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
