This is a personal trip, first and foremost. The goal has always been to witness, for myself, what Autumn by the Wayside describes in the dirty corners of the nation. I didn’t set out to prove anything to anyone. I don’t feel like I need to provide evidence of what I’ve seen. Autumn by the Wayside is published in several editions, available new in many major bookstores and is invariably stocked by the cartful, tattered and broken-spined, at your local second-hand retailer. It may as well be an invasive species, there.
These sites can be visited by anybody, their addresses are listed plainly. Most are open to the public for, at most, a small fee. It only takes seeing one or two of the destinations to loosen one’s steadfast sense of reality such that the rest of the book’s content seems reasonably likely to be true. It only takes seeing a dozen or so before the book becomes undeniable and… closer, somehow.
That’s the strange nature of Autumn by the Wayside. Other travel guides speak of their subjects as though they are unfamiliar. They prepare the reader for what is foreign and, in doing so, they write about a place with the assumption that it’s far away. Reading Autumn by the Wayside, one begins to feel the sense of the foreign approaching. What is familiar about a person’s hometown becomes uncanny. As the Wayside asserts itself, the notion of home dissolves. A person doesn’t need to travel to visit the Wayside. Once they recognize it, they just have to step outside their door.
I’ve gotten off-topic.
This is a personal trip- a trip about witnessing rather than writing. But the writing has become important without my realizing and it’s frustrating to see a thing like ‘The Monument, Undescribed’ and to be at a loss for words. Even Hector looks upon it in awe.
‘What can be said about ‘The Monument, Undescribed’ except that nobody can speak of the thing in regards to its physical attributes, its history, or its location?’
-traveler
