‘The Fake Tree Arboretum’ has been an entry in the guide for a while. I know this because I’ve done some of the little research I tend to do before I visit a place and when I search the notes on my phone, there is evidence of my attempting to work it into the travel over the years. It hasn’t quite come together for a variety of reasons. Mostly I just miss it- it’s on a stretch of highway that hasn’t proven particularly useful in my bouncing commute. It gets pushed to the back burner. A few times I was snowed out or otherwise distracted by some personal disaster. If it had happened a few more times, I’d make the argument that the fates were keeping me from ‘The Fake Tree Arboretum,’ but this time, there’s every reason to think I’ll make it.
But now the entry is changed.
‘The Wayside’s decay is not frozen, reader. Those teetering monuments, those failing businesses, those rotting floorboards- they are symptoms of the end of a place and, like distant relatives, we who visit the Wayside arrive in time to make our peace and leave before death occurs. It is easy to become detached on the Wayside, but consider that detachment is a symptom like the others. Consider that you may already be claimed by death, and flee.
And as you flee, consider visiting ‘The Fake Tree Arboretum,’ which was once a thriving Wayside attraction but has since shuttered its doors and had its shuttered doors kicked open. ‘The Abandoned Fake Tree Arboretum’ carries on like a corpse and we, still distant relatives, now arrive just in time to say a few words at its funeral.’
Sometimes it feels like the guide may be passing judgement on me. Should I have come to ‘The Fake Tree Arboretum’ earlier? And would the money I spent there have kept it afloat? That seems doubtful. Is it wrong to visit the corpse? If the author thought so, maybe he wouldn’t have kept the entry.
Still, it doesn’t feel good, taking up space in the parking lot and looking out over a dream someone once had- a dream of displaying fake trees. Old forum discussions indicate that ‘The Fake Tree Arboretum’ was the holiday stop for a while, that they would do up the whole forest in lights and hire a santa and make cocoa. It’s a long way from any city, but people would make the trek. Some wax nostalgic about a haunted Halloween forest they did as a one-off that didn’t sell quite so well. Some say that was the beginning of the end.
‘The Abandoned Fake Tree Arboretum’ is situated in one of those warehouse buildings, roughly the shape and size of a Home Depot. A previous visitor has done me the favor of breaking the glass doors at the front and I step through to find the place largely taken over by spiders, by what is, perhaps, the largest spider colony on earth. The webs are strewn between the brittle plastic branches of the trees, so clotted in some places as to appear completely white. Cloudlike. The spiders themselves rest on the webs, still in the way a thing can be still but ready to pounce. I get the distinct sense that they know I am here. I get the simultaneous sense that they are not particularly afraid.
I take the long way around the trees, afraid that attempting the forest itself will end in broken webs. The spiders twitch as a I walk by and their tiny eyes glow in my flashlight. This constellation of lights draws my attention to the center of the warehouse, where a massive display tree stands, now a white monolith quivering with caught insects. The droning makes my head hurt and I don’t recognize that it’s getting louder until the windows- those remaining in their frames- begin to shake.
I wake up outside the camper an hour later. A web has been drawn across the frame of the door leading to ‘The Abandoned Fake Tree Arboretum.’ The spiders have claimed it, and I imagine it will soon fade from the Wayside entirely.
-traveler
