Autumn takes on a great deal of winter’s chill the nearer one gets to Canada, which makes me thankful for the camper on those nights that I have to camp and makes me wary on those days where snow falls early and slickens the roads. North Dakota has seen snow in the last week and it hasn’t warmed enough, yet, to have melted it. The drifts crowd the road and I find myself claustrophobic even in the oil fields where the pumpjacks move darkly against the pale ground. 

I suppose ‘The Blank Space’ has gotten under my skin already. 

‘Theoretically accessible everywhere, but practically only visible in a square-mile or so of desolate North Dakota acreage, there is an section of visible space that is entirely blank, meaning, it seems to hold no stars or planets. Even satellites tend to avoid ‘The Blank Space,’ and, though this would take a little more proving, it has been reported that birds refuse to fly across it, preferring circuitous routes around the sky hole and generally preferring not to exist in the acreage under any circumstances. 

Several videos have circulated regarding ‘The Blank Space,’ none of them particularly convincing on their own but, as a mass, certainly telling of something strange. Most record satellites that just skirt ‘The Blank Space,’ usually with a background of disappointed travelers who hoped to be the first to document something cross it. One video records the release of a captured pigeon, which hurriedly hops across the field and out of range before attempting to fly. Another is an attempt to interview a parakeet that has been trained to talk. Visibly stressed, the bird only whines for its owner.

Of semi-recent interest is the uptick in disappearances following the migration of Swifties to ‘The Blank Space,’ it having gained some popularity in lieu of the hit song that shares its name. The number of visitors to the field increased a hundredfold in 2014 and several of the people making this pilgrimage never returned, a phenomenon local police attributed to them being ‘young people.’’

Like a lot of these places, it’s easy to identify ‘The Blank Space’ by the fence that’s been put up to keep people like me out. The fence has been cut and twisted back by previous visitors, which saves me the trouble, so I pull the camper a respectable distance ahead, as though I had only pulled over to take a piss somewhere, and then I back track through the chill with my little folding chair and a thermos of coffee.

The stars are bright, tonight, and that makes their sudden absence all the more disorienting. The moon hangs low in the west, the big dipper looks twisted and small in the east, and though my astronomical knowledge is fairly lacking, I can’t seem to pinpoint any one star or planet that’s missing, per se. It’s just that hear, in ‘The Blank Space,’ they are pushed to the side. The universe gapes open where they should be, and the longer I stare the more often I feel my chair tipping forward, as though I’m resting on an invisible precipice and am pulled by some extraterrestrial gravity. It’s intriguing and not entirely unpleasent, the controlled vertigo of a carnival ride. 

I remember, a little late, that I’ve also packed my binoculars, and as I dig them out of my bag I notice a chair like mine not so far away in the field- some artifact left behind by a traveler like me. The longer I stare, the more I see: a bag, a lunchbox, and a phone on the seat of the chair. There is nobody around, as far as I can tell, and I recheck the area with the binoculars before allowing myself to scan ‘The Blank Space.’ There, high up and directly above the abandoned post, I see a body.

I don’t wait long enough to see which way it is falling.  

-traveler

‘Though increasingly difficult to experience, ‘The Marilyn Vent’ is a small piece of the Wayside wedged right in the heart of downtown Minneapolis. ‘The Marilyn Vent’ is a subterranean infrastructural orifice that looks like any other but that garnered an amount of social media fame following a post that illustrated a consistent ability to lift skirts and dresses from the legs of those people who chose to wear them. Scripted videos soon followed- people of all genders wearing billowy bottoms and acting surprised when the air from below struck them. It featured as an entry on a fashion vloggers YouTube series. It received a very small mention in Vogue as a local fashion-related oddity. 

The trouble was that the vent was located along a fairy busy thoroughfare and the increasingly large crowds of influencers were becoming a nuisance to those business people who had been walking over the vent for years on the way to work and had never so much as blushed or blinked an eye. Soon, videos of ‘The Marilyn Vent’ took on a pointed turn- men in suits walking through a careful social media setup, brushing past would-be celebrities in a way that seemed decidedly un-accidental. 

A woman was hit by a car after stepping backward and away from one of these incidents and, mindful of litigation, the city attempted to block and reroute the vent. That same day, a room full of office workers in a neighboring building were found passed out in their chairs and the vent was quickly reopened. Plans for the city’s infrastructure surfaced, looking for all the world like the blueprints of a spaceship from a movie series with deep lore. Nobody could make any sense of them and nobody could quite tell why the vent existed or why bad things happened when it was blocked or even mildly diffused.

Finally, the city came to an out-of-the-box solution: they made the vent smell bad. When that didn’t work at first, they made it smell worse, and by the time they came to the sweet spot, the vent’s stench was so powerful that walking over it risks ruining a person’s clothes. 

‘The Marilyn Vent’s’ last claim to fame was the video of a woman determined to remake the first, only to throw up halfway through the process and to have her vomit blown back up at her and into the unlucky people who happen to be around. People don’t visit ‘The Marilyn Vent’ anymore.’

–an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

There are certain destinations on this journey that make me wonder whether the Wayside is aware of people like me, people who plan to see as much of it as possible, and I wonder if the Wayside, which is more of a concept that a place and much more of a place than an actual thinking entity, is mean. 

Take ‘The Cactus Maze,’ for example. Why would it ever need to exist except as a punishment for those of us who choose to explore the dusty corners of the nation? And why is it that the hardest or most painful attractions are the cheapest and easiest to access? I’ve driven past ‘The Cactus Maze’ a dozen times and I’ve always found a reason to avoid it- that it looked too busy or that it was too cold for something outdoors or that I had a small, fragile rabbit traveling along that would do poorly in such a pointed environment. 

This time as I approached, on my way to somewhere else entirely, I saw that the old, sun-word billboards carried a fresh addendum: the cacti are blooming it said. 

Well, now I have no choice.

‘When most people think of a maze, they think of it mainly in two dimensions. It’s a matter of moving forward, and sometimes backward, and making left-or-right sort of choices until our simple logic is rewarded with an escape from a trap we set for ourselves. ‘The Cactus Maze’ adds a third dimension of play with the addition of carefully placed, ground-lingering cacti and bonsaied cacti that jut their arms into the paths one is expected to navigate in order to succeed. ‘The Cactus Maze’ expects a bit of up-and-down thinking, and it rewards those visitors who are willing to get a little hurt by making the experience that much shorter. Those who choose to draw the maze out will find their paths narrowing.’

The maze is beautiful, I will give it that. Regardless of the flowers, ‘The Cactus Maze’ incorporates a variety of species that I have only ever noted on their own. And the sheer density of cactus is something new for me as well. I’m used to considering the lone cactus out of the corner of my eye, stepping over as I traipse through some desert trail or avoiding as I veer off to piss in a bush. 

In ‘The Cactus Maze,’ I begin to hear the cacti. They bristle against each other in the wind. They scritch and scrape as lizards drag their scales between the spines. The cacti at the entrance have been vandalized, their skins thick with names and slurs. Past a turn or two, however, there is no sign that anybody has been through in a while. It’s an intimidating place, dark and near-silent in a way that makes a corn maze seem jovial. 

I come to a path made hopscotch by the growth of little cacti pups and navigate it with relative ease. I find the same pattern around the next bend, only a large cactus lays sideways across like a fallen log. I’d assume it was an accident, but I know better, and I make it across with a few small snags in my pants. I regret bringing my backpack with me. I worry I might not have enough water. 

I crawl through a narrow cactus tunnel. I clamber over a massive cactus, carefully placing my hands where its spines have been pruned away. I pass through a hall of cacti that look like men. People have clothed them: a doctor, a santa claus, a marine. I lend a bandana to the cowboy and things get a little easier after that. The blooming cacti are dazzling in the low sun. I find myself standing to admire them, not something I’ve allowed myself to do at a place like this in a while. 

After an hour, I recognize the sound of the interstate. The difficulty has eased and the forks have dropped off entirely. Finally, I turn a corner and find myself at a dead end, blocked by brutal, unblooming cacti. They hold a toy skeleton between them and it, in turn, holds a sign:

Sorry, pardner. Best head back the way you came.

-traveler

Where else would ‘The Nation’s Perfect Yard’ be but outside Vegas, in the desert where nothing else will grow? It is an oasis, of sorts, the sort of place a man might crawl toward if he had been lost, wandering for weeks on end, desperate enough to topple cacti for their scant liquid, suffering the pinprick wounds of its needles. It is lush green and perfectly manicured: a bonsai of short grass and carefully placed flowers. 

The perfection conceals a raging war between man and plant and insect and desert. 

The plants are not allowed to breed with one another, for starters. Perfect specimens are bred elsewhere and transplanted only when ready. In order to inhibit breeding, local insect populations are killed and repelled by a cocktail of aerosol poisons so potent that visitors must wear a mask if they wish to trod the stone pass that bisects the greenery- so potent, that a mesh is drawn over ‘The Nation’s Perfect Yard’ to prevent birds passing overhead from dying and splattering themselves on this pristine and captive nature (that is, it doesn’t prevent the birds from dying- it only catches their bodies before they land). 

The land is dry and unforgiving, salted in the formation of the Earth. For this, a massive industrial plant works day and night nearby, pulling water from the next state over, purifying and then re-poisoning it with a specialty mix of weedkiller. 

‘The Nation’s Perfect Yard’ has no attached house, no living space whatsoever, though it is home to a motley collection of lawn ornaments, each fashioned by the sort of artist who is inexplicably rich and successful and completely unknown except to those who devote their lives not to art, but to the artists themselves. The result is a series of pink ceramic triangles that its creator describes as ‘a flamingo, deconstructed.’ Horrible gnomes peer out from sculpted bushes, each an homage to the artists highly abusive family. In December ‘The Nation’s Perfect Yard’ sports a nativity scene compromised of living children in expensive costumes, these children being trained at great expense to remain still for extended periods of time and to ignore the gawking tourists, each of whom paid more for entry than these children will see for their work.  

‘The Nation’s Perfect Yard’ is more a mirage than an oasis. A man crawling toward the grass would be shot before he was allowed to drink the chemical water that sustains it.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside