‘‘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

‘For a country with such capitalist ideals, there is nothing more damaging to the American ego than the common ‘For Sale’ sign. It appears in a city as the first blister of a pox, reddening windows and hopping from the threshold of one business to the next. Storefronts collapse like rotten teeth, leaving ugly gaps in the once-smile of Main Street. In these trying times it’s easy to wonder who passed this wasting disease to us- which of the world’s sick economies has coughed in our direction most recently?

Rest assured, reader: our affliction is auto-immune. In America, everything is, and always has been, for sale.’

The Editor is heartbroken to find an empty storefront where ‘Zeitgeist Publishing’ once held a branch. She refuses to admit it but, in terms of heartbreak, there’s no more obvious tell than hiding one’s face.

We’ve both seen the signs, or, I’ve seen the signs and I suspect she has too (I’ve been told I read to closely into silences). Neither ‘The Waterhole Death Sequence’ nor ‘Speculation’ boded well for the Editor’s town and it’s not often a path veers so far off course that it’s entirely unpredictable. I try to tell her as much (I’ve been told I offer solutions when I should be offering condolences).

“Do you know the difference between a path and a trail?” she asks, drawing an ‘X’ across the dusty pane of glass.

I chew the inside of my cheek and narrow my eyes: “No.”

“When you’re on a trail, you’re following something. When you’re on a path, you’re just walking.”

“How long do you think we’ve been on a trail?”

“Maybe this whole time.”

-traveler

The Editor’s home is only a few hours away when we drive through ‘Retro-Speculation,’ a façade that stands, like a headstone, where a real town once stood. Each building is constructed with two faces and the installation is set up in such a way that Main Street southbound appears as Speculation once was and Main Street heading north is Speculation in ruins. The Editor prepares me for as much but I still nearly run us off the road, distracted by the ghost town in the side mirror. She jabs my ribs in warning and I park in order to safely satisfy my curiosity.

‘‘Retro-Speculation’ does as much to encourage nostalgia as it does to criticize it, the ultimate interpretation of the project heavily dependent upon which direction a traveler is driving: toward the city that drained Speculation of life, or away from it. On one hand, the mirrored Speculation sits heavily on the conscience of those entering the city and becomes a blatant condemnation for those exiting the same way. On the other, it is easy to suggest that ‘Retro-Speculation’ was constructed purely as a timeline- a visual reminder of the city’s history (a preface and epilogue written on the same page).

The grant that once provided for the upkeep of ‘Retro-Speculation’ has recently been dissolved and both sides now fall into disrepair. Renewed interpretation relies heavily on the viewer’s belief in a universal sort of irony and their comfort with impermanence in its broadest application.’

There’s not much to see in ‘Retro-Speculation’ that can’t be taken in from the bike. It’s not a place made for stopping, though graffiti suggests we’re far from the first to lean through the empty windows and test the doorknobs. We take pictures standing at angles that aren’t meant to be viewed- the post office decaying on the right and simply weather-worn on the left. The Editor tells me the story of how she once lost her parents in the real Speculation and how, in the tear-filled interim, they didn’t even realize she was gone. She tells me Speculation set the standard for Halloween. We share a bag of chips in the field behind the façade, ignoring the exposed wooden supports. We gather ourselves before dark and put the grim town firmly behind us.

The Editor hopes Zeitgeist will have answers for her and I hope sympathetically, swallowing my doubts, aware that they will sit in my body like gum.

-traveler

The Editor and I go several days without fresh food on a long, empty strip of interstate that runs through the center of Nebraska. By the time we reach ‘Sebastian’s U-Pick’ we’re starved for anything that isn’t plastic-wrapped or roller-warmed and we’re ready to stretch our legs.

Autumn, here, is cold and dry and the knuckles of my hands are chapped by the ride. I notice the Editor shivering, sometimes, and I wonder what she thinks about on the long, silent stretches between destinations. She would never tell me and she would never admit to the discomfort but we are both clearly relieved by the relative warmth of walking in the apple orchard at ‘Sebastian’s.’

We quickly fill a basket and stop ourselves before filling another, resting, instead, at the base of a tree. After an hour, the woman from the front finds us both napping over the books we’ve neglected for months, each having managed only a few pages more.

“Don’t get up on account of me,” she smiles, seeing our embarrassment, “I wondered if I could just get some quick input from you.”

The woman slides a tablet from her bag and it opens to a question:

‘Should Sebastian’s U-Pick transition to a management structure suitable for conversion from a ‘Partnership’ to an ‘LLC’?’

The woman kneels long enough for the Editor to drowsily press the ‘Yes’ option and smiles again as she stands:

“I’ll get that going right away!”

“Get what going?” the Editor asks, paranoid, suddenly, “I didn’t agree to anything.”

“The management conversion.”

‘On paper, nothing is lazier than a so-called ‘u-pick’ farm, a business that has the audacity to charge customers to take the position of workforce. The reality is that a business’ average customer is entirely ignorant to the nuances of the products and services that they consume. America has not seen a revolution in ‘U-Sew’ sneaker factories because the average shoe-wearer would sooner be sucked into the complex factory workings than understand the first thing about the intricacies involved in even capping the laces that hold them to their feet (destroying the expensive machine and creating a gruesome litigation scenario in the process). A ‘u-pick’ farm, in reality, maintains the normal workforce and hires baby-sitters to keep the pickers from harming themselves or simply descending upon the crops like SUV driving locusts. It is the worst of many worlds.

‘Sebastian’s U-Pick’ embraces the madness of ‘the customer is always right,’ allowing strangers to pick their fruit and to make sweeping, corporate-level decisions based on nothing but their seasonal whims. It has dissolved dozens of times but rises from bankruptcy like a suicidal phoenix, suffering the combined trauma of a lifetime of failed trust-falls.’

Weeks pass and the Editor’s choice follows her. She spends free hours carefully researching tax law and sifting through the poorly digitized newspapers of distant Nebraska counties for any mention of ‘Sebastian’s.’

“It was a moment’s peace,” she explains, “I can’t be the one to ruin it.”

-traveler

“Holy shit, this was a stupid idea!” I shout, too scared of the water to be seasick, “You told me you knew what you were doing!”

The Editor grits her teeth at the helm and says nothing, steering the little houseboat with the dramatic flourish of a toddler mimicking its parent’s driving- back and forth, back and forth, seemingly into every opposing current the river can sustain. Something falls off the side of the boat behind me, a wooden plank- thankfully something from above the river. The plank holds steady with us long enough for me to pull it back up onto the deck. This is apparently upsetting enough to the Editor that she starts talking again.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“I want my deposit back!” I shout.

“You won’t get anything back if you fall into the-”

The Editor is distracted by a boulder that looms up out of the water. We pass it so closely that I can smell the moss clinging to its ridges.

“How much longer do we have?” the Editor calls again.

“You think this,” I ask, clutching the frankenstein Shitholes 131 away from the water, “Goes into specifics about how far ahead this place is? Does it ever say anything like that?”

“What?” the Editor calls.

I flash back, briefly, to the scene at the docks this morning. It was sunny and still- a pleasant day. It’s hard to imagine that it’s still the same pleasant day, that the only danger on either of the shores that sandwich us is falling into a restful nap, lulled by the sound of rushing water. We must look like idiots from there.

“Just read out whatever it says!” the Editor calls again.

So I do.

‘It is a common, though erroneous, assumption that the wayside is associated strictly with what lies just off-road. In reality, veins of the wayside run winding into the country and it is the roads, modern by the standard of myth, that subconsciously reveal its pattern over time. Take, for instance, ‘Red Kraken Lake,’ which is deep in the unpaved wayside, easily a week’s journey through dense forest and beyond a series of steep ascents. Much of this trouble can be avoided in traveling by boat on a river that enters the lake on the northern tip and exits to the southwest, eventually flowing back toward civilization. The river, unpredictable at best, is only a viable means of transport in the autumn, rain-swollen, but hardly the hateful, frothing monster that feeds on spring’s snowmelt. It is faster than the hike, and easier, though it’s not at all easy.

A trying era breeds superstition and a trying path breeds legend, a discrepancy due, perhaps, to humanity’s sporadic, if well-warranted, distrust of its fellow man and it’s steady, if not naïve, trust of nature. The way to ‘Red Kraken Lake’ is difficult and the rumors surrounding it grow more vivid with each hiker-gone-missing, their grieving families subject to fluff-retrospectives that pick apart autopsy reports for any suggestion of the mythical creature of the lake.

The creature, if it exists, twitches below the surface like a human heart, vast for all its distance from the road, and red for all its silence.’

I throw up, finally. The combination of the waves and the reading push me over the edge, allowing some of my vertigo to subside. A short while later, the river calms somewhat and I take the helm while the Editor pisses off starboard, reminding me not to look as though I would take my eyes off the river for even a second to watch something like that. She and I are still strangers in many ways.

We’re still floating when night falls and I reluctantly agree to sleeping and steering in shifts. I wrap myself in a blanket and find the rocking of the boat puts me out almost immediately. Occasionally I wake, thinking the Editor had said something but, if she had, it wasn’t something meant for me.

When she does wake me up it’s well past time. She wraps herself in the same blanket and I stand, nervously centering the boat between the dark banks. The day’s clearness persists and, even without a moon, the stars manage to light the forest and the river ahead. I consider, just once, turning off the boat’s front light to experience the area as it would be without out trespass but, even as I reach for the switch, I hear the Editor grumble behind me.

“Don’t be an idiot.”

I had planned on letting her sleep in but, as morning dawns, a rocky outcropping in the distance begins to approach the banks from either side. Though the river maintains its size, steep cliffs rise to cut off any easy means of turning back. The Editor jolts awake when I call for her but takes the change of scenery in stride.

“Better than climbing them.”

I try to hide my growing nervousness from the Editor, a latent claustrophobia that’s inexplicably soothed by being inside the small cabin, away from the looming rock walls. When she calls me outside I realize she must have known. The cliffs open up ahead of us, circling ‘Red Kraken Lake.’

The plan was to spend a day or two anchored on the lake itself, to sit together in solitude and compile what we know about ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ and the company responsible for publishing it. We’ve uncovered too many pertinent details folded into our histories to ignore them any longer, things that go unheard in the noisy world of motel rooms and fast food pit-stops. Things we hoped would find voice on the water.

But the moment the anchor splashes into the lake, I know we won’t be staying long.

The silence at ‘Red Kraken Lake’ is deep and ominous. We find ourselves checking the water over the side, staring into it for any sign of movement. Floating on the lake is like being suspended in the air- weightless, yes, but consumed by the fear of falling. As the sun passes into the late afternoon, the Editor is the first to admit it out loud.

“I don’t think I can sleep here.”

We arrive at a ramshackle dock the next day, 24 hours before the man from whom we rented the boat (and who agreed to tow the bike) is due to meet us. We work a little and sleep on solid ground. I wonder what nightmares I left on the lake.

The man comments on our exhaustion when he arrives and he takes the boat’s damage well, asking only $20 from the deposit.

“Enough for the beer I’ll drink as I fix it,” he says.

We shake hands and pointedly avoid speaking about the lake or the kraken, a decision, I realize later, that might only further the myth.

-traveler

‘‘Autumn by the Wayside’ is primarily a book about strange places and the events they sometimes host but it is also, occasionally, a book about strange events and the venues at which they sometimes occur. Take, for instance ‘The Waterhole Death Sequence,’ which is not limited to any particular locale but occurs regularly in every U.S. town, city, and urban sprawl (and likely outside the U.S. as well, if one believes in that sort of thing). An archaeologist will tell you ‘The Waterhole Death Sequence’ is an ancient tradition, an American feature before roads existed to define the wayside’s boundaries. But they only know it for what it was.

Animals congregate at a waterhole and, inevitably, some of them die there. Their bones gather in the soil, frozen in the positions of death long after the water and life have gone from the place. We find them layered in nested circles, huddled closer about the center as time passed and the waterhole shrank to a puddle.

The ‘Waterhole Death Sequence’ can be observed in real time. As cities consume towns, as gentrifiers consume neighborhoods, the locals find refuge in the waterhole and the waterhole, in turn, hosts death. When the post office has closed and the cemetery encroaches with the molasses-speed of vultures grown fat, the waterhole’s light will be the last to wink out, casting skeleton shadows of the way things were.’

“We used to come here every week,” the Editor says, peeling the laminate from a cocktail menu, “I thought it’d make me happy to be back.”

‘Yui’s’ is a shithole, a dive bar for financial reasons rather than aesthetic. The ash tray between us shivers under the ceiling fan. It spills its contents over the plastic rim, deformed as it is by burns. The place is crowded, as though everyone still living in the gutted town nearby is present, but nobody speaks. When they do, it’s only to murmur something in the ear of their neighbor or to order a drink or to cough. ‘Yui’s’ is a shithole but it’s not among those listed in ‘Autumn by the Wayside.’

One of the Editors used to come here and the current Editor was insistent we stop.

“Every Sunday for three years we came to this place. And if something came up Sunday? We’d go Monday instead. Once a week, no matter what, until…”

“Until what?” I ask.

“Until she found out what was happening,” she says, suddenly more willing to distance herself from the previous Editor, “She was the one with the limp- the one that died on the gray road. Before we-”

“Became friends?”

“Realized we weren’t unlimited.”

“Shitty way to go.”

“The town I’m from is a lot like this. I think they all are. That’s why there’s always an empty lot to walk past.”

“Hmm.”

A group of three steps into the bar and stand at the entryway, seeing that the chairs and tables are taken. They look expectantly at the Editor and I.

“We should track down the people from Zeitgeist Publishing. There’ll be, like, records of them somewhere.”

“And then what?”

“And then we find out what’s going on!”

The group at the door have stopped moving altogether. They don’t approach us. They don’t approach the bar. They wait for the table and I raise my own empty glass to my mouth so that it might encourage the Editor to finish her own drink- a quarter cup of watery beer she’s nursed for nearly 45 minutes. When she doesn’t, I speak.

“Every time I think I find someone who knows what’s going on they tell me I’m supposed to be the expert. The rangers told me they didn’t make the path, they just keep it safe. The strangers didn’t make it either, they’re trying to turn it back over to whatever it was before people came along. I assumed there was at least a direction or a destination until you told me that the organization of the book is meaningless. What makes you think the publisher knows anything?”

The Editor is quiet, then, but she finishes her beer.

“Sometimes you find a path in the woods,” I tell her, “And it’s just something an animal made. Sometimes it’s just the easiest route between two places.”

“What sort of animal made this path?”

I shrug.

“There’s nothing easy about this.”

-traveler

‘Travelers exiting the south side of Minnesota often find themselves stopping off the interstate in Fishborne, a small but immaculate town, frozen in time by a particularly rigid historical society. So carefully is Fishborne preserved, that a good deal of notice is drawn to a billboard on the outskirts, not far from the state line. The billboard, relative to the town, is an eyesore. Its paper is dry and peeling and it flakes off onto the countryside like diseased skin, sometimes reaching as far as Fishborne itself before being promptly swept into the trash. Its legs are bending and weak, warped by snowfall and wind and the incredible weight that it bears, the weight of hundreds of past advertisements, layered there like the flesh of the earth on which it stands.

This billboard can be rented like any other but, unlike the others, it is never cleared. The result is a less-than-ideal surface for adhesive and the first storm that comes along, sometimes even the first stiff wind, will pull strips of it down, creating the ragged collage that stands much of the year. Residents of Fishborne and of the small towns nearby see their future in these images and invite travelers to do the same (though an individual’s interpretation is kept as secret as a birthday wish).

From the billboard, a certain pantheon has even begun to evolve, the most recent of which is a chicken’s head and body (“Don’t be a chicken, vote ‘yes’ on Prop 84!”) perched on the neck of a middle-aged woman (“Who said we had to choose between youth and beauty?”). For nearly a month, ‘Mama Chicka’ shifted and evolved, her left hand giving way to the tip of a french fry and her chest falling forward to reveal the head of a goat. “Don’t Pay,” she would go on to say, before finally sloughing off into the dirt, “Be an EXIT NOW.”

It is a peculiar business, buying space on the sign. Locals attempt to design images that decay well, hedging bets on the perceived sturdiness of specific sections of the paper slab. The result rarely benefits anyone but the owner, who doesn’t believe in anything but the money he’s given.”

When the Editor and I arrive we position ourselves at the back of a small crowd that surrounds the ‘Sign Outside Fishborne.’ Heavy rain in the area has caused a molting and, even as we watch, strips of paper peel from the surface and splatter on the ground with wet, fleshy slaps. Much of the groups disperses as the sun begins to set, but a few set up camp and the Editor and I join them.

A wind picks up late in the night and I wake to the sound of leaves skittering across the pavement nearby- the mutter of this long autumn, louder for mingling with the drying scraps of old adverts and ashes from the fire.

I wake again, in the dark, disoriented by a massive noise and dragged from the tent by the Editor. A section of the billboard, nearly a foot thick, has peeled down to land as a multicolored log at the foot of the sign. Above us is an old image in its entirety- a black and white logo made up of nested circles and the words ‘Summer is the righteous anger of a star, try “Autumn by the Wayside,” available at your local secondhand bookdealer.’

-traveler