I am accustomed to surprises, this far into my travels, but I have not grown to like them. I am greeted by many of the rangers like a lost child- like a child that has been lost for an hour or so- like a child that was lost for such a short amount of time, nobody noticed until he returned. Their friendliness is a little too sweet. They use small words and short, sticky sentences when they speak to me. Most of the conversations I have are short, and most consist mainly of greetings and goodbyes as the man from the front, Ranger Chuck, leads me to a warm office in the back.

“Got a picture of you from the last time,” he says, settling in behind his desk and gesturing for me to take a chair opposite.

He spins a framed photograph around so I can see it- Ranger Chuck with someone who could certainly be me.

“It’s blurry,” I tell him.

“Well,” he says, a frown turning his face for just a moment, “Ranger Paul got his finger in the corner there and it threw the focus off.”

He leans back and stretches, straining the plastic office chair, and says nothing.

“So… can you explain this to me?” I ask after several, quiet seconds, “Is this time travel or amnesia or something?”

“Not totally sure,” he says, brushing invisible dust from his desktop, “You just show up here out of the blue every so often without any rhyme or reason, telling us the box up in Birch sent you. Thought it was a joke at first but…”

He pauses.

“Well, what would be the point? And you’re earnest, kid. Damned earnest.”

“Earnest?”

“Not in the typical way. You’re a real sourpuss much of the time, but you seem like the type that believes what he says.”

“What do I say?”

“You tell us what you’ve seen out on the road, mostly. Remind everyone to read your blog.”

“And you do?”

“Well… let’s say I’m a little behind.”

“So you know nothing about this?”

“Not nothing,” he says, “You ready for the ranger spiel?”

“Sure.”

“The Wayside Park Rangers is an international organization established to preserve the world’s eccentricities. In practice, it’s several loosely connected sects of conservationists with niche interests. We operate behind the curtains for the most part, not because we’ve got any ‘cloak-and-daggers’ agenda, but because drawing attention to the places we protect tends to be contrary to their conservation. We operate on donations and pay next to nothing, if you’re thinking about asking for a job.”

“And where do I fit in?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? The latest theory is, well, you know something about the ‘path,’ don’t you?”

“Something.”

“About as much as we do, I imagine, which is to say that it probably exists. We stumbled upon it as we started to digitize our records into a single, central database- the same names popping up in registers over and over again, like people were following some sort of guide.”

I start to pull Shitholes from my bag and he smiles.

“We know about your book and it’s not that. Or, it might be that now, but our records suggest this has been going on since before it saw the printer. Folks- certain folks- are drawn to these places.”

“And that’s the path.”

“That’s what seems like a ‘path.’”

“Is there a… direction?”

“That was our next question. Looks like: yes. We’re still working on just which way it leads, however. Lost a lot of files to rats, fires- you name it. It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle but you’ve got to wander around finding the pieces as you do.”

“So, I’m one of these people?”

“You are,” he says and, sensing what I hoped was a very private disappointment, he adds, “But there’s something more to your case. Yours and a few others. The way we figure it, there are four types of people involved in this mess about the path. There are the rangers, of course, who look after it, the ‘tourists,’ who walk it and don’t realize, the travelers, people like yourself that move with a bit more intent and…”

“The strangers.”

“The strangers,” he agrees,” Who seem to want to tear the whole thing apart. You were the first to turn us on to them, actually, and, sure enough, the moment you start looking at disasters along the path, you get these descriptions of short-haired men and jerry cans.”

“What are you doing about it?”

“Well,” he sighs, “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” he confirms.

“But-”

“I know, because I’ve heard it from your own mouth, why they don’t fight forest fires in Yellowstone. Care to remind me?”

I frown and say nothing.

“Turns out, we’re not always as smart as we think we are. Sometimes a problem is just another part of a well-oiled machine, complex beyond our current understanding. The path is complex, [traveler], and we understand almost nothing about it.”

“So you let them… burn things?”

“And we let you wander in and out of here on a whim, my friend. We let you tout your book and your blog and we let you think you know more than us even though you show up here knowing less than when you left.”

“You think I am part of the path?”

“Son, your name come up so often in our registers that you might as well be paving the thing yourself.”

-traveler

‘The author would like to thank his many generous hosts, if not in person then now, in the pages of a book they will likely never read. It is easier, this way, if not more meaningful.

This author recognizes the works of others that have helped along the way: ‘The Field Guide to Talking Stones,’ ‘Oh, A Ghost,’ ‘The Electric Journal of Rip Stevens,’ ‘Runes, Helpful and Otherwise,’ ‘Birds to Watch and Birds to Watch Out For,’ and ‘The Visual Guide to Eating Things Off the Ground.’ There are countless others.

The author commends the determination of his family, who continue to search after all these long years. I’m sorry, mom- I could not find the way home if I tried.

The author begrudgingly acknowledges the work of the Park Rangers, who are certainly a lesser evil. He would remind them that the Wayside is no more a place to be tamed than it is to be burned, but appreciates the rescue and medical care provided after his little tumble into the ‘Miniature Grand Canyon’ and the subsequent safety railing installed in his honor.  

He would not want others to get hurt along the same path.’

-excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘If ritual magic is anything like making bread, which is to say all it requires is the correct physical components moved in specific ways and under specific circumstances, then it follows that someone could eventually build a ‘bread machine.’ Imagine a series of rune-carved gears, a pre-programmed voicebox, a selection of turning crystals, and a liquid piping system to rival a modern espresso dispenser, all acting to mirror the magician’s dramatic flourishes and guarded recipes. Magic, broken down in such a way and re-constructed with an eye to practicality, becomes less flavorful almost as a necessity, but it does not disappear altogether and that distinction presents an opportunity for those of us who like bread, but do not have the patience to bake it.

A legitimate ‘bread machine’ is said to exist as a bygone relic in the City Museum of Birch, Colorado. ‘The Birch Fortune Box’ might well be a clever campaign to drum up donations for the Historical Society, offering a pay-what-you-will price structure that does not leave room for doubt as to whether the quality of a fortune will be directly related to the generosity of the person requesting it.’

If I could be described as having a set ‘way,’ Birch, Colorado and its rundown museum would very much be out of it. Accessible only by the most tenuous of mountain passes, I spend three days in a dirty motel to the east before the current storm weakens enough to allow for traffic through to the town and I find, upon arriving at another, dirtier motel, that the pass has closed neatly behind me like a set of ominous supermarket doors.

Birch is little more than a gas station, a bar, and a handful of houses loosely connected by a series of roads that disappear under the snow in the hour or so it takes me to settle into the room and shower. I see no one younger than 40 for as long as the sun is up.

Shortly after dark, the lights in the motel flicker and go out. From the window I see they are out all over town and I have resigned myself to three granola bars and an early night when the woman from the front desk knocks at my door with a bowl of soup and an extra blanket. She tells me they’ll have the generator on before long and she laughs when I tell her I plan on seeing the museum in the morning.

“Tomorrow’s Christmas Day,” she says, “And Charlie’s spending it with family. He won’t be back to open the museum till the storm clears.”

The storm continues for four days and I rest in a room that is often, that is almost always, warm. I build a snowman and I become known around town- a well-mannered stranger that has become trapped by the storm. People learn that I’ve come to visit the Box and the anticipation of my fortune seems to grow with each passing day, not because they truly believe in the power of the thing (though some surely do) but because the novelty of my situation eases the monotony of a frozen town.

The woman that owns the motel (I’ve never asked her name) comes to my room at 8:00am on the fifth day.

“Charlie came in late last night and I’ll be damned if Linda weren’t at his door at the crack of dawn this morning to get those museum doors open. Best be headin’ down there or he’ll be short with you for all the hubbub you’ve caused.”

It is not my way, to cause undue hubbub, so I leave for the museum a half hour later and find Charlie is short with me anyway (who can blame him) and make my way into a basement where The Birch Fortune Box collects dust.

It is an old, iron thing with a slot like a postal box for taking money and a slot like a papercut for distributing fortunes. I carefully slip a twenty dollar bill inside and then haphazardly dig the change out of my pockets and out of the pockets of my bag and, finally, I add a dime from under the Fortune Box’s informational sign.

I approach the Box’s heavy crank, nearly four feet in diameter, and turn it only a few inches before there is a click and the tinkle of some hidden bell and I see my fortune peering out from the ancient metal.

“Attempt 31,” it says, “Seek the Park Rangers for assistance.”

There is an address on the back.

-traveler

‘In the same way a book written on lead might be called the world’s densest novel, ‘Uncommon Hazards’ claims to be the nation’s most challenging round of miniature golf. It is a grueling experience (in ways which the author will reluctantly leave unspoiled for those who wish to visit) that only lightly wears the skin of golf, but it must be admired for the thoroughness with which it achieves its vision. ‘Uncommon Hazards’ employs blurred lines and psychic gut punches in the humble task of adding a few points to your score. Its courses are degrading and its staff is apathetic at best.  It is not a game any sane person would play twice.’

Without the author’s warning I would have assumed that when, on the first green, my ball was sucked up into the mouth of a cement clown where it was subjected to some sort of industrial grinder and returned a lopsided mess, that there had been some sort of mistake, that I would be issued a replacement. Thanks to the author, I was not surprised when an employee told me I would not get a refund, but that she would waive the ‘Ball Replacement Fee’ since the damages may have been due, in part, to the facilities and not entirely to my neglect. I putt the non-spherical ball in circles around the smiling clown while an angry man and his two daughters respectively huff and whine, waiting their turn behind me.

First round: 25

The second course is a clear, straight rectangle just ten feet long but the moment I approach the green a siren goes off and I’m asked to evacuate. I stand in the parking lot with someone who claims to be a manager for 15 minutes before he, having received no clear indication from anything inside the establishment, suggests we return. When we do, I find the second green is littered with invisible magnets, the most powerful of which is embedded in the hole itself, meaning that my final shot is actually just my having to press the levitating ball (presumably containing a magnetic core) forcibly into the ground for a few seconds so that it ‘counts.’

Second round: 31

I spend forty minutes in the liminal space between courses as a young man ahead of me talks loudly on his phone, which he holds pinched between his head and his shoulder as he attempts to play the round. He drops the phone every few minutes and dusts it off, continuing the conversation as though nothing had happened to interrupt it. The green is simple enough- crooked in several places and dotted with small, cement obstacles. The man weaves his ball around them over and over, unable to muster the fine motor coordination necessary to guide the thing to its goal as long as he’s preoccupied with the call.

At the forty minute mark I see that the man’s ball has not received the same rough handling in the mouth of the clown as mine and I take to the green myself, lining up a careful ricochet.

The man protests:

“Hey! I’m not quite done here buddy!” he says to me, and then, to his phone: “Yeah, some asshole’s trying to cut me in line at Hazzards.”

It does give me pause, but I take the shot and continue taking shots as the man’s outrage grows, as he waves his phone and hurls insults and generally hovers about- never stopping me physically but doing his best to disrupt me at every turn.

Third round: 12 (and over an hour of my time)

I’ve set up on the fourth course, which appears to be a series of sand-filled tubes, when the father and his daughters reappear behind me and take up their act again. One of the girls stands so close that I feel the leg of her plush horse graze the back of my knee and the man’s salty breath rustles my hair and all of the stress of today and of days before comes to an explosive head.

I shout at them, first degrading their employment at the course and briefly veering into broader, less meaningful abuse before receiving a powerful blow to the jaw and being escorted from the premises where a manager and I spend 30 minutes hashing out whether this is being done ‘in character’ or if this is an official banishment from the establishment.

It is the latter.

I walk back across the parking lot, fingering the lopsided golf-ball in my pocket, and find the bike silent, as it has been for several weeks.

-traveler

“Three pick-up trucks approach. One is red and two are silver. Three men leave each truck for a total of nine. Another man appears from behind a tree, the tenth. They each wear their hair short except, for the tenth man who wears no hair at all. They do not hear me, though I am in their speakers. They do not feel me, though I am in the air. Each man carries a red, plastic tank of fuel in their left hand and each carries a large blade in the right. They look at each other, but do not speak. They move in harmony with one another, not as though this is something they planned, but as though each truck and the men inside arrived to do the same thing at the same time by happenstance. They cut through the foliage with their blades. They widely ignore the sting of the fern. The red truck’s radio ceases to function. The cab of the red truck fills with smoke. The men do not look back, they continue through the greenery to the base of the tower. Each man bleeds and each man ignores his blood. One man falls to unconscious at the base of the tower. The others continue. One man becomes tangled in the ferns. The others continue. Eight men spread fuel at the base of the tower. Eight men begin to cut pipes and cords with their blades. I believe it will soo-”

-final transmission of the radio

My driving has hardly improved, despite many months on the bike. I am not a confident driver (not a confident man, generally) and I wear my insecurity like a flag. I waver- I hesitate in a way that is contagious. My driving is unpredictable, even to me, even in the best of situations and now, I am speeding. I am late. I haven’t been late for anything in a long, long time.

I’ve had so little to be on time for.

‘There was no little uproar regarding ‘Rolling Hills’ when it was pitched to Roberts County, no little uproar when the designs were approved and, yet, there is no shortage of customers now, in the early years of its functioning. They have their marketing team to thank for this success, using words like ‘economical’ and phrases like ‘environmental impact’ and never using words like ‘cheap’ and only strategically using the word ‘subsidized.’

The designer is not so coy. Emma Red happily confesses that ‘Rolling Hills,’ sometimes referred to as ‘The Jukebox,’ is to the dead what housing projects are to the living- an inexpensive, no-frills semi-solution to one of America’s many crises. Despite the hundreds buried in the hillside, ‘Rolling Hills’ has only 20 gravestones, each fitted with a subtle electronic monitor. The interred are assigned numbers, and those numbers are assigned timeslots, schedules of which are freely available from the website. There, you can track when your loved one will rise to their promised six-feet under (having previously been much deeper), and you can leave flowers on a stone that bears their name (for the time being).

At the current occupation, a body will rise to the surface five times each month and remain there for 10 minutes, though its said that a small donation might speed the dead on their journey.’

I arrive just as the ground in front of ‘Stone 4’ begins to vibrate, as the name, Alice Cantrel, dims from the screen. I wait for something to happen- a haunting or an enlightenment- but Alice rides her pine box quietly back into the depths of the hill and is replaced by a stranger body.

I shake the vial of toothpicks, nine, and I set off back to the bike. There, the radio breaks a long silence:

“I may be in trouble, traveler. I will try to describe the end, if you will listen.”

-traveler

The Stranger trips over his own shadow and it scatters out from under him.

I realize two things, then:

-I would never be able to do to the Stranger what the Stranger did to me. I don’t know why I thought I could.

-This is a stranger, but it is not the Stranger.

This man is younger, he has darker hair and a full set of teeth. He is not as tall or as thickly muscled. He has all the mannerisms of the Stranger and the same substantial shadow, but this is a different man.

The air cracks and a bullet buries itself in the trunk of a nearby tree. I’m buffeted by shards of dead pine, sucked dry by the vampire fern overhead. I scurry to the safety of thicker trees and my ankle lights up in pain. Falling, I feel the tendrils of the fairy fern tear out of my calf. There is another shot- one that likely would have found its mark if I had been standing.

I stay low to the ground, out of sight of the stranger and that much further from the predatory ferns. The man lets out a frustrated yelp and the canopy shakes as he fends off prying tendrils. There are bones in the treetops- I see them now that the light has changed.

“Throw out you gun,” the man says, “And step out here.”

My heart stops for a moment- the man assumes I was smart enough to bring a gun, that I would know how to use one if I had it.

“No,” I yell, crouching behind a thick stump, “You… throw down your gun.”

The man yelps again and yells- “Fucking plants!”

“They, uh, won’t stop until I tell them to…” I say.

“Fuck you,” he says, “I’m not an idiot.”

“Why are you here?”

“Same reason as you,” he says, and I hear him edging closer, picking his way across the underbrush, “The book, right?”

“Who told you to burn this place down?”

This stops him.

“Somebody already tried that,” I tell him, “Look what happened.”

“You a park ranger?” the man asks, taking another step closer.

“What?”

“A park ranger. Now’s the time to tell me if you are.”

“I’m not a park ranger.”

“Didn’t think so,” he says.

I take a breath, preparing to run, and the pick falls from my mouth. As it hits the ground, a tangled mass of fern and bone swings down from the trees, shuddering past me to the ground. The man is not more than a few feet behind me, but he is distracted by the sudden appearance of this ghoul and with that moment, I make a terrible decision.

I make finger guns at the man and yell: “Stop!”

And, against the odds, it works.

The stranger doesn’t wait to see if I have a real gun. He reaches down and seems to pull his shadow over himself and, with that, he is gone. I am left alone with the fairy fern and the hanging skeleton of an unlucky hunter.

I search the ground for the pick, for what was little more than pine mash when it fell, but it has vanished. The fairy fern attempts a lazy pursuit as I hike back to the road, but falters at the edge of its infestation.

My mind is elsewhere, replaying the events of the last year and wondering how many strangers I have passed without realizing there could be more than one.

-traveler

Movement in the dark gray of our peripheries is universally fearful. No matter how awful, no matter how truly terrible the source of that movement is, there is some comfort when the veil is lifted and the thing moves again in plain sight. For a sneaking thing to slip it must exist in our world, in the world where strange agendas do not excuse a thing from mistakes.

For all the time I’ve spent staring at Autumn by the Wayside, it has not moved an inch.

But now… a slip.

‘If there is any magic left in tales of the pirate’s black spot, ‘The Fairy Forest’ may be the source. It is a standing massacre of trees, a plague that spirals outward from the char of some distant fire as though ritually summoned and left to sow chaos. The culprit is the ‘Fairy Fern,’ a lush parasite that masks the scene of its crime with bright green fronds. Even seasoned travelers may find themselves in the heart of the infestation before they realize it is not life that surrounds them, but death.’

This entry was different in the old copy of Autumn by the Wayside. It is familiar enough that I doubted myself but, looking back over my own writings, I see that things have changed. Has the book quietly changed between print runs or has it quietly changed in my pack, shifting itself like ‘Mazzy’s’ maze?

The way to ‘The Fairy Forest’ is familiar enough, a left where I once took an errant right, a confident press through shrubs that obscure the path. I clamber over a tree and feel a sharp prick in my shoulder, a second shortly after. I turn to find I am an ivy marionette, the twirling roots of the fairy fern having reached down from above grasp my jacket.

Despite the warning in Shitholes, I have stumbled into the infestation.

I leave my jacket hanging and press on, careful to swipe away the curious tendrils as I pass. Before long I find the site of the Stranger’s fire, a column of fairy fern that ascends into the trees and spreads across the canopy like an atom bomb.

This is where it started, where our paths first crossed.

There is a circle of sunlight near the column, a place where the fairy fern has accidentally fallen a tree and not yet had time to patch the hole in its cover.

I sit and I wait and I move as the sun does so that I am always facing in the direction of my should-be shadow. I imagine that the Stranger will arrive quietly, folding himself out from the dark of some tree or simply appearing in a place that was previously empty.

When he comes, he is walking. He wipes a thin trickle of blood from his neck with the back of his hand, the same hand that he uses to brandish his pistol at the creeping ferns. The Stranger walks in a line toward me, as though held to an invisible path, and he is only ten feet away when his eyes meet mine.

He tries to run.

-traveler

There are long sabbaticals hidden between these posts, reader. I’m not sure you would notice if they weren’t made explicit. I work, or rest, or find myself stuck in one way or another.

I never go home.

Money has certainly been an issue more recently. Money for getting the bike out of impound (left at the ‘Edge of Disaster’ just a little too long). Money for a new pack. Money to fix an old truck radio. Money to eat.

Luckily, the unending autumn brings a long harvest and I am suited for mindless farm work, for pumpkins and apples and shuffling through the dirt. I work and make money and bide my time, devoting much of my thinking to the problem of the stranger and waiting for the weekend of ‘Mazzy’s Harvest Carnival.’

I am thinner and darker when it arrives.

‘There is something at the heart of ‘Mazzy’s Harvest Carnival’ that radiates a sickly-sweet feeling of unease, a feeling that hits well after one pays for entry. At ‘Mazzy’s,’ every beloved autumn tradition is taken to an extreme, exaggerated past seasonal cheer and into a clownish, careful-what-you-wish-for mockery. Pumpkins are heavier, hayrides are slower, and the cider is so thick with sugar that one can pour out a glass and count to three before it touches the ground.

‘Mazzy’s’ is syrupy as a place and people stick there like flies, determined to get their money’s worth and determined to re-experience festive autumnal memories that, upon careful recollection, are no more than a series of half-remembered commercials and cartoon specials. In a wasted sci-fi future, this will be where they find humans sealed up in amber- fat, and frozen in postures of mild disappointment.’

The ‘Carnival’ arranges itself late in the season, the result of hodgepodge chores assigned to myself and the others on the farm. There are others, yes, people like myself who prefer cash under the table and don’t mind bunking with strangers. We pick apples one day, assemble a tall, rickety slide the next. Signs are painted, hay is stacked. There is talk of the corn maze, of the tedious task of carving a path through the stiff husks and paper-sharp leaves.

And then, one day, the maze is there. The entrance appears with the sunrise and from the same rickety slide we see that the path has seemingly chewed its way out from the center.

“They must grow it that way,” I offer over a dinner of thick, pumpkin stew.

“No,” someone says, a woman who has been working the farm longer than me, “No way the corn grows that way.”

She doesn’t offer another explanation.

Sometimes I roll over in the mornings and feel the absence of the comb case in the breast pocket of my shirt- an absence so distinct that it seems, in the twilight of dreaming, to be as thick as the thing itself. One morning, to stop my teeth from chattering, I pull one of the ‘Arbor-Eat’ems’ picks from the vial and find, despite my weary skepticism, that I feel better. The pick (one for now, as there are only ten) becomes a part of my farming personality. On the night of the stew and of the self-made maze, I find the soggy splinter migrating to the corners of my mouth and tugging at my lips.

It pulls me to the cornfield.

The maze is not forbidden, but nobody admits to entering before I do. The leaves rustle and the pick twists in my teeth: ‘This way,’ ‘Turn,’ ‘Oops, dead end.’

“Alice?” I ask, “You’re not very good at this, are you?”

If it’s Alice in the pick, she says nothing. We wander until the moon is overhead and stumble upon the center where a scarecrow slumps on its post. A bucket of candy rests at its feet, along with a sign that says, ‘Please Take One ONLY.”

“Do you know the difference between a maze and a labyrinth?” I ask, taking the pick from my mouth, “A labyrinth is just one, winding path from the outside to the center. A maze splits and dead-ends- has as many ways in and out as you like.”

This is a conversation for tomorrow’s dinner. I practice, with Alice and the scarecrow, as I used to practice in the mirrors of middle school bathrooms.

“You can’t really be lost in a labyrinth…”

(Noises in the corn interrupt me, but quiet as I take notice. I find out later that the maze is rearranging itself. That’s the nature of these places. It will be another long night.)

“You can’t be lost in a labyrinth, but, I suppose, if it’s very long, you can be stuck. You might forget which direction you’re heading-”

I drop the Alice-pick and spend a long time finding it again.

(The maze grows more complex in the meantime.)

“What does it say…” I continue, “What does it say about life that a labyrinth is supposed to be meditative? The beginning is the end, the way is set.”

(An angry ghost eyes me from the scarecrow. It has been the heart of the maze for a hundred years. For a hundred, hundred years. It curses me, but I have always been unlucky and don’t notice much of a difference.)

“There’s some comfort in having no choice.”

I shake the scarecrow’s hand (the ghost rages inside) and turn to leave.

“But if this were a labyrinth, there would be no distinguishing between directions. To catch its prey, a minotaur would only have to stand by and wait.”

-traveler

Diego was not wrong, as much as I assumed he would be. I left ‘The Oasis’ and walked along the road until I was sure I would be out of sight. I circled back into the storm, despite my careful timing, and re-traced my steps, ashamed to be seen.

I looked for the comb case but could not find it.

What I found, instead, was a me-shaped puddle in the earth, hardly the perfect cartoon-silhouette, but close. I must have lain there for some time.

Standing at the foot of that puddle was the closest I’ve come to casting a shadow since, and I have stepped out of the storm and into brighter places to no avail. I am a Peter Pan, past my prime and I don’t know whether I should be concerned.

I feel myself aging.

I cannot fly.

But I have been… okay, in the absence of my vice. And that feels, in many ways, like flying.

‘What came first, the zany name or the concept of a wood-based tasting venue? ‘Arbor-Eat’em’ would have you believe the latter, billing itself as a high-class sort of establishment but having to try a little too hard to pull it off. The core concept is an inversion of the traditional hors de ’oeuvre, a selection of bland fruits and cheese paired with toothpicks of exotic wood. Found yourself wondering about the mouth-feel of a California Redwood? Curious about the earthy notes of the Baobab? Wood tasting might be for you.

‘Arbor-Eat’em’ is not without controversy. In the Fall of 2015 it premiered and then quickly retracted a ‘historical flight,’ consisting of toothpicks carved from reclaimed sources- the bows of ships, the inner layers of casks, and from coffins. The owner played it off as a stunt and swept the incident under the rug, but rumors of old inventory remain.

Nothing says ‘underground’ like a secret menu.’

Wait, no.

I am falling.

This is not the flight of the bird, but the flight of a coward. I’ve been here many times before, briefly suspended in the eye of the storm.

“Sir? We’re starting a round of the cedar, cut just last week.”

“I… thanks.”

I chew nervously through toothpicks and tongue sawdust paste from the holes where my teeth used to be, spitting it into ornamental bowls and rinsing with mineral water between flights. I ignore much of what is said about the processes involved in harvesting this wood, in caring for saplings and leaving a responsible carbon footprint. I am preoccupied with my near future, with the realization that things will still get worse before they get better.

Eventually, though, I settle myself down.

The walking tour filters lazily into a mingling area, situated next to a store for those convinced by the tasting- a place to shop for distant in-laws and work acquaintances. I pick the gouda off of several thin pieces of maple and wait until the host has finished speaking with an enthusiastic Minnesotan family before I put into action the careful approach necessary for under-the-table affairs.

“So,” I begin, “You have any of those coffin toothpicks left?”

The host does not turn to meet me, but I see his eyes slowly narrow, as though the man is falling asleep where he stands. Just as I’m sure they are closed, when I start to wonder if he has chosen to simply blot me out of his reality rather than to acknowledge the question, he speaks.

“Coffins,” he says, “Crew-see-fixes. pretty-lady’s wash basins. We’ve got all sorts of things in the pick cellar.”

“I…”

“What does a man like yourself want with a taste of the dead?”

“Just curious.”

“You know what they say about curiosity?”

He waits for me to answer.

“It killed the cat?”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” he repeats, “Company cat got into the nautical picks and they tore up its insides. Had to put it down.”

The host pulls another employee aside and whispers something in her ear before motioning me to follow. We step through a door marked ‘Employees Only’ and continue down a flight of steep, stone stairs. I break the silence after several quiet seconds.

“How did you get in to the toothpick business?”

“Grew up in the boonies,” he says, “Home-schooled. Parents struggled to put food on the table. You know what helps keep your mind off a hungry stomach?”

“Chewing toothpicks?”

“Exactly. We’d make our own- widdle’em down from branches. I got a taste for elm that way.”

“And what’s the deal with the historical picks? Who thought that was a good idea?”

“I did,” he says, and, ahead in the darkness, I cannot see his face.

The host unlocks a heavy door as we reach a landing and we move into a cavernous passage.

“Way I see it,” the host says, “If we soak whiskey in wine casks for a hint of old grapes, why not try something more direct? Why not see what we can glean from a thing that spent a hundred years on the ocean, or sixty below the earth?”

We come to another door, this one simply latched. It’s cold and still in the cellar a place made foreign by its comparative nearness to the heart of the Earth. There are shelves inside the room and, on the shelves, row after row of small, glass vials. In each vial, a bundle of toothpicks, tied with a string. Nothing is labeled, but the host leads me to a place in the center, where the pickings have slimmed.

“Plenty of folk like you,” he says, “Looking for the picks of dead folk. These three here are over a hundred years old. The row below that is at least two hundred. We do our best to source from the States, but the older these get the more likely they’ve been imported.”

I had not seriously planned on buying pieces of a coffin but now, in the grim basement of the ‘Arbor-Eat’em,’ I feel as if I have little choice.

“How much for one vial?”

It’s more than I have.

My palms begin to sweat.

“Do you have anything… cheaper?”

I feel the host’s judgement in the half-darkness. He sighs and slips his hand between the racks, pulling a vial of bright, white picks from the back.

“Last of the budget options,” he says, “Alice Cantrel- dead at 20, aged 5 years in pine.”

He hands me the vial without asking whether I can afford it. The sticks rattle lightly in the glass, the little taps sounding against my palm like static.

“You’re a man with bad habits,” the host comments as he turns back to the door.

“What makes you say that?”

“Strange tastes and no money.”

-traveler