad man. The intentionality of ‘The Bar’ is up for debate, but the result is the same. It is, historically, a haven for deadbeat dads. More recently, a corner has opened to deadbeat mothers. It’s the places where parents go, not to die, but to scrape off all but the stain of parenthood.

Sometimes there are children at ‘The Bar.’ This is fine, by state law, assuming they’re accompanied by parents or guardians (and here the term is used loosely). The presence of these children doesn’t make their parents better. Arguably, it makes them worse and it makes ‘The Bar’ worse, too, the childless parents being forced to remember that their own offspring are out there somewhere. It deepens their guilt and, simultaneously confirms the necessity of hiding out in a place where they, at least, can be alone and separate from their responsibilities and always just mildly drunk, enough to be angry but not enough to be scared.’

I fit in at most bars better than I fit in most everywhere else. Anyone who looks as rundown and lonely as me can be inconspicuous in a corner for as long as they nurse drinks. ‘The Bar’ is an exception that I feel immediately- a true, all-heads-swivel moment, including those belonging to the handful of children slouched on barstools, some still half-engaged with their parents’ phone.

It’s four in the afternoon and there is no happy hour. No happiness to be found, really. A billiard table sports an unfilled triangle of balls. A jukebox groans with the effort of flipping through its menu. One of the phone games has an annoying jingle and it’s the loudest sound in the room.

I step up to the bar and order a drink and fries, only to be told that the kitchen is closed, that it has been closed for years. My drink isn’t available either and the one I get, the one that is nearly the same thing, is weak and dusty. That my patronage is not welcome is made clear in these few short interactions.

I’ve spent a lot of time in places where I’m not welcome over these years, so I settle in relatively comfortably and find it all the easier to nurse my drink for how poorly it’s been made. The others eventually shrug off my presence, they being experts in turn.

-traveler

Perhaps the most accessible destination on my list, I’ve been putting ‘The Edge of the USA’ off for quite some time. The boundary has always been there, I know, but something like claustrophobia squirms in me when I finally face it in person, the open expanse beyond the border. Most people find it reassuring, this idea that there is nothing outside, but without anything to compare our country to, I find it diminishing.

‘Everybody knows that there’s more out there. It’s not illegal to say so, even if the regulations concerning the printing and sale of official maps are sometimes conflated with limits on individual rights. Close readers might have picked up on the mention of a few of these places in this humble tome, though, you’ll notice we’re often mistaken for fiction.

‘The Edge of the USA’ has been an attraction since the early days, meaning pictures exist of the place before the void illusion was installed. This early iteration was much the same in tone- something like an empty moat with a tall black wall on the opposite side. At night it looked much like the void does now, except with the addition of armed guards. Security, now, is invisible but insinuated with several carefully placed signs which indicate a man crossing the barrier and those parts of him making it across being dissolved into finer and finer particles until nothing of those pieces is left. In 2004, when one of these signs became unstuck from the wall and clattered to the floor, several visitors noted that they had been made in China, rendering the whole façade more of a threat than a logical conclusion as to what the border represents.’

-traveler

‘It’s true that there is a porta-potty standing so deeply in the red sandstone of Utah that many assume it has significance beyond the traveler’s base biological needs. This specimen is two days by foot from the nearest trailhead and located in an area that is not at all popular with travelers of any kind. It floods in the rain, bakes in the sun, and is home to a particular type of stinging insect that is equally formidable in the precipitation or heat. The trails are unkempt and signage is poor but somebody, somewhere out there keeps ‘The Redstone Closet’ clean and functional. This leads people to believe:

1. ‘The Redstone Closet’ is marker for, if not a portal to, some underground treasure or facility. This begs the question, of course- why mark something secret with something so conspicuous which leads to:
2. ‘The Redstone Closet’ is a trap. But a trap for whom? The curious? The bladder-full? And does it spring in a way not immediately clear or is it a sort of vinegar trap? It’s difficult to understand the motivation behind such a scheme so most default to the obvious:
3. ‘The Redstone Closet’ is the result of a bureaucrat moving money around and having to show some physical evidence of that expenditure.’

The fourth, undiscussed possibility for ‘The Redstone Closet’ is that it offers some small oasis from the difficult terrain and wildlife. It is, for instance, the first time I approach a porta-potty with something like excitement. Certainly the first time I think of it as the most beautiful thing in my immediate surroundings.

I slap at my leg where one of the Redstone biters has snuck in under my clothes. I wring my bandana out onto the red earth beneath me. It’s taken me three days to get here after choosing the wrong branch of a fork. I haven’t seen anyone in all of that time. I’m not even sure I saw cars on the highway as I approached, so it is difficult for me to stumble around to the entrance-side of ‘The Redstone Closet’ and to find the door locked, its little binary flag reading ‘OCCUPIED.’

A man is dying inside. Or murdering. Vulgar sounds. Wet slaps.

I turn back, then, and welcome the biters as a new unlikely oasis in a world that continues to amaze me with its strange places and with its violence.

-traveler