‘As much a journey as a destination, Alabama’s ‘Water Way’ looks, to the untrained eye, like a scourge of abandoned boats anchored loosely in Lay Lake. The truth is that ‘The Water Way’ is a beloved collection of abandoned boats anchored loosely on Lay, and it provides something like a spiritual center for struggling locals. Legend has it that the boats are wise, in the way of abandoned things, and that crossing them can grant insight not otherwise achievable by the troubled mind alone. More than this, there are a number of known ‘constellations,’ or orders in which one might cross the boats to gain specific blessings or knowledge. Some are well known, and these include the ‘Wibble Wobble’ which is said to grant mental fortitude and ‘Dunk’ which ends with a plunge into the lake itself and is said to shake loose intrusive thoughts and addictions. 

Other paths are carefully guarded, and the gatekeepers tend to lurk near the banks of Lay Lake, insinuating, but not outright revealing, the paths they believe they know. These guides of the ‘Water Way’ have garnered a certain celebrity after a widely-read memoir cited the author’s experience on Lay and how it transformed her life from something sick and petty to something healthy and generous and kind. The guides are not cheap and, despite playful infighting for the sake of show, they are united in protecting the secret paths. Recording a guide on ‘The Water Way,’ by map or by phone, is physically discouraged.

These people are experts in teaching lessons, after all.‘

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘The Root Garden’ is the first Wayside destination that I’ve visited that attempts the kitschy millennial aesthetic, and I wonder if it doesn’t foreshadow broader changes on the Wayside overall. Those of us who have fallen off the more civilized paths were, nevertheless, still born into the millennial zeitgeist and perhaps we are coming into what will be our fortunes. I started out losing my truck, for instance, and now that I’ve got a camper I’m almost like a homeowner. Maybe I’m hitting my stride.

‘Do you like plants? Do you like the dark? Have you ever wished you could immerse yourself in both simultaneously? If yes, ‘The Root Garden’ may be the place for you. Painstakingly built under an amateur vegetable and flower surface garden, ‘The Root Garden’ exposes those lower parts of the plants we don’t normally see to a dull yellow light that is supposed to be entirely harmless to the plants above. The roots hang from the ceiling of this basement while cottagecore hipsters recite a series of root-facts that are, by all accounts, common knowledge but are seen as contextually important and, worse, poetically significant. 

There is a bit of spiritual zeal to these youngsters, one that reeks of maybe-this-is-a-christian-thing-but-they’re-being-low-key-about-it. The employees are friendly and united in their praise of ‘The Root Garden’ as a project. They speak to each other like doting siblings and wear a uniform suitable for the prairie, but unspoiled by its brutality. As a whole, they are said to have a long-standing beef with ‘The Rot Garden,’ only two hours away by car. Historically, they are not willing to speak about this.’

I arrive in the middle of a weekday- not exactly prime time for site-seeing- and I’m not surprised to find I’m the only visitor. What does surprise me, however, is the sheer number of employees available. A woman greets me at the surface-level entrance and invites me to peruse the short history of ‘The Root Garden’ before committing to a ticket. She follows me the entire time and at a distance that suggests we might be friends- that we may have dated briefly but are still on good terms. I turn several times, thinking she’s about to say something or to hold my hand but every time I do, she seems focused on the history. 

The man at the register smiles and stares just to the left of us. They both jump when something strikes the glass entry door with a massive splat. I look in time to recognize a rotten cabbage sliding down the glass and to see a truckful of crust punks taking off down the highway and generally flipping off the establishment as though it were an avatar of the man which, even despite my general discomfort, I’d have a hard time believing.

“Was that the rot garden?” I ask and the woman shakes her head. 

“I don’t know what you mean.”

There are eight similarly dressed men and women in the actual ‘Root Garden.’ They look like colonial ghosts under the warm Edison lights anchored into the dirt ceiling, and they seem to silently vie for my attention, each an expert on their own segment of the cellar. I learn all the things I already know about roots. Anytime I accidentally brush my head against the plants all eight people react at once, half saying some form of ‘guess they like you’ and the other half politely suggesting I should be more careful. Nobody in the cellar but me is taller than 5’7” I realize. They glide around like ghosts under the plants. 

Finally, when the tour seems to be winding down to an end, I’m brought to the ‘edible’ section of the garden, where the likes of onions and potatoes hang from the ceiling. One of the specter women is carefully washing a dangling carrot and I soon find myself surrounded by the others.

“We have a little tradition,” one of the men says, “Where visitors bite a carrot in the ceiling. It’s the freshest vegetable that can be consumed. Life, still growing. Still anchored in the ground.”

My body reacts negatively in a way I’m only just able to keep from surfacing. I search my mind for excuses to not have to eat this raw, albeit clean, carrot in front of eight strangers.

“Won’t it kill the plant?” I ask. 

“Yes,” the woman says. “But we’ll use whatever you don’t eat. Even the greens above. There’s no waste here.”

The sentence is pointed- at me, maybe, or at ‘The Rot Garden,’ which seems a much more likely target. 

“I, uh… I only eat meat.”

“You eat meat?” The woman frowns. “Exclusively?”

“Yeah,” I say, embarrassed to be associated with a movement I don’t know a lot about. “One of those.”

The woman’s frown twitches back into a smile. She leans in close to one of the men next to her and whispers something, her body indicating a door that hasn’t opened since I’ve been here. I assumed it was a maintenance closet. I lack the imagination to know what it is now.

“Maybe.” The man says, softly. “Can we have a moment to discuss something?”

It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking to me. “Uh, yeah, sure. I’ll go over here to the, uh, fibrous roots.”

“Yes, of course.”

I imagine there is a moment after I leave that the group comes to some decision about myself and the door and, in turning, they see only the puff of dust hanging in the air from my silent but hurried retreat. In reality, I trip on the second step up and make a racket, sliding back down to the dirt floor, and they turn as a unit, having hardly had a moment to say anything to each other, and I acknowledge their acknowledgment only with an embarrassed shrug before scurrying up the stairs and away from ‘The Root Garden’ and all eight of them arrive in time to wave goodbye in the rearview mirror as I drive away. 

Maybe there was never any danger, there, but I’ve learned to limit my curiosity where consumption is at play.

-traveler

‘Safety is a fairly fluid term when it comes to rating the safest parks in the U.S. and no choice exemplifies this subjectivity more than the number one ranking of ‘Bunker Field,’ a public children’s playground and astroturf park located far enough underground that it would remain undamaged in all but a direct nuclear strike. ‘Bunker Field’ is a proof-of-concept maintained by Bob’s Bunkers, a company that specializes in apocalyptic security for the obscenely wealthy. They advertise their willingness to take on unusual and luxurious designs without compromising on safety or efficiency and Bunker Park is the prime example. Its air is filtered and clean. Its water pulls from a deep well and can be stored for up to five years. It draws power from the solar panels on the surface and from the rotation of its merry-go-round. Its leaded walls are nearly half a foot thick, and when the klaxons start to sound, several doors will automatically seal the playground from the outside world. 

The actual physical safety of children at ‘Bunker Park’ has been called into question, however. Injuries abound, the playground taking notes from sturdy, 1950’s era designs and except that it is constructed entirely of reinforced steel, off of which children’s heads tend to bounce. The lights are designed to dim automatically when no movement is detected and local children have identified the sensors and will cover them to bring about ‘night.’ Then, they toss themselves about in the dark until someone inevitably catches a concussion on the edge of the brutalist play area or simply runs directly into the walls, which are painted in the style of Looney Tunes to look like the lush natural environment that would be cooked in a real nuclear event. Cell phone service is not available at ‘Bunker Park’ for obvious reasons, so injured kids have to be dragged to the surface before their parents or responsible older siblings can be notified. 

And then there are the doomsday guys.’

The doomsday guys clock me basically immediately and it takes them no time at all to conclude that I’m a third party. The first party is, of course, the parents with kids, of which there looks to be just two families. The 18 or so other guys probably thought they could blend in as vestigial uncles or whatever but didn’t count on there being other preppers with the same idea and now they’ve camped on the outskirts of the park with big army surplus bags and matte black rifles to protect the place when the doors come sliding down. 

I sort of thought I could pass as an uncle for the time it took me to look around the place, too, but the current demographic and the unfriendly welcome immediately pushes me into ‘tourist’ persona. I pull out a small and entirely non-functional digital camera, which people find way less intimidating than simply taking pictures on my phone, and I do my best to project an image of what I actually literally am, which is just a guy looking around. The trouble I immediately run into, however, is that the preppers don’t want me taking pictures of them and the parents don’t want me taking pictures of their kids. I try to sit casually on a bench and look at my phone before I remember there’s no service. 

Tension begins to rise. 

The parents, who were surprisingly chill about the militia guys, are suddenly standing just a bit closer to their kids. The militia guys are cleaning their guns at me. Desperate, I pull up the only game my phone seems to have installed and find that it needs an update. A child laughs somewhere near one of the walls. 

The bunker goes dark. 

I escape ‘Bunker Park’ unscathed and well before authorities arrive. News articles capture the relative chaos of the event, which involved a great deal of random gun fire and an unhelpful maze of very bright flashlight beams, all whipping around in an effort to locate me, I suppose, and eventually whoever decided it was a good idea to open fire in the dark. Only one injury came of the whole thing- a kid who ran headfirst into the reinforced concrete base of the slide on his way back to his parents. They’re quoted as being fairly positive about the park, despite the mess:

“He was going to lose those teeth anyway.”

-traveler

‘The information age has largely done away with mystery and those mysteries, those surprises, that remain, tend to be the scary, stressful unknowns that plague adulthood and leave us looking cynically in the rear-view mirror, wishing we had known a little better a little earlier and understanding, vaguely, that there are likely more cruel surprises ahead. Among the few soft surprises left is ‘The Random Button,’ located in an elevator in the U.S. Steel Tower in Pittsburgh. Locating the elevator can be a trial- it is not technically open to public use and is not among those that office regulars take normally. Travelers are encouraged to ask for the location of the restrooms and to follow the directions almost exactly opposite, which is difficult if the hired security is paying even a little bit of attention. There is something of an understanding among those who attend the U.S. Steel Tower for their daily grind- they recognize and seem to respect the need of travelers to find the elevator and will sometimes help. 

They will never enter the elevator themselves, however. 

The elevator is visually hostile. It creaks open and requires that riders open and close an inner gate. It shifts underfoot and seems to sag with any weight over 200 pounds, though a placard insists it’s rated to carry much more. There are a series of normal buttons in the elevator and two near the bottom of interest. ‘The Random Button’ is identified by an anachronistic ‘wacky face’ emoji. The button beside it indicates ’65,’ which is technically a floor above what actually exists in the U.S. Steel Tower. There is no information available on paper or online about what this button does, and such an informational black hole suggests that the result is so boring that nobody has ever cared to write about it, or is so disastrous that nobody has ever survived long enough to communicate the results. Travelers are encouraged not to press the button marked ’65.’ 

‘The Random Button’ does exactly what one might suspect: it chooses a floor at random and, when feeling playful, will sometimes cause the elevator to go up several floors and then drop down again as though teasing- as though making a decision on the fly. ‘The Random Button’ overrides whatever security might exist in the building, meaning that the elevator may stop at floors meant exclusively for maintenance staff. Some reports indicate the elevator may open onto random rooms. A busy conference hall. A bathroom stall. The fire escape at an uncomfortable elevation. These reports have not been verified, though travelers are encouraged to pause and consider their surroundings before making an exit. 

One other oddity: contrary to conventional wisdom, all signs near and within the elevator seem to encourage its use during a fire or a natural disaster. One report during such an event suggests the rider who, in their hurry, pressed ‘The Random Button,’ was deposited in the lobby of an entirely different building several blocks away and several days later, though to the rider, no time seemed to pass at all. Travelers, as always, are encouraged to pack sandwiches. 

You never know how long you might be away.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside