‘‘The Monkey Paw Orchard’ is kind of like a reserve in that it contains the only significant population of monkeys known for their wish-granting appendages and it’s kind of like a slaughterhouse in that the animals are being raised for product. Paw Monkeys are rare for the same reason their posthumous powers should be used with caution- they often fall prey to tragic ironies before they’ve reached an age at which their paws have matured for harvest. Those that survive the early onset of irony will sometimes kill wizened older monkeys and attempt to make wishes on their paws before employees of the reserve can stop them. Those monkeys that don’t die in the attempt and who subsequently survive their own near-assassinations and who pass the prime age for breeding are killed and their hands are sold to billionaires, celebrities, and to a non-profit that places monkeys’ paws in derelict houses, buried chests, and shifty pawnshops all across the country.

Rumor has it that ‘The Monkey Paw Orchard’ is what happens when someone tries to wish for more wishes but, if that were the case, there would probably be a lot more of these monkeys around.’

I happen to be on site when one of the younger paw monkeys kills an elder nearing harvest. It’s quick and brutal- a heavy stone to the back of the head. Again. Again. Hard to make sure it’s done. Fast to get to the wishes before someone comes to stop it. The paws don’t need to be removed for the magic to work. That’s more a matter of convenience than anything.

Obviously without understanding the language of the monkeys, I can’t say for sure what its wish was, but I was surprised to see that nobody came to retrieve the dead specimen or quiet the murderer as it did excited victory laps around the massive enclosure that constitutes ‘The Orchard.’

Weeks later I notice the same two monkeys in the background of an image posted to ‘The Orchard’s’ social media feed. The dead monkey still rots in the reserve. The living monkey is all skin and bones, on the verge of death itself. I figured the monkey had asked for more time to make more wishes.

Now, I wonder if the monkey didn’t just want to be left alone.

-traveler

There is something about people who loiter in dispensaries, something that makes them less bearable than your run-of-the-mill addict. It’s the snobbery, I think. The same depth of knowledge and willingness to flaunt it that certain serious coffee drinkers sometimes exhibit. Legalization, which I’m generally for, has only made it worse. The people who were smoking premium pot before it could be bought in-store lord it over those who started smoking when it was safe. The people who stick to edibles talk lung cancer and the people who smoke talk diabetes. It’s the same entitlement capitalism breeds in every market- each consumer must think they alone are consuming the most efficiently. The most ethically.

All of these people are present at ‘Borderline,’ and I get the sense that everyone knows I am the lowest common denominator.

I order a coffee. I’ve given everything else up.

‘Combine the legalized weed of Colorado and the cheap chemical moonshine of Arizona’s Charles County and you get a half-mile, yard-wide strip of land where a person can be truly cruel to their body and break no laws in the process. ‘Borderline’ owns this property in its entirety and what it loses in double taxation it makes up for with a frighteningly loyal customer base- one that leans libertarian and gun-owning.

Police tend to steer clear of ‘Borderline,’ mostly due to a series of successful suits waged on local departments, claiming that officers from either or both sides were acting out of jurisdiction and arresting citizens who were breaking no local laws. ‘Borderline’ has compensated by employing a private security team for each side of the property, each with a very strict protocol regarding what they are legally allowed to do to customers on either side of the border. Bouncers on one side sometimes herd unruly customers to the other, creating a ping-pong game of angry drunkards.

‘Borderline’ sits in stark contrast to the legal puzzle box that sits at ‘Four Corners.’ No man sits at ‘Four Corners’ without breaking one law or another. It is impossible to visit without arrest.’

My order for coffee takes a while. I get the sense they don’t particularly want to brew it but why else have it on the menu? Why not just tell me the machine is broken?

It takes me a while to realize that there is no music playing at ‘Borderline,’ that the atmosphere is almost business-like. People arrive on their own and set about the business of getting blasted with bored determination. They sway in their chairs. They knock over their bongs. They call for another drink, the smell of which I had originally mistaken for some sort of industrial cleaner. They watch me watching them and they begin to get upset.

Nobody wants to be seen like this.

I take my coffee to go and get pulled over across the country line.

Freshly broken taillight.

-traveler

‘It’s not uncommon, when driving through Pennsylvania, to spot the most beautiful rainbow one has ever seen. Its lines are clear against the sky and there is a glow about it, even in the day, as though it were emitting eyewatering UV in other-than-violet tones. It’s difficult to look at. It’s difficult to look away from. This is all by design.

There is nothing natural about ‘The Everainbow.’ Some might say it is the antithesis of nature, both because it has capitalized on one of those few beautiful things nature gives freely, and because it tends to short-circuit bird brains, causing them to dive headfirst out of the sky. Its creators tried and failed to work the ‘gold at the end of the rainbow’ schtick early in ‘The Everainbow’s’ operation, claiming they were the first to make good on the old myth. When this didn’t sit well with audiences, the two men responsible simply deleted their social media accounts and retired to the comfortable silence of people who make too much money to worry about image.

‘The Everainbow’ is something to see- that can’t be argued. It undulates in the wind and shivers in the cold. It’s projected twice its normal size on a new moon and it lowers to half-mast in the wake of tragedies. A satellite radio program airs on Friday evenings and ‘The Everainbow’ moves to the beat of its songs. The program is at least 50% advertisements and ‘The Everainbow’ is known to contort itself to sell products.

The painful UV effect is the latest in ‘The Everainbow’s’ features, this one a government-mandated backfire meant to keep drivers from getting distracted. Accidents have doubled since it began to singe eyes and people living nearby have reported colorful, blistering tans after standing in the glow for too long.

Real estate in the area has skyrocketed. Every new product run across the arc is a success. Celebrities and influencers bathe in the light, trying to get the blistering tan just right. On Sunday mornings ‘The Everainbow’ streams a solemn list of people killed in Everainbow-related accidents. Mourners gather to capture the honor on camera.

‘The Everainbow’ can do no wrong in the eyes of the public. It has begun flickering coded messages and a cult is forming around them. Don’t listen to what ‘The Everainbow’ says in those dark spaces. It is lying and it wants the worst for you.’

­-­an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

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