There are four men at ‘The Alien Crash Site’ when I arrive. It’s noon on a Saturday and the interstate buzzes behind me. It’s exactly the right time to stop at a place like this- to have a picnic, here, or to pee in the facilities. ‘The Crash Site’ is a state park, or, if not officially a state park, it’s a state-funded destination. There is nothing at the turn-off that suggests it is closed to the public. Nothing at the entrance. Just like there is nothing to suggest that three of the men are plain-clothes soldiers, outside of their very rigid posture and their jackets, bulked up by concealed tactical armor.

The fourth man, at least, is in fatigues.

‘The history of ‘The Alien Crash Site’ begins abruptly with some of the strange phenomena that have been observed in the clearing. These include floating lights of all colors, strange, inhuman whispers, and the occasional unwitting levitation (none of which have been caught on camera). The history does not cover the actual crash or how anyone might know it is a crash site. It does not suggest why most people believe it needs to be approached under cover of dark and at risk of being fired upon by military guards. These things are taken for granted, as if they were always known. But they were never known. They still aren’t.’

The soldiers stare at me. I stare back, to the best of my ability. Nothing else happens.

I return to the camper and grab an old shovel I found along the highway when I stopped to pee. I step back into the clearing and see that, with the exception of their eyes, which follow me, the men haven’t moved. Past the edge of the clearing, the men walk with me in a sort of dance. For each step I take toward the center, they move slightly closer and in whichever directions allows them to stay equidistant from me.

Another man arrives from the parking lot- he has a kid on his shoulders. They see what’s happening and leave.

By the time I’ve reached the center of the field, the soldiers are each withing a couple yards. I take care to maneuver the shovel in a way that seems unthreatening. My phone hangs from my pocket, not-so-secretly recording this interaction and not so secretly streaming it to the cloud. The shovel slips into the ground. The soil is soft, as though recently churned. I dig and the soldiers watch.

After about an hour I begin to pull up little bones. Small skulls soon follow. By hour two I have a whole collection laid out- an alien crew and pieces of what might be a hull. The soldiers seem neither surprised nor concerned. I take pictures of everything. I upload it to a link-sharing site and wait to verify that it can be viewed publicly. I place one of the little skulls in my pocket.

The soldiers don’t move back to their original positions as I leave. They wait until I’m loaded into the camper and then, drawing small, folding shovels, they begin to re-bury the crash site.

The alien skull glows in the dark. I try to post the effect but receive an error message. My old post is gone. The skull is warm to the touch.

I take the skull back to the field and bury it myself. The soldiers don’t even move this time. They must have seen this happen before.

“We’re cool now, right?” I ask. The soldier in fatigues nods in a way that makes me add: “Won’t happen again.”

He shakes his head slowly as if to say: No, it won’t.

-traveler

‘‘The Nation’s Smallest Graveyard’ seems like the sort of place that would be reserved for one heroic individual who traded their life for the life of another- for someone who faced death, unflinching, because they knew their end would be the continuation of another’s. Or maybe a child, I suppose. A lovable cat.

‘The Nation’s Smallest Graveyard’ doesn’t appear to hold any of these things- doesn’t appear to be anything but what it claims. It’s about a yard squared and it sports a couple dozen miniature tombstones indicating, one has to assumed, a couple dozen lots. ‘The Graveyard’ is old and its stones are so small that it’s proven impossible to decipher what words may once have indicated for whom this honorable place was cordoned off and why they were so small. Some believe it’s an old pet cemetery- the sort of place put together by somebody who is handling a pet all wrong. Others believe it is a proper graveyard, but that the lots each hold only a finger of the interred. Why? Nobody is sure. There’s no historical context. Nothing in legend. It would be as weird a thing to do in the olden days at it would be now.

Then, there’s ‘The Southeast Lot,’ on which someone has taken to placing a flower. Blue petals. Yellow center. The flower is miniature like the grave and nobody can identify it or find a living sample. These things together, a Wayside destination make. It’s all mystery- senseless mystery- and for some reason, everybody is too scared to dig the place up and solve it.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘Another victim of the internet, ‘The Monument of Unknown Heroes’ is now little more than a field of pedestals and a handful of cement feet. Whoever once went about the task of researching and sculpting those unappreciated devotees to good has returned to demolish the likenesses of those people whose identities have been revealed, making them ‘too known’ (we must assume).

‘The Monument of Unknown Heroes’ was a flash in the pan, as far as Wayside destinations go. It had been populated to nearly 50 statues by the time it was discovered in 2021 and it took only six months for a visitor to identify a statue of someone they knew (a volunteer fire fighter). The first demolition took place three days later which initiated an almost-friendly-but-probably-quite-bitter hunt for more IDs. As the movement grew in size, statues were being ID’d nearly every other day and the keeper of ‘The Monument’ was so busy demolishing statues that they managed to produce just one more before all of the likenesses were matched. ‘The Monument’ was abandoned by May 2022 with a note in stone reading:

‘There are no more good people.’

This strikes the author as more than a little dramatic.’

I spend a long time looking down at some cement shoes, carefully comparing them to mine. They’re a dead match to my beat-up sneakers. Same generic branding. Same smudges and tears. It’s one of the older statues, according to internet lore. The sculptor started in the northwest corner of the clearing and moved east in an expanding grid. These shoes would have belonged to the third or fourth statue and I think it was me.

So, do people know who I am? Or did I just stop being a good person sometime between now and then?

-traveler

My knowledge of classical music, of the composer or era of any particular piece, is probably just about average for my generation of Americans. I know ‘Flight of the Bumblebees’ when I hear it. I can recognize the, uh… ‘Mountain King’ one. And there are plenty others that I will recognize by tune as being important or even for being a sort of go-to soundtrack to certain Hollywood emotions. I wouldn’t be able to name them, though, and I certainly wouldn’t have any idea about how they fit into the history of music- about their importance as it might have been originally.

Unlike much of the population, I assume, this ignorance is something I actively maintain. I spend a lot of time in places-between-places and classical music tends to crop up there. Elevators. Lobbies. On hold with under-paid customer support staff. With the exception of country music, classical is also just the most likely thing to be on the radio waves in those stretches between civilization, where oil derricks swing their heavy arms and deer jump out to be splattered on the road.

Without their names, these pieces mean nothing to me and I am able to exist in ‘The Waiting Room’ for a little while without losing my mind entirely.

‘Immortality, or something much like it, is available to all US citizens but, like all government services, it is offered at a price. Those interested might find a number of tutorials online, each different, perhaps, at the beginning but all inevitably leading to ‘The Waiting Room’ in D.C. These tutorials appear daunting due to length alone but be assured, dear reader, that the steps are not so hard. Immortality is the work of bureaucracy and bureaucracy is the closest thing we have to ritual magic.’

The first 40 or so steps to attaining immortality involve racking up a great deal of debt. The more complicated the better. Passed that, several steps detail how one might ignore the debt in whatever way is most obvious to the lending parties. These lending parties should be as legit as possible. Mediation should move toward the government and away from private parties that might rely on violent methods. Once the government calls for mediation, there are several layers of appeals to make for which a flow chart is readily available online. The last path of this chart should stream debtors into ‘The Waiting Room,’ where people wait for their case to be resolved.

I have no monetary debt, which is a relief. I’m likely beholden to a number of people and deities for some bail-outs over the years, but these debts are entirely spiritual and beyond the scope of the American government. In short, I have no reason to be in ‘The Waiting Room’ and am shortly escorted back out onto the street. Not before seeing the people, though, their faces both desperate and determined. Not before seeing the food available, which seemed to be thin, room-temperature sandwiches and water.

Not before hearing the music, which I could not name. It’s good, I think, that my mind holds no details about classical music- that it slides off my brain. Otherwise the melancholy piano of ‘The Waiting Room’ might have followed me out.

-traveler

‘Of all the risks one might take on the road, ‘The Sharp Drop to Santa Monica’ is perhaps the one place where a traveler should heed the road signs and mind the mirrors. An artifact of the defunct ‘Inter-I’ (or ‘Inter-Interstate’), ‘The Sharp Drop’ is a scattered and fading phenomenon: a sudden dip in the road that inexplicably drops a vehicle in Santa Monica, California. ‘The Drop’ used to exist in a dozen places around the states and as far away as Virginia but, as of this writing, it has shrunk to just one: an unsigned exit off a Texan strip of I-35.

The rancher that owns the land just off this exit has taken to leasing the space for advertising and this offer is happily accepted by a number of West Coast resorts which will usually plaster an indulgent, billboard-sized image of their property right about where vehicles tend to move from one state to the next, making it seem as though the passengers have driven directly into a dream. Rumor has it that mischievous Texan businesses will sometimes lease a similar billboard on the Santa Monica end, making it seem, through the rearview mirror, as though the car has escaped from a high-speed chase or emerged from the buttocks of a trending model. It’s rumored that this sign sometimes simply reads ‘Good Riddance.’

These are all rumors, of course, because nobody who has entered ‘The Sharp Drop to Santa Monica’ has ever been seen in Santa Monica or ever again and because the businesses sometimes advertised tend to have alien amenities and uncanny features. It’s best to read the road signs approaching ‘The Sharp Drop to Santa Monica’ because most recommend avoiding it at all costs.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

In all of this traveling, I’ve seen a number of drinking holes called ‘The Bar.’ A wink of the eye. A little smirk. Each of these places thinking they were clever, distilling themselves to the obvious. ‘The Bar’ outside Belle Fourche, South Dakota pulls it off straight-faced. Dark and foreboding as an open mouth. Blacked-out windows. Cheap plastic signs draping onto the sidewalk, advertising any number of get-drunk-for-cheap deals. A stain on Main Street, as close to anywhere in the U.S. as it can be.

‘‘The Bar’ may have been constructed in a metaphysical shadow. It may have been founded by a bad man. The intentionality of ‘The Bar’ is up for debate, but the result is the same. It is, historically, a haven for deadbeat dads. More recently, a corner has opened to deadbeat mothers. It’s the places where parents go, not to die, but to scrape off all but the stain of parenthood.

Sometimes there are children at ‘The Bar.’ This is fine, by state law, assuming they’re accompanied by parents or guardians (and here the term is used loosely). The presence of these children doesn’t make their parents better. Arguably, it makes them worse and it makes ‘The Bar’ worse, too, the childless parents being forced to remember that their own offspring are out there somewhere. It deepens their guilt and, simultaneously confirms the necessity of hiding out in a place where they, at least, can be alone and separate from their responsibilities and always just mildly drunk, enough to be angry but not enough to be scared.’

I fit in at most bars better than I fit in most everywhere else. Anyone who looks as rundown and lonely as me can be inconspicuous in a corner for as long as they nurse drinks. ‘The Bar’ is an exception that I feel immediately- a true, all-heads-swivel moment, including those belonging to the handful of children slouched on barstools, some still half-engaged with their parents’ phone.

It’s four in the afternoon and there is no happy hour. No happiness to be found, really. A billiard table sports an unfilled triangle of balls. A jukebox groans with the effort of flipping through its menu. One of the phone games has an annoying jingle and it’s the loudest sound in the room.

I step up to the bar and order a drink and fries, only to be told that the kitchen is closed, that it has been closed for years. My drink isn’t available either and the one I get, the one that is nearly the same thing, is weak and dusty. That my patronage is not welcome is made clear in these few short interactions.

I’ve spent a lot of time in places where I’m not welcome over these years, so I settle in relatively comfortably and find it all the easier to nurse my drink for how poorly it’s been made. The others eventually shrug off my presence, they being experts in turn.

-traveler

Perhaps the most accessible destination on my list, I’ve been putting ‘The Edge of the USA’ off for quite some time. The boundary has always been there, I know, but something like claustrophobia squirms in me when I finally face it in person, the open expanse beyond the border. Most people find it reassuring, this idea that there is nothing outside, but without anything to compare our country to, I find it diminishing.

‘Everybody knows that there’s more out there. It’s not illegal to say so, even if the regulations concerning the printing and sale of official maps are sometimes conflated with limits on individual rights. Close readers might have picked up on the mention of a few of these places in this humble tome, though, you’ll notice we’re often mistaken for fiction.

‘The Edge of the USA’ has been an attraction since the early days, meaning pictures exist of the place before the void illusion was installed. This early iteration was much the same in tone- something like an empty moat with a tall black wall on the opposite side. At night it looked much like the void does now, except with the addition of armed guards. Security, now, is invisible but insinuated with several carefully placed signs which indicate a man crossing the barrier and those parts of him making it across being dissolved into finer and finer particles until nothing of those pieces is left. In 2004, when one of these signs became unstuck from the wall and clattered to the floor, several visitors noted that they had been made in China, rendering the whole façade more of a threat than a logical conclusion as to what the border represents.’

-traveler

‘It’s true that there is a porta-potty standing so deeply in the red sandstone of Utah that many assume it has significance beyond the traveler’s base biological needs. This specimen is two days by foot from the nearest trailhead and located in an area that is not at all popular with travelers of any kind. It floods in the rain, bakes in the sun, and is home to a particular type of stinging insect that is equally formidable in the precipitation or heat. The trails are unkempt and signage is poor but somebody, somewhere out there keeps ‘The Redstone Closet’ clean and functional. This leads people to believe:

1. ‘The Redstone Closet’ is marker for, if not a portal to, some underground treasure or facility. This begs the question, of course- why mark something secret with something so conspicuous which leads to:
2. ‘The Redstone Closet’ is a trap. But a trap for whom? The curious? The bladder-full? And does it spring in a way not immediately clear or is it a sort of vinegar trap? It’s difficult to understand the motivation behind such a scheme so most default to the obvious:
3. ‘The Redstone Closet’ is the result of a bureaucrat moving money around and having to show some physical evidence of that expenditure.’

The fourth, undiscussed possibility for ‘The Redstone Closet’ is that it offers some small oasis from the difficult terrain and wildlife. It is, for instance, the first time I approach a porta-potty with something like excitement. Certainly the first time I think of it as the most beautiful thing in my immediate surroundings.

I slap at my leg where one of the Redstone biters has snuck in under my clothes. I wring my bandana out onto the red earth beneath me. It’s taken me three days to get here after choosing the wrong branch of a fork. I haven’t seen anyone in all of that time. I’m not even sure I saw cars on the highway as I approached, so it is difficult for me to stumble around to the entrance-side of ‘The Redstone Closet’ and to find the door locked, its little binary flag reading ‘OCCUPIED.’

A man is dying inside. Or murdering. Vulgar sounds. Wet slaps.

I turn back, then, and welcome the biters as a new unlikely oasis in a world that continues to amaze me with its strange places and with its violence.

-traveler

‘A stretch of interstate might appear familiar for several reasons, the foremost being that, taken mile by mile, much of it looks the same. Far down on the list of reasons déjà vu might occur on the road is an accidental diversion to the site of ‘DARPA’s Abandoned Dream Stages’ from back when the agency was orchestrating and broadcasting dreams to the country’s citizens. Don’t worry: they’ve stopped doing that and they’ve hauled away most of the equipment. It’s just the dream stages, made nightmarish by time and decay and slivers of memory and bad intentions.’

It seems unlikely that anyone might accidentally arrive at the ‘Abandoned Dream Stages.’ They are ‘off the interstate’ in the way that anything technically is, which is to say that you have to drive about 45 minutes on increasingly questionable pavement to reach the edge of the site. That said, the edge of the site is hotly debated. Some people believe they’ve seen the road in their dreams. Some people say the same thing about the dense forest that surrounds it.

Most people have dreamt of the brown brick house so I pull up outside and step out of the camper to take it in. Seeing it in pictures hadn’t sparked anything and it’s as much a stranger in person. The next stop, further into the site, is a bridge where people dream of falling but I’ve been driving all day and decide to stretch my legs.

The door to the house is locked. The knob turns but someone has installed two beams on the door and frame to padlock together. The beams are strained and splintering, as though someone has failed to shoulder their way through. I try myself, half-heartedly, and with less than a quarter of a heart I check under the mat and, there, find the key to the lock, shining as though it were made yesterday.

The threat of government retribution is enough to make me cast about for cameras or for soldiers hiding in the shadows. When nothing stands out, I’m left to assume that the lock is for liability’s sake. Opening it is the equivalent of signing a waiver, in case I should experience bodily harm inside this aging building. I push open the door and then…

I have dreamed of the inside. The hallways. The rooms. I’ve more than dreamt of the brown brick house- this is my family home, the base of all my memories before this trip. It’s all as I remember it. A cracked pleather sofa. Gouged linoleum in the kitchen. The shadow of a smoke detector on the ceiling. Vague enough to be the home of anybody in a dream, only, I don’t have any memories of any other house. So, this has to be the one.

I walk up the stairs. I turn right down the hall. In my dreams, the house blurs the nearer I get to my room and the same thing happens now. The house is made that way. It’s painted and shaped to blur and the effect is so disorienting I have to reach out and touch the wall where the door should be but where, instead, is a swirl of wood and paint.

I stalk back out to the camper and return with the axe. The wall comes down easily- there is a door there, after all, hidden in the chaotic blurring. The door opens on a series of narrow passages that make up the space between the walls of the brown brick house, the sinister opposite to everything I thought I remembered about my life before this trip.

Maybe the Wayside has been routed in me longer than I realized.  

-traveler

Before I tell you what he’s saying, you have to understand that he’s dressed in military fatigues and holding a mean looking gun and baring his teeth and turning red in the face and squeaking like a cartoon chipmunk.

He’s saying: “Get the fuck back, sir! This is military property and I am authorized to use lethal force in maintaining its perimeter!”

It’s difficult not to laugh, so I run, instead.

‘The government has established a facility that claims to be ‘The Federal Helium Reserve’ and claims, in turn, that it refines helium from national gas and auctions it off to the highest bidder. None of this is true.

‘The Real Underground Helium Reserve’ is a massive underground chamber filled with leaky balloons and guarded by soldiers, armed with non-combustible weapons. It’s also, technically, a national park so the soldiers are required to stamp your passport prior to escorting you away. They don’t like to be reminded of this.’

-traveler