‘Though each has its curiosities, none of the nation’s ‘Little Italys’ are so curious as to warrant inclusion in this humble guide. Also absent are the handful of ‘Tiny Italys’ which, while certainly being strange as a concept, are all fairly mundane in practice and safe, overall. The northwest’s ‘Truly Miniscule Italy’ comes close, it being both very strange and mildly dangerous, but what danger does exist faces entirely inward. It’s just so small that a visitor could topple the place with an uncareful brush of their fingers.

The only Italian variant to be featured here is ‘Particulate Italy’ which, at the time of publication, hangs in a cloud outside of Springfield, Missouri and seems to be floating west on a leisurely breeze. ‘Particulate Italy’ is a destination that visits you and it’s worth adding any one of the many websites or apps that track ‘Particulate Italy’ to your rotation of electronic devices for it tends to be an unwelcome guest. Why? Well, that involves a short history.

‘Particulate Italy’ was created in the early 2000s, a product of the ‘everything must be smaller’ trend that prevailed at the time. Vancouver’s ‘Microscopic Italy’ (since lost), had held the record for the world’s smallest ‘Italy’ for nearly a decade by then and, daunted by the undertaking that would be involved in challenging Greenland’s ‘Gargantuan Italy,’ bored American scientists decided to create the smallest ‘Italy’ possible with the technology available at the time, hoping to score a much-needed ‘win’ for the States. After some trial and error, and using methods since classified, these scientists produced a fine dust that, on very, very close inspection, turned out to be ‘Particulate Italy.’ A short time later, these scientists died, their lungs filling with blood.  

The absolute lowest bar to qualify for an Italy variant is the inclusion of an identifiable landmark and ‘Particulate Italy’s’ claim is staked on an extrusion that looks a bit like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. This ‘Particulate Pisa’ has led to a great deal of trouble since ‘Particulate Italy’ was released from the lab and the problem is twofold:

When ‘Particulate Italy’ is inhaled, the ‘Particulate Pisa’ has a tendency to hook into the lungs and sort of wobble about with each attempted breath, tearing thousands of little holes in the delicate tissue meant for transferring oxygen to the bloodstream. The secondary issue has to do with the way ‘Particulate Italy’ moves through the air which is, in a word, erratically. ‘Particulate Italy’ floats across the nation like an American football rolls across a field, making sudden, unexpected turns for reasons that cannot always be calculated in time to adjust predictions. Those website and apps that track ‘Particulate Italy’ do their best to pinpoint its location, but their primary purpose is to highlight fairly large zones where ‘Particulate Italy’ mightbe, so that the residents of those areas can be evacuated in time.

It’s recommended that travelers avoid ‘Particulate Italy’ when possible and that proper respiratory gear be donned if a visit proves unavoidable.’

-traveler

‘In 2007, Edmond Bell discovered the entrance to a cave network on his land and, despite a lot of good advice from a number of reasonable people, he decided to map the cave with nothing but a flashlight, a daypack, and enough rope that he could tie it off at the surface and find his way back as necessary. This worked for a week or so, by which time he was able to report that the cave moved gradually downward without branching for as far as his rope would take him. Bell paused for a week to order more rope and to devise a reel-like system to release it so that he could ‘safely’ carry on past his current dead end. He entered the cave on June 23^rd and has not resurfaced. The cave system has been gated. Stern signage recounts an abridged version of this same story, using it as a case study for adventurous stupidity. Edmond Bell is most likely dead, after all.

But.

But the thing is, Bell’s reel is still turning at the same slow pace that might indicate a determined man’s trudging steadily forward into the dark. It stops at night, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a full eight, but it always picks up again, churning rope into the cave. You’re asking, couldn’t it be a quirk of nature? A body dragged along by some underground river? A trick of heat and wind? A hoax, even- a separate reel deep inside that eats up the slack?

Could be. Sure.

You’re asking now about this seemingly infinite supply of rope. That’s the special draw of this destination. Visitors bring rope to add to the reel so that Edmond Bell, whatever’s left of him, doesn’t get stuck on his journey into the earth.’

Hector and I arrive at ‘Edmond’s Reel’ around three in the afternoon with a length of rope I picked up special from a hardware store half an hour down the road. The woman there asked if I was going out to ‘Edmond’s Reel’ and gave me a skeptical look when I told her I was. I haven’t decided, yet, whether the skepticism was in response to my buying the cheapest length of rope that could support the weight of an adult man, or a broad skepticism regarding the whole enterprise.

These things still nag at me, even this far down the road.

‘Edmond’s Reel’ isn’t turning when I arrive but it groans to life after a few moments, as though whatever tugged the rope had been taking a breather. A sign nearby, likely placed there by the Rangers, details the use of the additional reel, which has been erected anonymously and allows for visitors to add line without interrupting the feed from ‘Edmond’s.’ The instructions are simple but I’ve never been very good with rope, so it takes me a while to get everything tied together and spun.

When I turn back around I see that ‘Edmond’s Reel’ has halted again and it’s a full minute before I realize his line has disappeared between the bars, severed from the creaking contraption that kept him anchored for over a decade. I rush to the entrance of the cave and watch the rope pull into the thick shadows beyond the gate. It disappears without a sound.

When I turn, I find Hector nibbling idly at the length of rope now drooping from ‘Edmond’s Reel.’ He stares back, daring me to point a finger, claiming, with innocent rabbit eyes, that the rope pulled loose on its own and he’s only making the best of a difficult situation.

I wonder, though. These things nag at me, even this far down the road.

-traveler

‘Retired, now, after many years of service, the mystery solving kombucha mother, known affectionately as ‘SCOBY,’ can be found souring the water of a two-ton tank off I-295 in New Jersey. ‘SCOBY’ is kept alive by the grace of the state where, in the nineties, it served as an unorthodox mascot for local law enforcement. ‘SCOBY’ was wheeled about in its tank, visiting elementary school classrooms in the mornings to tremble at the though of the audience considering recreational drugs, and to crime scenes in the evening, where it shuddered and gulped over bludgeoned corpses and stolen art.

It might be noted, here, that ‘SCOBY’s’ communication is limited to twitch-like movements and brief gurgles. At the outset, these were interpreted by the group of teenagers that discovered it and who, after hundreds of crime scenes and long media tours, dispersed. Only one of the original five remain in the state and he has refused contact with ‘SCOBY’ for nearly a decade.

‘SCOBY’s’ collaboration with the police ended when it exposed a deep corruption at work among officers. It quickly became a mascot for anti-police factions and, rather than make a martyr of a mushroom, the state placed ‘SCOBY’ in its current limbo with a signboard that sidesteps its history by describing it only as ‘the largest kombucha mother in the state.’ Attempts to communicate with ‘SCOBY’ through the glass have widely failed. It has instead become a sort of inactive pilgrimage site for those wronged by the police.

Admission is charged on the basis of donations. Visitors receive a bottle of ‘SCOBY’s’ kombucha for every five dollars spent. Connoisseurs maintain that it is nearly undrinkable and witches claim that it makes for incredible results in the magic of truth-telling.’

At some point in the previous year, a local police department donated a plaque to ‘SCOBY’s’ tank. It says ‘FEEL FREE TO TAP THE GLASS.’ ‘SCOBY’ doesn’t acknowledge me when I pry it away, but it feels good to do it.

-traveler

Three days. It takes three days of eating french fries and elephant ears and hot dogs- of paying grossly inflated carnival prices- before I give in and get in line for ‘The Inevitable Rollercoaster.’ And it’s not even the food, really. I’ve survived on worse diets for longer stretches of time for no better reason than poor mental health. At the end of three days, it’s the music that does me in.

‘It’s a bit of a misnomer to call it ‘The Inevitable Carnival’ just because it’s home to ‘The Inevitable Rollercoaster.’ The fact of the matter is that a traveler need not interact with any part of the enterprise but the rollercoaster in order to escape. It’s easier to pay for tickets and stand in line than it is to, say, sneak through the grounds and commandeer the ride, but there seems to be no standing obligation to be lawful in one’s actions in order to find one’s way out of the quantum looping carnival-shaped phenomenon that can be said to exist both everywhere and nowhere at once.

For the sake of describing it however, we’ll say that ‘The Inevitable Carnival’ appears like any other traveling carnival one might spot on the horizon, all flickering lights and tinkling music. There, at the center, is ‘The Inevitable Rollercoaster,’ which stands much taller and spreads much more widely than any mobile rollercoaster should. Once one spies ‘The Inevitable Rollercoaster,’ it becomes impossible to leave its outskirts. Practically, this means every road and highway will loop back around to the carnival grounds, reappearing on the forward horizon as soon as it’s disappeared from behind. The cycle is broken only after riding ‘The Inevitable Rollercoaster’ and with no particular fanfare. In fact, riding anything else afterwards feels like an anti-climax.’

The thing is that I hate roller coasters and really all carnival rides. I get motion sick in the back of cars and on boats in anything but the stillest waters. I get extra motion sick on carnival rides and the sickness, there, is so much more public. So, while Day 1 at ‘The Inevitable Carnival’ can be reasonably written off as me doing my due diligence in confirming the inevitability of it all. The following two days are dread and hard-headedness and unceasing carnival music which rides the wind to my camp at the furthest point of the loop, where I can look every direction and see ‘The Inevitable Rollercoaster’ towering in the distance.

At the end of the third day I smuggle Hector into one of the little rollercoaster carts and when I warn the ride operator that I sometimes get sick she puts me in the back, saying that the ride goes fast enough that I’m unlikely to vomit forward with enough force to spray even the person in front of me- that, if I know what’s good for me, I’ll turn my head to keep from choking on throw-up that hangs in my esophagus, caught between the momentum of the coaster and the strength of my stomach contractions.

It’s the best advice I’ve received in a long time.

-traveler

There used to be this toy, this little blue-gray plastic oven, that came with diecast molds and bottles of goop. Squeezed into the molds and baked, the goop would solidify into rubber-like toys. Bugs mostly, but monsters and aliens too. I loved that thing, despite its tendency to overheat and to leave streaking blisters on my hands when I tried to remove the rubber too soon after baking.

It had a smell- a smell like melted plastic and ozone. I haven’t thought about the toy in years but as soon as I take my helmet off, a breeze rolls off ‘The Astroturf Fields’ and the memory comes back clearly.

‘It’s hard to argue with the farmers who run ‘The Astroturf Fields.’ Well, no, it’s easy to argue with them, since there’s just no way they’re doing what they claim to do, which is growing astroturf from the ground like it’s sod. It’s hard to get anywhere in an argument with them, though, because when everyone at the farm does their job, it sure looks a lot like they’re growing plastic grass.

The nearest anyone has come to debunking the enterprise involved a particularly stubborn group of podcasters that caught wind of something shady happening on ‘The Astroturf Fields’ at night. The investigation culminated in the discovery that an absurd amount of pesticide was being applied to the fields and, though many might call any use of pesticide absurd in this case, the quantity in use was also criminal. ‘The Astroturf Fields’ were fined and they issued a boilerplate apology as well as pictures of what they claimed was a recent surge in detrimental pests but was, clearly, images of rubber locusts.’

I kick a rubber ant off my shoe and heave Hector’s kennel out onto the field with me. I don’t trust him outside of it, not here. He chews at questionable grass all the time and there’s no question that whatever rubber or plastic they’ve used in the astroturf will sit in his insides for however long he has left or until it dams up some inner orifice that’s necessary for rabbit life. I can’t help but wonder if I’m not exposing myself to carcinogens just by breathing the air over the field. Much of what I am nostalgic for is cancer-causing in retrospect. I swat a fly away from my face and it lands with a quiet thud on the ground nearby.

A rubber fly.

I’ve mostly given up trying to understand how things happen at Wayside destinations, but this is truly something else. I turn the fly over in my hand- definitely rubber. I glance around and then surreptitiously slide the fly into my pocket. I wish I’d collected the ant but it’s gone when I look for it. I don’t know what I’ll do with them but nostalgia’s a weird motivator.

Hector and I move inward. It’s a Sunday, which means the farm is technically closed, but forums have suggested nobody seems to pay much mind to trespassers who aren’t actively damaging the grounds. Without any real direction, without any sense of what it is to experience ‘The Astroturf Farm,’ I take us toward a scarecrow assuming that if anything freaky is going to happen it will happen near something like that. It’s the first thing around that isn’t made of rubber, that is, in fact, made of the sorts of materials a person might expect a scarecrow would consist of. It’s dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and swim trunks and it sports a tie-dye bucket hat. It’s stuffed with natural-feeling hay, though three rubber cockroaches shake out from under the cloth as I poke at it.

I hear rough rubber honking as I stoop to collect the bugs. When I look up again I find a rubber crow is now perched on the bucket hat. It holds a translucent rubber beetle in its mouth that’s the kind of green color that suggests it might glow in the dark.

It seems pretty cool so I reach for it.

When I make it back to the motorcycle, and I do eventually, I find that one of the newer editions of Autumn by the Wayside has an addendum regarding ‘The Haunted Scarecrow of the Astroturf Fields:’ a related, but distinct Wayside attraction that happens to exist on top of another.

The scarecrow chases Hector and I back and forth across the fields while rubber crows pelt me from above, bouncing lifelessly off my body and onto the grass. The rubber insects I collected squirm in my pockets. The astroturf shivers in the wind. I become aware of the distant forms of farmers, watching this unfold from the barn. They ignore my calls for help, dipping and swaying on rubber legs, softened by the midday sun.

-traveler