Autumn tends to be orchard weather. Orchard weather for things like pumpkins and squash- old apples and peaches that fall apart in your hand. Gardens, on the other hand, don’t have much going on at all in the autumn. That’s been my experience. Gardens become cemeteries for themselves, their dry bushes marking the lots where something beautiful has grown and died. ‘The Ash Garden’ is grimmer than most, because in ‘The Ash Garden,’ death is not an afterthought.

‘Perhaps a result of the sheer number of people out there these days, the market has cultivated a demand for quirky means by which to dispose of human ashes (‘quirky’ because the act of purchasing such a vessel denies the consumer the chance of being genuinely ‘creative’). There are beautiful and tacky urns. There are amulets and chains. There are molds and molten plastic which might allow for the deceased to become, say, a doll or a trophy or the base of a Christmas tree, why not? Past the initial grief-busting high of receiving such an object, none of it is very satisfying to have. Certainly not for the generations that follow who, if they kept every item imbued with dead ancestors, would have no room for their own things.

‘The Ash Garden’ is just about the perfect compromise. It relies on the premise of its forebearers, that it would be a shame for the mortal remains of a loved one to just be buried, and pivots to the forebearers’ forebearer which is to say: it convinces people to bury them anyway. This switcheroo is accomplished through the narrative of ash being important to the growth of flowers and flowers being symbolic of life and symbols of life being important to popular traditions and ceremonies regarding death. To cut through the babble: one might pay ‘The Ash Garden’ to add their relative to the soil they use to grow flowers for funerals (also at a price). Thus, the enterprise has sourced specialty resources and captured a specialty audience all for the price of seeds and property tax.

It was working pretty well until the pandemic.’

No in-person funerals. A lot of dead people. ‘The Ash Garden’ is all ash and no garden now. I have to pull out a mask for the first time in a while just to stand at the outskirts. A man at the center beckons me over and I wave him away. I don’t need my shoes full of this stuff. It’s already in a cloud around me, layering my clothes like unmelting snow. A small sign indicates what ‘The Ash Garden’s’ signature gray-blue flowers look like in peak season. This is not peak season. I’m not sure that season will return, here.

The man beckons again, urgent. A younger me would give in but I’m tired, these days, and suffering from the sort of loneliness that perpetuates itself. I’ve forgotten how to interact with others. Talking to strangers makes me nervous and self-aware.

The man waves again and I call out this time, angrier, maybe, than is necessary. “No!”

He waves again so I wave back, exaggerating the movement. If he has something to say, he can come to me.

The wind changes, slows, and the ash clears somewhat. The man is a scarecrow.

I might need to talk to someone soon.

-traveler

‘A hole in the ground can garner a great deal of suspicion. Rightfully so- that’s where a great deal of us will end up when we die. But the uncomfortable presence of a hole in the ground is not in question, here. Rather, it’s the ease at which one might make a hole in the ground seem less suspicious- friendly even- that pertains to ‘The Universal Charging Station’ in Mississippi.

A grate, for instance, makes a hole more palatable. A manhole cover takes a whole and makes it reassuring- necessary, even. A few orange cones, a flutter of police tape: these indicate the bare minimum, that a hole has been reported and that necessary actions are being taken to deal with it. A hole in the ground with a house on top is just a basement. A hole full of water is just a well. A hole in a face, wet with teeth and tongue, is just a mouth. It doesn’t take much to make a hole friendly.

But ‘The Universal Charging Station’ makes no attempt.’

It isn’t hard to see what the guide is talking about. ‘The Universal Charging Station’ is essentially a hole in the ground made more conspicuous by the large, metal pole encompassing and sticking up out of it, twisted off so tightly that it comes to a jagged point. There is a hole in one side where someone has helpfully scrawled “charge here.”

Like others before me, I examine the pole with care. I tap it, in case the entire thing is electrified, and I tap it again to test the depth of the hollow. Once I have made sure the thing is benign, offering up my skin before my precious phone, I unwind my charging cable from its careful curl and lower one end into the pole.

A car passes on the interstate, its wake blowing through my clothes and kicking up dust. When I clear my eyes I see: the phone is charging. The cord hangs loosely in the pole, clanging against either side, but it’s drawing a charge from somewhere all the same.

Amazing.

My phone is at 5% and the lighter-port in the camper is broken, so I decide to stay for a while. I barely make it to 20% before the unlit stretch of interstate, before the quiet, is too much. I’ve always needed an excuse to talk to myself: a stuffed animal, an imaginary friend, an old rabbit. Now I have nobody and I’ve lost my voice.

-traveler

‘Out past Santa Fe- out past even the outskirts of Santa Fe- there is a rundown little diner called ‘Betty Sue’s.’ A sign on the door advertises ‘The best coffee in the USA.’ What makes ‘Betty Sue’s’ different than all the other diners that advertise similarly?

Nothing.

All of them are lying. You will not walk into any diner in the USA and have the best coffee there. You will not ever have the best coffee in the USA. If you are reading this book, or even looking at the cover, or even standing in the same room as a copy, you will never have the best coffee. The best coffee in the USA is reserved for the wealthy elite. The demographics for readers of this book and for the obscenely rich are two separate and perfect circles, never meeting. The wealthy elite who drink the best coffee in the USA have never heard of this book or even of a travel guide. They have people that describe places to them and those paid place-describers are likely wealthy enough to have never read this book either.

People like you and me are allowed to consume the worst coffee. We are allowed to consume the hottest coffee. We are allowed to consume coffee, in general. These are privileges that, at any moment, could be stripped away by the sort of wealthy elite who drink the best coffee. They could, at any moment, make coffee hotter and worse than anything we could imagine. They could halt the harvest of coffee, make its consumption illegal. If they then chose to brew only the worst coffee in the world, then it would technically also be the best coffee and it would belong to them.

There are those of you who might think that your own technique for brewing coffee is best on a personal level. You are wrong. There are those who believe any coffee shared with a lover or intellectual rival or with a cigarette is the best coffee. Wrong on all counts.

The best coffee in the USA available from a roving pop-up barista for-hire. She works for whomever will pay her the most per cup. She only brews once per day. When pressed for her secret she says ‘It’s just hype, anyone can make a perfect cup of joe.’

But then she smiles and winks to suggest that’s not the case at all.

She does not drink her own coffee. The wealthy elite forbid it.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘It’s difficult to know what circumstances led to the emergence of California’s ‘Angry Rabbit Tree,’ both because nature has always been willing to churn out monsters when humanity is least prepared, and because a lot of paperwork handled by ‘The URT’ staff has gone missing under mysterious circumstances.

Catching glimpses of ‘The ART’ remains somewhat difficult as of this entry. It is cordoned off and sporadically patrolled by Rangers who don’t know what to do with the thing. Past that ‘The ART’ is admittedly kind of dangerous. The sort of place this publication can’t recommend visiting in its current state without risking an amount of liability. Readers beware.

First: Rabbits inhabit the area. Their holes are a hassle in and of themselves. They twist ankles and cause the ground to collapse at odd times, the earth there being honeycombed and unstable. Then: the rabbits themselves are mean. Territorial. Smart. And organized as though by a single mind. Reports suggest that all rabbits on the premises are simply roots and branches of ‘The ART,’ a single rabbit budding multiple fruits. They haven’t killed, yet. But not for lack of trying.

The tree itself has gone dark and leathery. More like flesh than wood. It shivers in the cold and sags in the heat and twitches when the odd insect lands here or there. For all that it’s angry at those who approach it, Rangers insist it rests into contentment when left alone. They ask for room while they attempt to make peace with the thing. Donations of rabbit food are received gratefully at this time.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

There are fewer and fewer sacred places on this earth- fewer places unworn by the feet of travelers. Some of the roughest edges of the Wayside have been smoothed by the great stampede of people like myself, who look for an escape here and, finding that here is much the same as everywhere, attempt to squeeze in through or into the dirty seams and cracks of places that seem unbroken. Those places do exist, but they’re growing thinner and dirtier and the internet has made travelers lazy.

I’ve grown lazy.

‘The Universal Receiving Tree’ in California is a marvel for the mainstream. It is a massive redwood that, over many, many years, has been grafted with the branches of nearly a hundred fruiting and flowering trees. It sustains these branches, requiring little maintenance beyond the initial grafting supports. It blooms in the spring, summer, and fall and creaks like an old skeleton in the winter, a hodgepodge monster among its neighbors, none of which have boasted the same flexibility.

I’m starting to sound like the book, I know, but the book says something else entirely.

‘Oh, a pretty apple. Oh, a juicy orange. And both? Amazing!

That’s what you sound like when you visit ‘The URT.’ You sound like someone who has never been to a grocery store. The sad truth of the matter is that ‘The URT’ isn’t doing anything particularly interesting on the surface. Tree grafting is an old, if not tedious, technique and ‘The URT’ is just a prize pug at the dog show: dolled up and wheezing for the masses. Did you know ‘The URT’ draws a diverse population of butterflies the likes of which can be found nowhere else on earth? Did you know that the tree’s seeds are collected and burned to keep its secret proprietary?

Did you notice there aren’t any squirrels in that tree? No insects around its base?

The Wayside is the metaphorical shoulder of the highway- the place that exists between road and ‘other.’ But metaphors are limiting. Sometimes the Wayside is as much the places above and below the highway. Take, for instance, ‘The URT.’ Why does nobody collect the fruit that falls until after closing? And why does the parking lot never clear?’

It’s difficult for me to see ‘The URT’s’ park and its structures as anything but shady, having first read the guide’s entry. The rest of the forest is entirely open to the public, with the usual restrictions regarding hunting and camping. ‘The URT’ stands alone, fenced off at a distance one expects from a tiger’s enclosure. The site is overstaffed and manned by people who take their job way too seriously if you believe their job is to simply guard a tree. And life does avoid ‘The URT’ at ground level. It’s difficult to tell for sure from the raised platform, but nothing obvious moves down there. No bugs. No rodents. Birds stick to the branches. Bees stick to the air.

When I look too long a man pulls me back and tells me I was leaning too far out.

He’s the man I ask about closing procedure.

“The thing is,” I tell him, “I’ve got a friend that’s got a friend that did the underground tour, you know. Off the menu. And he said for money, for like, $500, it can be arranged.”

I don’t have friends, as you must well know, and I don’t always have money. The man asks for more but I stand firm. I’m not good at haggling- I just don’t have any more money than that to give. He accepts when I offer the money upfront, and he tells me to meet him in the parking lot an hour after closing.

The camper is not inconspicuous in the near-empty lot and I make it more conspicuous by peering through the shades every few minutes, thinking that a rogue leaf is someone coming to tell me where I should and shouldn’t be. When someone does come to the door, I don’t hear approach at all.

One tentative knock. Two louder knocks after that. The knock of someone second guessing what they’re doing, someone nervous, I think, which puts us on even ground.

I open the door and find a woman. She’s younger than me, dressed in unbuttoned flannel and unlaced boots. I recognize another traveler and she must have recognized the same in me.

“Are you waiting for the tour?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“You want company?”

“I have company,” I tell her, and I gesture to Hector, wheezing on his bed in the corner.

“What’s wrong with him?”

The wheezing started a couple weeks ago. Then he got sluggish. The couple vets I’ve seen tell me it could be anything. The rabbit’s old and he’s got more miles on him than most. They all agree that it doesn’t look good. Lately he’s taken to chewing a hole in his back, a habit that’s landed him in a cone.

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve got a coffee pot in my car if you’ve got electricity in this thing.”

“Sure,” I tell her, “I could use coffee.”

The man is late coming to retrieve us, but he makes good on his promise. He doesn’t blink when I haul along a sick rabbit. Eve, the woman, side-eyes me.

Through a back room and down a series of cement stairs, we find ourselves in the hollow chamber that allows for access to ‘The URT’s’ roots. They emerge from the ceiling and reenter the soil through the floor and walls. A number of people in lab coats mill about the exposed roots, examining the illicit grafts. It’s mostly animals and pieces of people. There’s something that looks like a robot across the way, but when I stare too long one of the uniforms gestures at our guide and he pulls me away.

The tour is wordless until we reach an alcove in the far wall. The earth is exposed, there, and the grafts go mostly unobserved the employees. Our guide points with his chin:

“Deposits.”

I take off Hector’s cone and stroke his head. Then I set him close enough to the roots that the ragged flesh around his chew-wound touches the wood. He doesn’t move from the spot.

“This keeps things alive, right?” I ask.

“It sustains them,” the man says. It’s a practiced deflection, but sustaining is enough for now.

I look over at the woman and she shrugs: “More coffee?”

We camp there, in the lot, until someone finally arrives to tell us we have to go.

-traveler

I hate public bathrooms, so you can imagine the hell this trip has been. I figured, early on, that I would get used to it but the Wayside has made it worse. Popular destinations have reason to keep their toilets clean and mystery free. Places on the Wayside don’t share this motivation. Their restrooms are dirty, that is without question, but they’re often also assertively weird. They emit strange sounds. They invite strange company. Like anything that’s been used too hard and for too long, they are embittered.

I waited to visit ‘Ansville’s Haunted Toilet’ until I had a toilet of my own. The restroom in the camper in cramped and not without a distinct smell, but it’s clean and boring the way a toilet should be. With some months of that stability, I finally make the stop.

‘There’s no proof that the toilet in Ansville is haunted. It’s warm, that’s all. Warm like somebody got off it minutes before, but always warm, even if they didn’t. That sort of trick can be pulled with an electric seat. It could probably be accomplished wirelessly. It could probably be accomplished with targeted heat emission.

Could just be a warm bathroom.

The kicker, though, it that ‘Ansville Bites,’ the restaurant in which the haunted toilet can be found, doesn’t charge for admission. They don’t advertise. They even chafe a little at being asked which stall it is. If nothing else, this seals the deal.

Mishandled denial has a funny way of indicating the truth.’

On a crisp autumn night, all I can say about ‘Ansville’s Haunted Toilet’ is: pretty cozy. Maybe my first five-star visit in all these years. Once I get past the weirdness of the warmth, by reminding myself that I’m not sharing the germy butt-heat of another living human, and once I get past the subsequent there-may-be-a-ghost-here-now, weirdness, there is just the warmth and my own bare skin. And that’s not something I’ve felt for quite some time.

-traveler

‘Aging, but still beautiful, ‘The Model of Crook’s Pass’ is a mainstay for hikers and reasonably adventurous road-tourists alike. Friendly for a man trapped by his own vanity, Darren Meek claims to have visited Crook’s Pass before the concept of ‘the golden hour’ entered into the mainstream and, finding himself so well-lit at nearly every hour of the day (for the magic of Crook’s Pass works even in the moonlight) he has thus far refused to move from the spot even for an afternoon.

He’s never looked better.

A winter’s beard fills out in the shadowy crags of the pass, making him something of a pretty-boy mountain man. Malnutrition chisels his jaw in the fall. His skin tans to a bronze by the end of summer. And in spring, well, everyone looks good in the spring.

Meek has put in the work, too. The state granted him permission to build a small cabin for himself at the pass which he did, shirtless all the while. Pictures from the process were collected for an advertising campaign that was ultimately deemed ‘too risqué’ for print. He hands out the discarded samples himself and personalizes them for $20.

Meek has recently become a somewhat frenetic spokesperson for climate change awareness. A little evidence and a great deal of speculation suggests the weather is changing the quality and duration of light at the pass and that Meek is looking a little worn in the new glow. Visitors are cautioned to proceed with care and to lead with compliments- advice that may become a mandate if ‘The Model of Crook’s Pass’ wins its quiet bid to become a national monument.

A note: ‘The Model of Crook’s Pass’ is not to be confused with ‘A Model of Crook’s Pass,’ the scale replica of Crook’s Pass on display 100 miles west of the actual site. Though this model now includes a tiny scale replica of Darren Meek, he has refused to acknowledge it, claiming that the artists have failed to properly capture him.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘Melanie Morkovich doesn’t want you to try to guess what puppet you’ve got a hand in when you visit Butte County’s ‘Inner Puppet Journey.’ She’s been quoted as saying the practice is “infuriating” and “in direct opposition to the spirit of the project,” though she fails to go on record as to what might better suit that “spirit.” Her insinuations, and demonstrations of her own technique, lead the author to believe that, like much of modern self-care, engaging with the ‘Inner Puppet Journey’ is a means of staying in the moment. Trying to guess what puppet your hand is not very ‘present.’’

I’d like to say that I’ve got a personal rule about sticking extremities into places I can’t see, but the Wayside stripped me of basic survival instincts years ago. This is how I find myself crouched in the lower half-floor of the ‘Inner Puppet Journey,’ able to reach up through a series of anonymous holes and into the dark anuses of mystery puppets. I suspect I have my hand in a turtle, though, it’s difficult to say which is the right direction for the puppet to be facing. It may be a figure with a hard plastic mask and, rather than working the turtle’s mouth, I may instead be squeezing the tip of a velvet top hat.

I move on to another puppet, one whose inside fits like a glove. I sense that something is sewn into the fingers- that something might be sewn across the fingers, actually. I wonder if it isn’t a spider web. It would make for a weird puppet, but I’ve seen worse.

The next is long enough that I can feel around on the floor above. A snake, maybe, because my point can just fill the thin fabric of something shaped like a tongue. I waggle the tongue this way, change direction, and waggle the tongue backward. I do this a few times so, later, when I dig through footage of the puppet floor I might figure out what I had been puppeting all along. My understanding, though, is that it’s nearly impossible. Morkovich doesn’t police the use of her puppets on site, but most people believe she mixes up past and present puppet floor footage to discourage the guessing. My hand will be lost in a sea of-

Something grazes my finger through the puppet and I freeze.

I’m not the only one on the half-floor. A teenage couple flirts near the exit. A father lifts his son to the puppet holes about ten feet away. Nobody is close enough to be touching me.

“Stop!” I hiss at the dad, “There something up there.”

He carries the kid several more puppets away in order to more efficiently ignore me. The thing that grazed my finger is still there, unmoving. I feel for it with the snake’s tongue: two eyes, a nose, and a gaping mouth. I pull back instinctively. The fabric is wet. When I reach for the face I find it still gaping. And closer.

I pull my arm back so quickly that the snake turns inside-out. The teens are looking at me now. The dad never really stopped.

I head for the exit when the kid says: “Daddy, look!”

The snake’s body is filling with an arm from above. It’s tongue pokes out and it turns its head to waggle at me. The teens think it’s a riot. The dad is bemused. The kid is freaked, and I side with him. I take the exit and wash my hands in the camper.

There are clips from the ‘Inner Puppet Journey,’ largely considered parody, of a nude figure slipping across the puppet floor. Bizarre, artsy stuff, I guess. And probably not parody.

-traveler

‘The City Fountain’ doesn’t get me right away. In fact, I’m in the city for nearly eight hours before I catch it in action. A man reaches down to tie his shoe and a short blast of water emits from a hole in the sidewalk, soaking his crotch. I might have missed it if I hadn’t turned at just the right moment which, according to my research, is strange. ‘The City Fountain’ is not known for holding back on visitors.

‘The first and only entity protected under federal laws regarding ‘Irregular Sentience,’ ‘The City Fountain’ of City, Idaho is, unfortunately, sentient by way of general malevolence. Designed and installed by a local Idahoan name Jack Janner (later found to be a false name), ‘The City Fountain’ was activated on July 4^th, 1976. Janner was killed later the same day when a pipe exploded nearby, thus far the only fatality attributed to his creation. The water-logging of his personal files, both at his home and in the local bank’s safety deposit box, further implicates ‘The Fountain’ in his death but, because irregular sentience laws had not yet been put in place, ‘The City Fountain’ has managed to avoid trial for the apparent homicide.

‘The City Fountain’ has garnered a reputation as something of a trickster, utilizing the thousands of spouts and spigots integrated into the City’s waterworks to knock ice cream out of the hands of unsuspecting children, and to knock phones out of the hands of their parents, recording these little micro-traumas. Residents of the City know that ‘The City Fountain’ is more than a trickster- it’s a bully- and that the only thing keeping it from crossing the line from cruel to dangerous are the bylaws that allow it to be tried as a human.

Resentment grows between Wayside tourists and the City dwellers who have to live with ‘The Fountain’ year round. Rumor has it that a third faction has determined to kill the thing, in whatever manner a thing like ‘The Fountain’ might be killed. Visitors are cautioned to be forgiving of the City’s people and suspicious of its facilities. Much of the plumbing has succumbed to the will of ‘The City Fountain. Unfortunately, the meanness is the best indication of ‘The City Fountain’s’ intelligence and its best defense for protection.’

I hurry back to the camper and find it flooded. Hector, soaked and shivering, has taken refuge on the driver’s seat. A thick stream of water pummels the headrest, jetting up from behind the camper and through one of the windows I left cracked for airflow.

‘The City Fountain’ won’t let me fix anything as long as I am in its domain. My shirts are knocked off hangers. My bedsheets are stained in muddy sewer water. We leave town and find an amount of peace in the outskirts, though night falls before anything has a chance to dry. It’s a cold night. Another night on the ground. Eventually, I decide to drive and hope the chilly autumn air will start us on our way back to normal, whatever that looks like.

-traveler