‘The surface of the Earth is many things, sometimes ugly and often melancholic, but, unsatisfied to the extent at which it was either, humanity looked to space for inspiration and the result was America’s ‘Lunar Wonderland.’ Adverts on cereal boxes and between episodes of beloved Saturday morning cartoons promised kids a true-to-life moon-walking adventure- something that eighties’ children and concept designers understood very, very differently.

Imagine the growing pit in a child’s stomach, then, as the family car crests the last hill before the touted ‘Lunar Wonderland’ to find it glowing eerily under a massive glass dome. Imagine that, through the windows, the child notices no other families inside. Imagine a theme park that has created and employed a state-of-the-art acoustic design method that swallows up sound in order to replicate the oppressive silence of space. Imagine, as a child, tripping into a shallow crater and being unable to hear your family call for you or to see them through the asbestos moon-dust that now coats your helmet, or to reach them due to the life-like heaviness of your child-sized replica space suit.

‘Lunar Wonderland’s’ ten-year run is impressive, considering the lengths it took to make itself as frightening as possible for its target audience. Like many of the eighties’ conceptual flops, it remains relatively intact in the deserts of the deep south, too plastic, really, to decompose and too expensive to dismantle (experts suggest that removing any part of the dome would spread a catastrophic amount of the aforementioned asbestos‘…like a child blowing apart a dandelion).’

More recently, millennial retro-lust has created a small market for ‘moonshine’ which, here, means paying a local to haul out and plug their generator into the ‘Wonderland’s’ grid. Parties otherwise too young to have witnessed the moon in its prime can experience the vacant terror of the lunar surface for the first time and eighties-kids, now grown, can exorcise the cool, white nightmares that pulse beneath pleasanter dreams.’

The local that offers me ‘moonshine’ insists that we arrive after dark and that I ride shotgun in his pick-up. His truck reeks of a cigarette-smoking grandfather, the smell far too stale to belong to anyone in his own generation. It reminds me of my own truck when the sun would dredge up the same sort of smells from between the cracks of the fake leather- perfume, body odor: ghosts of people still living.

‘Lunar Wonderland’ is dormant when we arrive, of course. The complex is larger than anything I could have possibly imagined and the false terrain beneath the dome glows, dimly reflecting the light of its real-life counterpart. When I circle back around to the man I find his upper-half fully engulfed by the conglomerate systems of the exposed machine. He emerges for air and startles to see me standing close.

“There’s a suit for you in the truck,” he says, “Your 30 minutes starts as soon as the lights come on.”

I take the hint and begin the lengthy process of pulling the space suit on. It’s small, for me, and shares the scent profile of the truck to intensely that I wonder if it isn’t the source, but the sudden quiet, the sudden protection from the desert wind severs my ties to the earth and instills a certain calm. I walk noisily back to the man and he says something, his voice too muffled by the helmet for me to understand. He waves, then, and leads me to the entrance where I see that the keypad on the outside glows with a small red light. When the man passes a haphazard card-key across it, the doors open and I step inside.

The false moon is glowing, now, and past an initial wave of fear I find myself stumbling with a bout of dizziness. The ground buzzes through the thick soles of the space boots and I understand that the surface of the moon, which rises from the floor like a wide hill, is rotating. The guides don’t mention this and it means that, embedded in the earth below me, is a scale replica of the moon in full. I turn to look back and the man motions to me through the glass. He scribbles ‘22’ in the dust, there: my remaining time.

Best get to it, then.

There is always a question of what it means to experience a site from Autumn by the Wayside. At the defunct ‘Lunar Wonderland,’ I content myself with sitting quietly is a small, dusty crater as the glowing replica earth passes overhead, shifting, occasionally, as the cumbersome suit digs into my back.

Before long I feel the incline of the surface sloping downward and see the man gesturing angrily through the glass. I’ve lost track of time- maybe fallen asleep. I stand on stiff legs and write back that I’m willing to pay for more. The man indicates something- a rate increase, potentially, but we walk away from the dome having reached some sort of accord.

The complex is a labyrinth of old ice cream parlors and souvenir shops so I seek out a service door and find someone has pried it open before me. The stairway beyond is plain but functional compared to the pageantry above. Navigating it in the suit proves difficult, however, and I’m out of breath by the time I find the next door. It’s labeled: ‘Dust Recollection and Filter Access.’

‘Moon dust’ pours from the room as I swing the door open, covering the boots of the space suit. I begin to itch, inwardly, and hope that the locked-in smell of smoke is a testament to the suit’s tight chemical barrier. The floor inside is coated with the stuff and illuminated by the far wall- a wide portion of the moon’s rotating surface. There are brushes in place, seemingly to collect and redistribute the dust on the floor, but a powdery mountain has formed where there should be an outgoing belt and so it builds here instead.

I dig the pile out, finding several generations’ worth of lost-and-found items in the process including dozens of small flags likely planted by those who purchased moonshine like me. I wonder, briefly, if I’ll ever travel abroad and decide that I probably won’t.

The lowest level exits into the basement of the complex where a full half of the glowing replica is laid bare. The material is translucent where the powder has been brushed away completely except for a thin, rust-colored line off the center. I puzzle over this inclusion for a while, trying to remember what I’d learned of the moon in elementary school science, when I stumble though a pile of asbestos dust and upon a flattened space suit inside of which is the flattened body of a woman. In the moment of inspection I manage before revulsion sets in, I realize that she, like me, had reached into the filter and she, unlike me, had been pulled into orbit.

In the light of the rotating ceiling I see the patches on her suit indicate arrival on the same imaginary spacecraft as mine and for the second time in a matter of weeks I’m reminded that I am alone again. The Editor likely wouldn’t have stopped me putting my arm in the filter and she probably wouldn’t have been able to pull me out in time, but she would have been there to understand how I met my end. Where did they look for her when they realized she was gone? Could their guesses have ever come close to something like this?

The false moon darkens abruptly and, except for the glowing afterimage of the red-projected ring, the room is cast into darkness. I’m forced to feel my way back to the surface, a punishment the man above seems to think is fitting enough for keeping him so long. It gives me time to remember the dangers of the ‘Wayside,’ the long drops and the small spaces.

-traveler

‘‘The Shining Face of Seattle’ is actually an hour outside the city but the name sticks all the same. It’s positioned far enough into the wooded acreage of an otherwise unremarkable rest stop that it sees little traffic, but travelers who happen to read the signs outside the bathroom will have no trouble identifying the short path that leads to the statue. It is not uncommon to see others moving that way.

The origin of the statue is entirely unknown. Bolts at the base suggest there may have existed a dedicating plaque but it has been missing long enough that its absence is clear in all existent pictures of ‘The Shining Face.’ The statue itself depicts a man in bronze, doubled over but looking up and forward, as though struggling to finish a race. His clothes suggest a modern sculptor (which makes the absent history all the more strange) and the foundations of a second, small platform that may have once held the object of his gaze can be found ahead of him in the brush. The man’s metal has oxidized black with the exception of his face which, local lore would have you believe, grants preternatural foresight to those who rub it. As one might expect, it shines.

What many don’t expect is that the ‘The Shining Face’ has worn so thin over the years that its features have smoothed or collapsed entirely, forming something like a gaping mask. Guesses regarding ‘The Face’s’ emotional state vary from terrified to ecstatic, these interpretations being reflected in the poses of those who post pictures of the statue online. One may wrap his arm around the statue’s shoulders as though consoling him, for instance, and another may bend nearby as though bowled over by the same hilarious joke.

There are surprisingly few pictures of people actually rubbing the statue, a phenomenon that can be attributed to an entirely different local tradition- booby-trapping the face. The only evidence of this dates back to 2013 when pranksters filled ‘The Shining Face of Seattle’ with raw meat (presumably pressing it through the smoothed mouth and eyes) so that when a group of scouts approached to place their hands on the metal, several bloated rats streamed out of the head. A clip of the incident can be found with a simple internet search. Legend would suggest that, at other points in time, ‘The Face’ has been covered in glue, electrified, filled with insects, wired to screech at being touched, and that the mouth has been widened, sharpened, and turned inwards so that an unwitting visitor might reach for a light inside and find themselves trapped by lips made razor, though why anyone would attempt-’

There was a time, not so long ago, when the Editor would read aloud from Shitholes as we approached a site, preparing us for what we were about to experience. In the span of a week I’ve fallen back on old habits, which is to say, I’ve gone back to skimming the entries.

It’s grown dark except for the lit eyes of ‘The Shining Face of Seattle.’ I’ve left ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ in the bike’s trailer, along with my pack- along with most of what I own. I twist for a view of the trail and feel the razor-mouth of ‘The Face’ peel back another quarter-inch of skin. The lower half of my jacket’s sleeve was cut cleanly away in my initial attempt to get free. The bare arm inside is cold and wet with blood.

My left hand fumbles, again, for my cellphone. I scroll through my contacts and reach the bottom of the list in three short seconds.

Nobody is coming.

-traveler

The editor returning to Zeitgeist is like a missing cog falling back into the works of a massively complex, deeply broken machine. She pulls a manuscript and a pile of sticky-notes from the drawer below the gun and places a call that rings on a phone hardly 20 feet from her open office door. In the brief interim, she makes several quick proofing marks on the final page of the manuscript and slides it into an envelope. The man she called steps past me to take the package from her and sets a basket on the desk, filled to overflowing with what appears, at first glance, to be garbage.

The man leaves and I shut the door behind him.

“What the fuck?”

The editor sighs and pulls a dirty paper towel from the pile. When she unfolds it, I see there’s writing on the inside.

“Sept. 21,” it says, “Saw blue bird hanging upside down from tree. Eight in a row?”

A rough illustration of the same is scribbled underneath.

“This,” she says, “Is the editing process. This is what your book looked like when we received it. It’s what would happen if you turned your backpack over into the garbage can and asked me to make something of it. More than that, it’s what did happen.”

“You remember all this now?”

“Yes…” she says, “I think so. It’s hard to explain. Something happened to…”

The phone rings and the editor’s arm has nearly crossed the distance when she stops herself. As soon as her hand touches the desk again the phone quiets.

“There’s a system in place here,” she tries again, “Zeitgeist is trying to… preserve these weird, shitty…”

She pauses again, but maintains the wherewithal to frown at her adjective choice before starting over.

“In a capitalist society, the fast-track to preservation is sales,” she explains, pulling another sheet from the basket, “There is writing here- here in the country I mean- so much writing that just doesn’t go anywhere. Nobody wants to take something like this and make it coherent because it’s tedious as fuck and…”

The ringing starts again and this time the editor’s arm shoots across the desk. She pulls the phone from its cradle and flings it against the door where it shatters into several pieces. The dial tone plays dully from the components still attached to the cord.

“It’s tedious because it’s all so complicated and it’s all so… fragile.” The editor clicks a red pen open and closed. “It’s like a… imagine a…”

“Imagine a path,” I say, and she nods.

“Yeah, imagine this untouched wilderness- pretty enough that it’s got to be sitting on an oil field somewhere. Imagine the government says we can keep it, but only if we make it safe for people to enter so they can see the beauty of it. And the danger. Now it’s your job to tame it- to cut a path into this paradise without collapsing the thing. In order to preserve it, you have to carve into it. You have to hurt it a little. You have to sell passes and stuffed bears. Does that make sense?”

A phone rings in the editor’s desk before I can answer. She’s about to open a drawer before we realize, at the same time, it’s the drawer that holds the pistol.

“Zeitgeist is doing for shitty writing what you do for shitty attractions,” she says, keeping her voice above the sound of the ringing, “Preservation by monetization. Selling to save.”

The ringing stops, again, and I rub my eyes.

“How did you keep coming back to life?”

“An editor can make changes to a piece as long as the spirit of the story is kept intact,” she shrugs, “I may have been heavy-handed early on, but I needed to understand where the story was going before I could set you on the right course. You’re a tough guy to track down.”

My eyes are sore and red under my thumbs. A headache has begun to form and it pulses with the dull warning of a distant thunderhead.

“What do you want?” I ask, and the editor pulls the top sticky-note from her pile. There, written and underlined in red pen, are two words:

‘An epilogue.’

‘It used to be that a traveler could happen upon a woman selling pirated DVD’s from the back of her blue pick-up truck. She was everywhere, this woman, in every state, along every highway. The woman never had the movie you wanted, but she could often recommend something like it that she did have. The movies were invariably strange- nearly unwatchable both for the quality of the video and of the content. When the woman’s ties to the gray infrastructure were called into scrutiny, research discovered the DVDs were, in fact, unique to each sale. A mass collection campaign has been organized to study the chronology and ‘mythos,’ as it were, of the ‘Roadside Attractions.’

The woman and her blue pick-up have vanished from the public eye and, while many blame the gray road community for forcing her into hiding, many more insist that the sudden abundance of esoteric streaming services have simply made obsolete another time-honored American job.’

-traveler

We are inside ‘Zeitgeist Publishing’ for an hour before I realize we will learn nothing from the people there. They couldn’t help us if they wanted to.

‘Preface

This is not a destination guide, reader. No one place between the covers warrants visiting on its own. This book shares more in common with the average trail guide than it does with any popular travel publication. It attempts to do the work of a trail guide for roadways, the half-mad cardiovascular system of America with all of its cracked, weeping asphalt and all of its cracked, weeping people. It attempts to describe the way between things and, in doing so, the book has become as mad and winding as the road.

I’m sorry, for this, but there is no other way.

I don’t understand how ‘Zeitgeist’ came to know about my writing or in what form they will publish it. I don’t understand what they want when they ask me to write a preface. This must be what a ranger feels when they are tasked with describing their park in short sentences for a single sign at the trailhead: entice the reader- and warn them.

Let me entice you.

Strangeness is inherent to the periphery. A speeding vehicle strikes a deer. The animal drags its body to the outer edge of the forest and succumbs to death. It becomes strange, there. Its shape changes. It fills with new life. It becomes a niche ecosystem for things neither afraid of the traffic nor of the woodland predators. It exists, for a short time, in limbo. And then it is forgotten.

The wayside attractions are much the same- repulsive and fleeting. To purchase this book, to follow it as a guide, is not to become the driver or the deer. It is to become the weird life that inhabits the corpse in the interim.

Let me warn you.

Carry water, always. Tell your loved ones where you are going and when you hope to return. Carry a blanket and a length of rope. Tell your loved ones when you are going and how you hope to return. Carry a flashlight and fresh batteries. Tell your loved ones how you are going and why you hope to return. Carry a shovel and something sharp. Tell your loved ones why you are going and where you hope to return. Carry a map- any map.

Carry water.

My limited understanding of German suggests that ‘geist’ is just as likely to translate to ‘ghost’ as it is to ‘spirit.’ My limited understanding of things unknown is that there is a huge difference between the two. The spirits of the forest. Team spirit. Fine spirits. Spirituality. There is nothing in these words to suggest menace. Or death. Ghosts, on the other hand, are always dead and often unhappily so. Maybe that’s why we lean on ‘spirit’ in our understanding of ‘zeitgeist,’ though my own experiences would suggest that lost time can be as bitter and haunting as the restless dead.

A preface is strange, reader. Like the ranger’s sign, it must be written by someone who has already completed the task it defines. It’s the reader’s beginning and the author’s end.’

There is an art to looking busy and everyone inside the small office that constitutes this branch of ‘Zeitgeist Publishing’ excels at it. I excelled at it in a past life, which is why it only takes me the hour to see through the charade. A man scribbles on a note pad and throws out the pages. Blank paper pours from the copier and a woman arrives to cycle it back into the machine. Several people appear to be mouthing silently at phones in the back and they end their calls as I pass on my way to the restroom. The man at the front desk keeps us waiting and, assuming that’s his job, he’s the only one currently performing it well.

The Editor is quiet and I take the silence as apprehension until she readily agrees to investigate on the way back from the toilet. We find her office, or, we find the editor’s office and her name is on the plaque. It’s empty until she enters and then she seems to vacillate between the Editor I know and the editor that she should be.

“I think I’ve been here before,” she says, opening a drawer and setting her gun inside, “Isn’t this where we started?”

-traveler

We arrive in a Zeitgeist hub town and as we coast around the corner toward the supposed branch’s address, I feel the Editor’s fingers digging into my sides. They release, suddenly, as we pass. It appears, by all accounts, to be open.

Of course, after weeks of travel, the Editor begins to lose her nerve. I see it in the way her hands shake at the gas station, rattling the ice in her plastic soda fountain cup. I hear it in deep breaths she takes when she thinks I’m not close enough to notice. The Editor, faced with the end of journey, is panicking. All of her work has been with things unfinished.

She jumps on the idea of taking a hotel room for the evening (“It’s getting late,” I say, “They may not be open much longer.”). She grips me again as we pass the branch on the way, straining her neck to catch a glimpse of… what? Another self? I look too but I see the windows of Zeitgeist Publishing are mirrors and turn back to the road before I can make eye contact with her. The door seems to be opening as we pass but I don’t see the person leaving and, if the Editor does, she keeps it to herself.

By sheer happenstance there is a Zeitgeist Publishing product catalog in the drawer of the hotel room (along with a phonebook, the Bible). It’s a slim pamphlet, made up entirely of esoteric travel writing.

“‘Check Under the Bed’: a Guide to Cheap Hotels”

“‘An English-to-Forest Translation Guide’: Make Them Listen to your Poetry!”

“Biting Insects Back: Alternative Protein Recipes.”

Finally, near the back, is Autumn by the Wayside, its subtitle playfully censored by exclamation points. Its description is as follows:

‘How long can you be lost on a circular path? Follow the curious traveler as he attempts to find out. Tag along on his journey into America’s living room, where he digs into the spaces between couch cushions to find things otherwise forgotten. Follow him, and tell us where you are. He has been gone so long.

‘Autumn by the Wayside:’ a travel guide for those who mean to lose themselves.‘

-traveler

‘A small, mid-western university, Prairie College, is renowned for two things: producing well-equipped students of agriculture and a growing monument to failure that spreads across its expansive campus dubbed ‘Academic Rigor Mortis’ (or, sometimes, the ARM). In practice, the ARM restates a situation made relatively clear in the institution’s public documents- that the success of their small number of graduates is achieved at the cost of the large percentage of students that fail or drop-out. The academic targets of Prairie College are impossibly demanding and students are expected to fulfill physical farming duties in addition to coursework. The administration has leaned into this trend, creating something that shares more aspects with an obstacle course than it does with any other accredited educational program in the country. Its workload has been deemed psychologically damaging by several local psychiatrists who describe failed students as ‘irrevocably broken.’

‘Academic Rigor Mortis’ is the result of a particularly cruel policy, one that states that ‘Prairie College’ will not release documents for transfer before a student buries her completed physical coursework on campus, erecting a small headstone that displays their proposed (and unfinished) thesis to mark the lot. The ARM, then, is a field sown with failure and failure grows there, the paper and ink leaching into the earth and creating a dark chemical shadow.

‘Prairie College’s’ founding documents famously refer to its ideal graduates as ‘enlightened farmers’ and famously digress into something like a summons for a singular being: ‘The Enlightened Farmer.’ The school’s tightening filter, it’s suggested, will someday result in its final graduating class- a class of one. This student will end the ARM’s decay and, perhaps, the punishing educational cycle of the institution from which it extends.’

There was a time when I thought I may have wanted to be a farmer. I would tend the garden in the backyard and read books about the end of the world. Looking out over the ‘ARM,’ I wonder how long we’ve been preparing for disaster. Humanity is bracing itself for an apocalypse and the end-times are crowded with prophecies. The longer we draw this out, the stranger the world will become.

-traveler

‘‘The Thistle Garden’ has grown at the center of Bellstaff, Wisconsin for three decades and it has made the small town miserable for all those years. The thistle there (all North American varieties of the species as well as several prize-winning, experimental strains) is not bound by the garden walls. It runs rampant, having infiltrated the urban sprawl in the same way it seems to infest forests elsewhere in the country. It rises from split asphalt and twists itself into ivy. It lies dry and dormant under snowfall until a careless foot breaks through the frost. It grows like mold in backpacks and in the collars of old shirts. The air of Bellstaff itches with thistle and so thick does it grow that ‘The Garden’ may well be the town itself.

But, officially, it is not.

‘The Thistle Garden’ is an acre of tastefully shaped weeds and, because contemporary landscaping favors a wilder look than years previous, the thistle is allowed to grow until it leans just over the boundary of the walkway, creating an unwinnable maze. Few would think to enter ‘The Thistle Garden’ in shorts, but even jeans-sporting visitors report that the plants linger on their denim, an evolutionary long-con with no obvious purpose but to cause discomfort.

Nature’s senseless cruelty, in this regard, is mirrored in ‘The Garden’s’ keepers, who have constructed a playground in the center- the best playground in all of Bellstaff. To quickly catch one’s self at the end of the slide seems to be a natural talent held by most of the city’s minors, but this is not at all the case. Each of these children has been jettisoned into the thistle at least once- a tradition as deeply held as chicken pox and equally as important. They have learned and they encourage others to learn as well. Out-of-town cousins are rarely warned ahead of time and, though many consider this a vicious joke, you will find no one laughs while they rescue a child from ‘The Garden.’

-excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

In my absolute willingness to turn over creative guidance to the Editor, I wonder if I may have overestimated her expertise. The relationship between a writer and an editor should involve careful collaboration, I think, or a playful push and pull. It should involve a balance, not necessarily of skills, but of power.

Or so I imagine.

Somewhere along the way I seem to have given up total control to the Editor, assuming, like I do of almost every person I meet, they she knew something about this world that I did not. As I watch her struggle with the crank of an old souvenir penny-crusher, I wonder if I’ve put too much trust in her lead and I worry about the process of reclaiming that power peacefully.

“I don’t think this is the one,” I venture, and she glares at me.

“What makes you the expert?”

“If I wrote the book-” I reason, “-and you assume I did. If I wrote that it would be easy once you found the right machine, it’s not going to be hard.”

She continues to glare and I shrug.

“I never try very hard.”

‘The span known, among exonumists, as the Period for Contemporary Elongateds has already far surpassed the 20-year Period for Modern Elongateds, the distinguishing factor of which was that said elongated exonumia were mainly created and sold as trinkets in stores rather than crushed fresh on-site by the sheer manpower of the tourists themselves. The early timeline of the Elongated Exonumia Tradition is somewhat contested in the field and crushed coins existing prior to the 1960’s are simply called ‘oldies,’ a term that is just as likely to refer to actual, machined designs as it is to nickels left on train tracks.

Suffice to say that the off-centered copper stamping of a smiling gorilla that you’ve frivolously squandered your laundry money on has a long, absurd history and, no doubt, a long, absurd future.

The Period for Contemporary Elongateds is coming to a strange end with the discovery of a mysterious setting available on a series of modern penny-crushing machines in rural Iowa. The most reliable of these machines can be found at the ‘Diesel Dump,’ a small gas-station, laundromat, and dive bar that is popular both with the locals and with a certain brand of roving hipster. By pulling the crank out at its base, as though one is preparing to set the time on their watch, the machine can be operated in reverse and, fed any type of elongated copper, it will produce two quarters and an old penny.

The process has become known, in certain circles, as ‘Maxwell’s Remonetization’ and the machine, ‘Maxwell.’ ‘Maxwell’ and its mysterious process remained a strange but benign attraction until late 2017 when Alexander Horton, a longtime exonumist and recent drug-addict, arrived at the ‘Diesel Dump’ and exchanged his formidable collection of elongated coins for $350 dollars in warm quarters and pennies. The event prompted Valeria Isabella, owner of the ‘Diesel Dump,’ to admit that she hadn’t ever given the machine much thought, neither emptying nor servicing it in the several decades it has gathered dust near the door.

Experts have confirmed that ‘Maxwell’ is returning crushed pennies to their original forms, not just exchanging them for equal value, and that the quarters paid back for the trouble are identical to those used to pay for the initial elongation. The ‘experts,’ it should be said, are all members of a quasi-cult that has formed around ‘Maxwell’s Remonetization’ and believe that the machines capable of the process are acting against the slow decay of our universe. These strangers stalk tourist hubs with heavy pockets and a jangling gait, sure that, in repairing the nation’s flattened coinage, they ward off time’s arrow.

Those in opposition of the ‘Remonetizationist’ movement have criticized its followers for glorifying the past through the worship of old money. The cult leaders have denied these accusations, stating they act only against entropy and are not at all opposed to change.’

‘Maxwell,’ it turns out, has been moved near the counter so that the ‘Remonetizationists’ can be easily monitored. The crank pulls forward with a satisfying thunk and the Editor glares, again, to see that I was right.

From her wallet, the Editor pulls an old souvenir penny, dark with tarnish. She hands it to me without explanation. It says ‘CLOWN TOWN, 1991’ and features a wide, cartoon grin from which several teeth are missing.

“My sister stole my lucky quarter for this,” she says when I hand it back, “And it’s been a pretty shitty thirty years.”

The Editor bends the metal to that it fits into the machine’s input tray and slams it backward. We work the crank together and ‘Maxwell’ groans with mysterious internal effort. After a minute, or so, three coins clatter out the bottom. The Editor retrieves them and she smiles, instantly, in recognition.

“That’s the one.”

The remaining 26 cents is thrown into a pile that eventually pays for two soft-serve ice creams and a coffee on the patio of the ‘Diesel Dump.’ The sun is setting and we haven’t made plans for the night, a prospect that would normally worry me, but seems to be mitigated, in part, by the Editor’s renewed calm. She fingers the quarter incessantly, twirling it on the table and dropping it often enough that I suggest she pocket the thing before it’s lost again. She does, and her hand remains there with it as the ice cream melts to a chocolate puddle on the cheap plastic furniture.

-traveler

‘Though a business model like that of ‘National Harvest’ necessitates many branches, tours are only offered at the founding facility in Northern Vermont. ‘The Stowe Facility’ is a modest structure compared to the modern holdings of ‘National Harvest’ and much of the original machinery inside has been decommissioned, forming a small museum. Active sectors are reserved for research and development as well as a variety of kitschy, public-facing services: a shop where one might purchase a small sack of leaves that once circulated near their childhood home, a booth where one might don the regional uniform and practice firing leaves from a leaf blower (spreading them evenly over the yard of a false home), and, finally, the largest leaf pile in the world where, for a modest five dollars, adults can relive the joy of leaping into the autumnal unknown.

Alisha Hirsch, ‘National Harvest’s’ current CEO,  maintains a residence on the grounds of ‘The Stowe Facility,’ though she is rarely seen outside her small, private forest (a sampling of nearly all American deciduous species). A fierce businesswoman, Hirsch garnered a degree of infamy in the 1980’s when she pioneered the use of sticks in otherwise harmless leaf piles with the purpose of dissuading children from inhibiting the re-collecting process. Backlash would later result in the recall of dangerous sticks and the distribution of festively designed ‘jack o’lantern’ leaf sacks, a gesture many still see as self-serving given the ease in which the sacks allow for ‘National Harvest’ to reclaim and process used leaves. Following the haphazard recall, sticks remain in circulation to this day.

Controversies aside, ‘Autumn’ is commonly recognized in the central and northern stretches of the United States and, recently, has begun to enjoy increased popularity overseas as well. Offering rare insight into the complex logistical problems a company such as ‘National Harvest’ might face on a global scale, Hirsch recently outlined a plan for ‘international Autumn.’

‘It couldn’t all happen at the same time,’ she admitted, shuffling through the motely detritus outside her home, ‘The sheer volume of leaves necessary for a worldwide Autumn would be unmanageable. What would need to happen, what we’re testing right now, is a staggered approach, so that the collected leaves from one country are processed and shipped to the next. It would never be Autumn everywhere,’ she concluded, ‘But it would always be Autumn somewhere.’

“Hirsch is a bitch,” the Editor growls, crunching her way across the lawn and toward ‘The Stowe Facility’s’ small giftshop, “It’s not just the sticks- did you know she was behind the child labor shit too?”

“I thought I’d heard something…”

“Back before she was CEO she designed this whole idea of having kids rake up leaves like it’s some sort of great American duty. She convinced a generation of parents to force their kids into slavery and then stabbed them in the back- literally in some cases. There was a lawsuit and everything.”

The Editor stops to collect herself at the giftshop’s door, heaving out a great lungful of air before stepping inside. Her tirade continues but is reduced to a mutter.

“The leaves they’re using these days are designed to break apart after a season or two,” she says, picking up a small plastic bag of leaves and sniffing carefully at the contents, “They realized it’s cheaper to produce lower quality shit because it keeps people from just re-using their own, storing them in the basement or whatever. Used to be you could jump in the same pile ten times before it flattened out…” She chooses another sack and grimaces at the smell. “What order are these in?”

I spend time looking over a few decorative magnets while the Editor describes her old town to a clerk. My own childhood home was situated in a pine forest and, while there were a few families who celebrated ‘Autumn’ with a transplanted maple or two in their yard, it’s not a season I became accustomed to until I began to travel.

“Found it!” the Editor smiles, her mixed feelings about ‘National Harvest’ briefly suppressed by a wave of nostalgia, “Take a whiff of this and tell me what you think?”

The leaves in the Editor’s bag smell much like the others- much like the store and the grounds overall, but I smile back and give her an appreciative thumbs up.

“It’s expensive,” she admits, crinkling the little sack between her fingers, “They’re not producing this mixture anymore. And these are… old. Like, they could have been from my neighborhood when I was a kid there.”

“At least they’d be durable.”

“Yeah…”

I see the Editor struggling to justify the expense and, in the end, agree to split the cost with her.

“It’ll be nice to smell something besides our feet when we camp.”

The Editor is subdued again as we prepare for the next stretch of highway. She sniffs at the bag before carefully zipping it into her pack.

“It’s weird to think that the others, the other like me- they’d walk away with a completely different bag. Their ‘Autumn’ would be totally different. Maybe it died with them.”

“Maybe,” I admit, “But if we’re off to meet one of them, maybe we’ll get a chance to compare.”

The Editor disappears into her helmet before I can gauge any reaction, but I see her carefully crush several leaves under her boot before mounting the bike and she laughs as I steer us through a loose pile in the parking lot, scattering it behind us in a great, broken cloud.

-traveler

‘Blame for ‘The Sharp Place’ lies definitively with the Baby Boomers, whose method for the disposal of razors parallels their method for handling the climate, a whimsical laissez-faire approach (that may, yet, be the death of us). The method is simple, if not baffling: 1. A slot is cut into the bathroom wall, sometimes in the mirror cabinet and sometimes garishly chiseled out of tile. 2. Used razors are pressed into the slot by freshly shaven homeowners. 3. Intrusive ideas about where the razors may go or what may happen when they are found are ignored. 4. The homeowner’s subconscious remains distantly aware that the walls are filling with rusted razors, hair, and blood. 5. The homeowner’s subconscious manifests irrational fears that the razors will turn up at inconvenient times (i.e. in the apples given to children at Halloween). 6. Repeat.

‘The Sharp Place,’ then, is an American state of mind, a chicken-or-egg straining of logic that takes the example of pressing razors into the walls of our private restrooms and allows us to assume the worst of everyone in the neighborhood because, if good people can press razors into their walls, who knows what the shifty couple across the street might be capable of? Gluing them to playground equipment? And if the neighbors are feeding razorblades to stray dogs, is it really so bad to press them into the bathroom wall where, at least as far as we can tell, they are safely away from children and animals?

‘The Sharp Place’ is equal parts condemnation and permission, the new American paranoia.  It’s the reason razors are banned from airplanes- if we can’t trust ourselves with them, we certainly can’t trust the man sitting next to us who may, in our absence, slip under the seat and run one across our delicate Achilles tendon. And he, under the seat, can hardly trust that we have not gone to press razors into the walls of the airplane bathroom, risking catastrophic depressurization for the relief of being free of a blade.

‘The Sharp Place’ is also a place, deep underground but open to public viewing. It is the terminus of a complex series of pipes, an infrastructure that connects the walls of all American bathrooms and ferries abandoned razors into a natural pit, the bottom of which remains something of a mystery. It is a place that smells like blood, though it is likely only rust.

Visiting the site of ‘The Sharp Place’ does nothing to mitigate the feeling of it, though some have found small relief in bringing boxes of their used razors for disposal at the hub- a guilty pilgrimage that misses the point entirely.’

The Editor and I search for an entrance to ‘The Sharp Place’ off I-5 in Washington and find nothing but an orchard where Shitholes suggests it might be. I call her superstitious when she stops me from eating an apple there but I drop it when she isn’t looking. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.

-traveler