Hector and I arrive at a place called ‘Hangman’s Ledge’ on a cold day in early autumn. There is nothing particularly special about ‘Hangman’s Ledge.’ Every state has a hangman’s this or hangman’s that which, of course, begs the questions ‘who was hanging who so often they named somewhere after it?’ and ‘if it’s who I think it was hanging who I think was, should we really hold on to that sort of name like it’s not a big deal?’ In terms of places to visit, however, ‘Hangman’s Ledge’ is entirely mundane.

It does offer a sprawling view of the valley below and, though it would be difficult to pinpoint ‘The Moonshine Spring’ without binoculars, it is very possible, on a cool autumn night, to see whether or not the spring has been ignited. The internet says it’s as simple as looking for flickering orange light, like a massive candle has been lit miles away. The internet says a person knows it when they see it. I don’t see it, so I assume ‘The Moonshine Spring’ carries on in its unignited form below and we skip it.

You see, the internet says that, in its unignited form, fumes from ‘The Moonshine Spring’ are capable of intoxicating or killing any small animals that happen to wander into the area.

Autumn by the Wayside offers another reason:

‘People have been killed over ‘The Moonshine Spring.’ You wouldn’t think that would be the case, but it is. Imagine a natural fountain of unbelievably high-proof alcohol. Imagine it exists, unregulated, on private land. The landowner has thrown the gates open- never thought to build gates, really- so anybody can visit ‘The Spring’ and drink or bottle to their heart’s content. It is a free, seemingly-infinite supply of a reasonably valuable resource.

But that resource is moonshine.

It is impossible to think of a reason why one person would kill another over such a thing and it’s impossible to believe that such a thing wouldn’t invariably lead to manslaughter in some form or another.

People come from all over the country to peaceably fill a bottle at ‘The Moonshine Spring.’. But those people also leave. The people that remain at ‘The Moonshine Spring’ for days on end are often of a different sort and they are, by definition, the most likely to be found there. The longer ‘The Moonshine Spring’ remains unignited, the drunker and angrier these people become. An unarmed traveler might check in town for recent burning dates and, finding they are a long ways off, should consider buying the pre-bottled stuff and saving the site for next time.’

Hector and I swing past ‘Hangman’s Ledge’ on our way back through again. It’s late autumn and cold. Colder on the ledge than anywhere else. Wouldn’t you know it- the internet was right about this one thing. The orange glow of ‘The Moonshine Spring,’ ignited, is unmistakable. Even from miles away.

We take the bike down off the ledge and walk the half mile or so to the dry rock field, finding it stinks of stale alcohol and urine at its outer edge but is fairly clean-smelling nearer the flame. Maybe the explosive ignition burns the residue off the rocks or maybe the long-term residents retain enough sense to separate the bathroom from the bar.

Autumn by the Wayside lists, in its many appendices, the ways ‘The Moonshine Spring’ has been ignited over the years. Everything from lightning strikes to dares. More often than not, though, it’s some drunken Icarus who wants to smoke with his drink. There’s a picture of it happening to a man- of his body silhouetted by the growing flame. It does round on the internet every once in a while. Isn’t hard to find.

We warm ourselves by ‘The Moonshine Spring’ and, when I worry Hector’s acting strangely, we head back up the valley wall, satisfied to have seen the thing in its better form.

-traveler

‘Wandering among the many reading areas inside the Library of Congress in Washington DC, an unknowing visitor might stumble upon a room with an uncomfortable climate. This is likely ‘The American Standard Room Temperature Room’ which, in an ideal world, would be set to a standard 68 degrees Fahrenheit but is often much colder come January and much warmer in July. These temperature fluctuations reflect the average environment of the American living room at any given moment based on readings from sensors across the nation (the specific locations of which are a closely guarded secret). A heat wave will make the room unbearably hot. A winter storm that knocks out power in the Midwest may lower the temperature to near freezing.

‘The American Standard Room Temperature Room’ is a concept piece by artist Julian Rocio who created it as a meditation on empathy. Though ‘The Room’s’ temperatures do sometimes swing high and low it is always habitable in the short term, and rarely even notably uncomfortable upon entry. The room’s programming is based on national averages, after all, and at least some of the data points are from climate-controlled dwellings.

The trick of ‘The American Standard Room Temperature Room’ is that it looks no different than any other on-site reading room. Patrons normally find their way inside accidentally and as they read or research it’s Rocio’s intention that they become aware of their discomfort very, very slowly. Cold hands. Sweat under the collar. A near-total inability to find perfect comfort and a level of discomfort that doesn’t quite warrant leaving the room. It is a princess-and-the-pea style revenge experience at the center of the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution, where some of America’s most privileged might tread.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

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

‘It isn’t entirely necessary to visit ‘That Same Stupid Cloud National Park’ to see the titular slice of sky. It’s a cloud, after all, and its visible from certain viewpoints for miles around. Optimal angles aside, the park’s experience is worth the nominal cost of entry for two reasons: context and charity.

Context is important in viewing ‘The Same Stupid Cloud’ because it appears like any other except on days when it’s the only cloud in the sky or when the high-up airstreams have whipped its peers into quick movement around it. In these conditions it’s easy to see that ‘The Same Stupid Cloud’ is static both in place (above the park) and in shape (decidedly cumulus). On shape, ‘The Same Stupid Cloud National Park’ devotes the great majority of its educational displays to a friendly debate about what ‘The Cloud’ looks like. An anatomical heart? A puppy’s head? A gemstone of some sort? These are just a few of the many suggestions that have been sourced from visitors and turned into tall, difficult-to-read signs, each with a cut-out of the specific shape they detail to aid someone who might not otherwise recognize, say, a gyoza in the sky.

This brings us to the second reason to visit the park: charity. The rangers stationed at ‘The Same Stupid Cloud National Park’ have so little going for them. All park resources outside of those suggesting cloud shapes are devoted to explaining, in great detail, why exactly ‘The Same Stupid Cloud’ is anomalous and what has been done to study it. ‘The Cloud’ is a marvel, of course. It is a perfect scientific outlier, defying much of what is understood about physics and meteorology. It flies in the face of what humanity has learned of permanence and nature. It resists attempts to dispersal. It hums low tones on the winter solstice.

Recognizing all of this requires that one think really hard about the cloud or attend the annual ‘Sky Song Festival,’ neither of which the average tourist is likely to do. An hour’s pitstop is rarely enough time for a road-weary traveler to properly wrap their head around the implications of the thing- is really only enough time to empty one’s bladder and agree that the cloud does look like a pigeon, from a certain angle, as one Kumar D. pointed out in 2003. This is a source of frustration for the rangers who are, on the other hand, inevitably driven mad by the mind-bending impossibility ‘The Same Stupid Cloud’ represents.

‘The Same Stupid Cloud National Park’ earns Autumn by the Wayside’s highest recommendation, not because it stands out among the rest, but because your earnest attendance may grant a local ranger the will to see another day through to its end.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

My interactions with the police and other law enforcement entities have been less than ideal over the years. Some of these interactions have been covered in previous posts and those do tend to be the biggies but, speaking strictly in numbers, they represent only a fraction of the ill will I’ve accumulated in any given state. It used to be that when my budget was in the black I would rifle through my envelope of petty offenses and pay a couple off as a sign of good faith. It turns out that, past a certain limit, that sort of behavior only raises more red flags and, more importantly, alerts local governments to a person’s general whereabouts. I don’t pay tickets anymore. I don’t even keep them in an envelope. This may become an issue if I ever need to verify my credit score or take out a mortgage but practically speaking, on a day-to-day basis, it only presents a problem when a Wayside destination is government-adjacent or, in the case of ‘Planchette Airforce Base,’ so outwardly non-government as to raise suspicion.

‘A hub for UFO sightings, livestock mutilations, crashing metallic sounds, and lost time, ‘Planchette AFB’ shares a dozen qualities with New Mexico’s Area 51 but ask your local conspiracy nut about the nation’s most confounding places and ‘Planchette AFB’ won’t ever break the top 10. Why? Sheer forthcomingness in its most uncomfortable form.

‘Planchette AFB’ is chain-linked, razor-wired, and generally advertised as being off-limits by signs that cover all proper variations of ‘no trespassing’ in nearly every regional language. This has been true since its establishment in 1955. These signs were taken quite seriously until 1962 when Andrew Cabot, determined to end his life in a hail of bullets, sped toward the front gate in a pick-up truck in the clear light of day and discovered that the soldiers posted there had no intention of stopping him.

Cabot’s story prompted active explorations of the site, orchestrated mainly by members of the anti-military collective ‘Men Against War,’ which happened to be headquartered nearby. They confirmed Cabot’s claims: the soldiers at ‘Planchette AFB’ would, at most, shout at unwelcomed visitors but would never actively restrict their entry. Still, the exploration of ‘Planchette AFB’ ended up taking a long time for several reasons.

The first was simple disbelief. Despite the assurances of others, most of the ‘Men Against War’ were sure that ‘Planchette AFB’ represented a new sort of government honeypot. If trespassers weren’t already being strongarmed into bringing their fellows back to an unknown fate at the base, the soldiers were certainly keeping track of their personal details, building some sort of massive case that would see them all imprisoned in the months that followed. Cabot himself was no help in this regard. Though the brief fame seemed to distract the man from his suicidal ideations for a time, he finished the job in early 1965, hanging himself in the closet of a nearby hotel. For those already on the fence, this seemed proof enough that contact with the base was ultimately deadly.

The second factor was the complexity of the base. Though the soldiers would move to stop trespassers, several doors remained locked and several objects remained unexplained. In June 1965, for instance, members of MAW managed to break into one of the previously unentered hangars. There they discovered four 20-foot cubes, each with a perfect mirror finish and each housed as though it were an aircraft of some sort. Excitement ebbed when, after three months, nothing more could be discovered about them. They emitted no signals and sported no obvious seams. Soldiers would polish smudges from their surfaces but would not answer questions about them, claiming all information regarding the cubes was classified. Similarly, after breaching the central laboratory building in 1966, members of MAW discovered that the bulk of the structure existed underground as a series of concrete hallways randomly segmented by heavy doors. If ‘Planchette AFB’ wasn’t some sort of behavioral experiment, skeptics suggested it was simply a rat race designed to distract the public from the real deal.

The third factor was a civilian death at the hands of a soldier in 1973. The official story is that a member of MAW had a little too much to drink and became aggressive. Upon striking a soldier in the Cube Hangar, the first incident of its kind, a second soldier opened fire upon him. When the case came to court, base leaders proved that they were more than happy to suggest the dead man had been trespassing in a classified hangar when he chose to attack the soldier. Though no soldier has acted upon a civilian since, the death set a precedent for behavior on the base and likely led to the eventual dissolution of MAW.

Almost nothing has changed about ‘Planchette AFB’ since then. Soldiers rotate in and out. The facilities are maintained with seemingly needless precision. Civilians can, and still do, explore the grounds and can expect only the passive loathing and occasional shouted reproach of nearby personnel. Most importantly, nothing of interest has been discovered there since Cabot’s run despite the concentrated efforts of various travelers. ‘Planchette AFB’ represents the most uninteresting of mysteries: one with no explanation at all.’

It seems like half a century’s relative passivity would be enough to put me at ease but it doesn’t. Not even a little. So when I’m driving through the open gate of ‘Planchette AFB’ and the soldiers stationed there begin shouting at me (as research suggested they might) I still manage to slide the bike through a patch of gravel and only just catch myself on a leg that’s been twisted more times than I can count. It’s painful and embarrassing but the soldiers don’t laugh or offer to help. They just scream at me for trespassing.

When the bike’s safely upright I continue onto the base proper and, there, things quiet down a bit. I park next to a van that sports a logo for ‘Melanie’s Outta This World Tours’ and spot the group across the way. I don’t have a booking with Melanie but, as I get Hector situated in his harness, I consider following the tour to the Cube Hangar as a safety-in-numbers gambit. They’re soon joined by a red-faced officer-looking type who begins demanding that they turn back while Melanie soothes the crowd and suggests they take pictures I decide to head off on my own.

I seem to attract less attention on my own and I soon find myself deep in the mazelike basement of ‘Planchette AFB.’ After a few turns I hear a sleepy voice echo down the hall.

“Looking for me, buddy? Hey. Looking for me?”

A man is draped over the threshold of a door. It’s clear he’s been sleeping- a thick blanket suggests that he came here with an intent to sleep. His shirt indicates that he’s a ‘Planchette Busy Body,’ a volunteer that sleeps in damaged sections of the base to keep the soldiers from resecuring gained ground. They maintain an online presence to support a fairly unconvincing recruitment effort.

“I’m not looking for anyone,” I tell him.

“Fuuuuuuck,” he says, “I think they forgot about me. My guy’s, like, way overdue.”

“I’ve got some trail-mix if…”

“Anything to smoke?”

“I quit,” I tell him, “Quit a long time ago.”

“Fuuuuuuck.”

“How long are you supposed to be here?”

“I signed up for a couple days but I’m a regular. Do it every week. This guy’s supposed to have been here-” he checks his watch “-three days ago. Is Melanie around?”

“The tour group?”

“Yesss. Melanie will bum me a smoke. Would you and your rat thing sit here for me? I just want to dump the toilet and bum a smoke. I’d owe you one.”

I look down the hall behind us then back over the man’s shoulder to where the hallway seems to fork. Totally quiet. Completely still. “You can’t just sneak out real quick?”

“Some places you can, man,” he says, “Cuz in a lot of these places we’ve hacked the codes or copied the keys so it doesn’t matter if doors get shut. Our people couldn’t crack this one so they just melted the hinges off.” The man gestures to deep metal scars on either side of the frame. “And it’s a pinch point. If they put this back, they cut off half the facility. What I’m saying is, it’s an important door. What’s five minutes to you?”

I have no answer and with that the man abandons me. Hector and I sit in the door frame for an hour. Two hours. Every time I determine to leave I seem to hear boots clicking just out of sight and I make myself stay for the sake of progress on the Wayside and because I worry that the man’s sleeping in this doorway means others are sleeping further ahead. Would base officials consider them before replacing the door, or would they seal them inside, setting a new precedent with which to enforce the seriousness with which they view trespassers? My opinion of government accountability is grim, to say the least, and the worry anchors me.

Footfalls wake Hector and Hector eventually wakes me. Eight hours have passed and a womans appeared, hesitating at an intersection ahead of us. I think to call out just as she’s about to turn down a different way.

“Hey!” I call. “Hey! Are you looking for me?”

-traveler