“METAL MAN, METAL MAN!”

The screaming robot of ‘Metal Man National Park’ waves his arms in my direction. I am the only visitor, currently, and thus the sole object of his attention. The Metal Man is… fused in the rock. Or is part of the rock. I approach a sign nearby and find that the question of fused-with/spawning-from/imprisoned-in the rock is still debated, with angry academics on each side attempting to out-talk each other while simultaneously blocking the research of critical peers. It would mean a lot of weird things if the metal man were spawning from the rock. Some less weird things if he were simply fused with it. Nothing weird at all if he were imprisoned in it, given the country’s incarceration statistics.

‘Pity the Metal Man who, for many years, was mistaken for a prank and who we now know is as sentient and as miserable as the rest of us. The oldest visual proof of the Metal Man is dated 1949. He flails next to three cowboys, each standing a cautious yard or so from his blurry limbs. Behind them, ‘Metal Man National Park’ stretches into a desert not yet blighted by the highways that divvy it now. Though these men were perhaps not the first to sight the Metal Man, this picture heralds decades of playful torment at the hands of curious tourists before the installation of a low metal railing in 1994 discouraged visitors from physically interacting with him.

The Metal Man has an uncanny ability to predict thunderstorms, an attribute he showcases by extending a steel rod from behind his neck and into the air above him in order to capture lightning. Some go as far as to suggest he calls the storms.’

I step over the metal railing, as many have before me, and follow a well-worn trail until it stops a few feet from the Metal Man. He’s pauses, arms slack, and then extends a hand my direction.

Here’s the thing about the Metal Man: he looks strong. Metal is just generally stronger than flesh, right? So, even though I haven’t read any cases of the Metal Man pulling someone apart limb from limb despite the many people that stand closer than I am to take selfies with his frantic form, I don’t really feel safe giving him my hand either. This seems to register with the Metal Man. He tries the same thing with Hector and is snubbed again.

He shouts: “Metal man!” This time at the sky.

He kicks at the rock around him, a motion that has broken off much of the stone and thoroughly dented his foot. He powers down suddenly, arms clattering to his sides. The Metal Man’s inside whir and buzz: an established indication of his idle state. The lightning rod begins to extend from his neck.

There isn’t a cloud in the sky when I leave ‘Metal Man National Park’ but I don’t doubt the Metal Man himself and gamble on a southward retreat. The storm gathers behind Hector and I and soon engulfs the park, leaving the Metal Man to the rain.

-traveler

‘‘The Unnamed Monument’ is described, in most literature, as a brutal obelisk that just doesn’t sit right and that’s really about all there is to it. It’s made of gray cement and weatherworn to such an extent that the only visible markings indicate the year of its installation: 1787. Plenty happened that year, both good and bad, but none of it quite warrants a monument erected on the edge of the Dakota Badlands. There was a lot of New America stuff happening at the time. One might think that monument makers had their hands full elsewhere.

The early internet saw the rise of a ‘Money Pit’ style rumor regarding the monument, namely that it indicated the site of some lost treasure. This led to a great deal of digging in the area and, in 1998, a man had to be airlifted from the site after ‘The Unnamed Monument’ lost its grip in the earth and crushed his lower half. The monument was righted, shortly after, and the rumor was nearly forgotten. Nearly, because a new rumor now circulates regarding a blurry picture of the fallen obelisk that indicates there may be something carved into the bottom. It’s this author’s opinion that a social media challenge or a ‘copypasta’ will have the ‘The Unnamed Obelisk’ on its side again by the end of the decade.’

What doesn’t sit right to me, is that there are a few dozen obelisks like the one Autumn by the Wayside describes, crooked in the ground like teeth in the jaw. They are each foreboding in their own way and each has a number on one side, indicating that they may be counting down very slowly, I guess. Slowly enough that it’s the least of my worries, really, because I could name half a dozen ways for the world to be ending in 1700 days if that’s the sort of pace we’re setting.

‘The Unnamed Obelisk’ still manages to stand out as wronger than the others. It’s clear even from a distance which one is the oldest, and when I’m close enough to touch it, I feel the tingling ache of mild electricity- like blood pooling in my fingers. And my fingers are bleeding when I pull my hand away. Not from any clear point- just from the pores, I guess, which seems worse in theory than it seems to be in practice. I hand-sanitize, which just spreads the blood around, and then I wipe the blood/alcohol mess on my jeans.

It’s been said before, but ‘The Unnamed Obelisk’ does seem to sit at the heart of the future-proofing problem, which is to say, there’s a lot about the site that suggests it’s more of a warning than a monument. Someone must have thought people in the future would be smart enough to stay away from evil-looking, blood-sucking obelisks on those bases alone and that the year would be explanation enough as to why one might think to install one as a marker.

Maybe just make it really boring next time.

-traveler

There is a man having some sort of lonely mental crisis at the central point of ‘Compelled Echo State Park.’ A Ranger is stretched across a bench nearby, looking at his phone. He hears me approaching and shifts as though he might lend the weeping man some assistance, fulfilling what, I have to assume, is his duty at this particular posting. He shrugs, instead, and goes back to ignoring us both.

To be fair to the man-in-crisis, ‘Compelled Echo Cave’ is a lot to wrap your head around. The nearer I get, the clearer it is that the man’s outbursts are being prompted by the cave itself. The distant sounds of his own hysterics emanate from the dark, there, and hearing them elicits a fresh bout of wailing. Though, that’s not really what’s happening, is it? In reality, the man is being compelled to echo the wailing- his crisis playing out in the cave before it manifests on the surface. I feel a twinge of existentialist discomfort, myself, and before I can find the words to comfort the man, I hear my own voice echo out of the cave: You okay, man?

It’s exactly the sort of low-bar discomfort I have to offer in any situation: reluctant and almost judgmental. I try to think of something else to say but the words form in my mouth anyway.

“You okay man?”

No. The cave says.

“No,” the man answers.

To be fair to the Ranger, this seems like the sort of thing a person has to work out on their own.

‘There is no better way to upset your already less-than-stable understanding of the universe than to visit ‘Compelled Echo State Park,’ where the cave seems to anticipate noises at its mouth just before they happen. Researchers of the compelled echo phenomenon fits neatly into the established understandings of natural science, but the papers they produce utilize a great deal of technical jargon to beat around the bush and to eventually suggest other avenues of study to be explored at a later date.

Some find the pre-mimicking of ‘Compelled Echo Cave’ to be difficult, but ultimately therapeutic. Others insist alien wordings and intonations are insinuated into what they are forced to say at the mouth. Still others assume the whole thing is a scam. Suffice to say: nobody likes the sound of their own voice.’

The cave speaks again: Look, I’ve never been good at this sort of thing under normal circumstances. I’m not going to make you feel better.

It pauses so I can catch up. The words tumble from my lips.

But this thing has always been here and seeing it for yourself doesn’t change anything.

I say all of that, too, and then I hear Hector sneeze in the darkness. A few seconds later, the Hector at my feet sneezes and seems legitimately surprised by the cave, as though it’s the first strange thing he’s noticed in all this traveling.

I hear the sneeze because the cave, and therefore the man, has quit crying. In fact, when I listen closely, I can hear the unexercised grunt of me pulling him to his feet.

The man opens his mouth to speak and I stop him, afraid we’ll end up back where we started. It must work, because the cave stays quiet and, soon, I hear the man’s footsteps fading into the dark. Soon after that he leaves.

Thanks! The cave shouts, and I turn in time to see the Ranger say the same thing. He follows the man down the trail and toward the parking lot.

I sit at the entrance of the cave for a long time, waiting to hear what I’ll say next.

But no words come.

-traveler

‘Likely the most miserable creature on earth, ‘The Angry, Impotent Cat of Bank County, Arizona’ is homeless by choice and, thus, is somewhat difficult to pin down, geographically, in a medium that cannot effectively utilize GPS. There are websites and social media accounts dedicated to tracking the direction of its wanderings. That direction is inevitably ‘away from the people who are trying to interact with it’ so most photos of ‘The Angry, Impotent Cat’ are of its butthole, likely the only aspect of its fame the cat would approve of.

Not to be confused with ‘The Angry, Important Cat of Bank County, Arizona,’ an elected official.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

There’s a lot to be said about the walled-off border of ‘The 51^st State,’ but what stands out most to me is just how flat it seems despite, according to maps, being a massive, perfect circle. The credibility of the map is questionable, sure. That’s true of any map that reveals the shape and location of the secret ‘51^st State.’ Holding a map like that is a misdemeanor at least. Creating maps- distributing them- is unquestionably felonious and maybe also the sort of thing that gets you thrown into the sort of prisons that don’t show up on maps either. Irony at its most cruel.

They can’t throw you in jail for finding the wall, though. That would be tough. It’s huge, towering hundreds of feet in the air. It reeks of misplaced tax money, the quality with which it’s been built and the care with which it’s maintained. People find this wall all the time, I’m sure, and without knowing the context, they must wonder the same thing we all do: keeping us out or something else in?

‘Rumor has it that official maps of the continental United States disguise the location of ‘The 51^st State’ by widening borders and shaving off little latitudinal degrees where the average non-cartographer won’t miss them. Situated as it is, where Midwestern prairies drag on for miles in every direction, it’s the sort of discrepancy that most will overlook without a second thought. The wall itself serves much the same purpose, it being the color of sandstone and curved so subtly as to blend in with landscapes and horizons when viewed from the highway. It is so bland- so unseeable- that certain stretches of interstate have been forced to draw some attention to the wall in order to keep vehicles from colliding with it as drivers pull to the shoulder to relieve themselves.

Of course, once the wall is seen, it can’t be unseen. It is the single largest construction on American soil. Unofficial estimates put ‘The 51^st State’ as the tenth largest in the nation but that sort of math is wholly unnecessary when faced with the truth of the thing. It breathes enormity and it has the allure of a dead insect- grotesque and dangerous for all that it’s still.

As for what’s behind it, collecting the ideas about ‘The 51^st State’ and its daunting wall has proven a difficult task. There are just so many theories and the people that ask about them just keep disappearing.’

-traveler

It takes about three days before I admit to Hector, and to myself, that I may have gotten us lost. It doesn’t really sink in until that evening, when I’ve finished rolling strips of old billboard vinyl into tight logs for a fire we can’t enjoy too closely without inhaling psychedelic adhesive fumes. This is what being lost is: assuming everything will sort itself out around one too many bends. More specifically, being lost in ‘Billboard Hell’ is allowing one too many signs to guide you in the wrong direction. It’s second-guessing the intent of an advertisement for a burger joint that should just be five minutes away left- going right because you suspect some sort of guerilla reverse psychology is at work. It’s tearing through a billboard to find yourself facing a second, smaller sign for the same company, congratulating you for ‘thinking outside the box’ and offering its services in sign repair.

We have another couple days of food. Probably a day’s worth of water unless it rains.

There is an engine running, somewhere, and we head that direction in the morning. There’s nowhere else to go.

‘It stands to reason that, because Vermont maintains a state-wide ban on billboards, there must exist a concentration of billboards somewhere else in the country to offset the deficit. This is the less-than-scientific explanation for ‘Billboard Hell,’ which stretches over several states but seems to be confined mainly to the rust belt. Where it exists exactly is hard to say because there are a lot of places in the US that might qualify as a billboard hell and the ‘Billboard Hell’ is always shedding old roots and branching ever forward.

The Rangers suggest travelers wishing to avoid ‘Billboard Hell’ remain within the boundaries of Vermont and ignore any signs that might be trying to coax them across the border.’

­-traveler

‘‘The Fridge-Magnet Safe-Hold’ (or FMSH) is relatively new to the Wayside and was a small, unadvertised venture until 2022 when fictional mob boss Tom Get (of the series, ‘Getmen’) uttered a now signature phrase: ‘sleeping with the fridges.’ This euphemism, seemingly misspoken, resolved itself at a scene filmed on-site at the ‘FMSH,’ in which Tom reveals that the business serves as a convenient way to ‘keep the fuzz from taking hold of ‘em’ (itself, a colloquialism for police investigation, not an allusion to mold). The episode proved popular enough that the ‘FMSH’ tactic for hiding bodies featured several more times- right up until a real body was discovered there.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves.

‘The Fridge-Magnet Safe-Hold is a fridge dump and magnet-storage solution all in one. It was founded with an understanding that many American families are upgrading to refrigerators that, through shape or material, are unable to hold the magnets that had become sentimental on previous models. For a small fee (discounted with the simultaneous donation of a fridge) a family can rent fridge space in a building that is, in all other ways, your average storage beehive. Units consist of a single fridge behind a clear plexiglass door so that the stored magnets can be viewed but not touched. For five dollars, anyone can walk the halls of the FMSH and admire the collections housed within except on Wednesdays and Saturday, when entry is reserved for unit holders only. This is likely when most people take a moment out of their week to store figurative skeletons in their closets, these fridges being mostly airtight and just inconspicuous enough to allow for the storage of petty secrets. The expectation for these skeletons to be ‘figurative’ is why the dead body felt like such a party foul to those who used the place as intended.’

Hector and I arrive at ‘The FMSH’ on a Thursday- a slow day, I’m told. Those other visitors I see around me tend to slot into a few categories: the true crime enthusiasts, the ‘Getmen’ fans, the fringe art students, and the miscellaneous drop-ins, like myself. The true-crime and Getman folks are crowded around a rather drab looking display in the northeast portion of ‘The FMSH.’ I stand near the back for a while before I understand why: the stench.

Something is rotting in the fridge.

A man, a tour guide I assume, has drawn the attention of the crowd to the plastic letter magnets on display, there, suggesting very generally that theoretical hitmen might (and fictional hitmen certainly would) leave coded messages in letters like these to ensure their fellows in crime might understand the nature of what is inside. The crowd eats this up, some trying to decipher the magnets, others asking if it might be wise to call the police, secretly hoping, I’m sure, to be on-site when a new discovery is made.

The guide deflects the latter suggestion in a way that makes me think whatever group he’s associated with has filled the fridge with meat for effect. The crowd moves on.

A group of children eat lunch at the opposite end of the property, taking advantage of an otherwise empty hallway. I step over and through them and despite my rush, despite my worn-ragged clothes and body, they stop me to ask question about Hector, who eats his fill of sandwich lettuce and baby carrots while the chaperones grimace nearby.

In a lull that threatens to be awkward, I ask about the drawing of a house on one of the nearby fridges and soon find myself on a miniature tour of schoolwork. This hallway has been rented to the school, it seems, and the children post their exemplars here for viewing. They seem proud, and rightfully so, especially given such a strange audience as me and my rabbit. I go and spoil things at the end, though. I suggest, to one of the teachers, that if I were going to hide a body in any fridge, these make a lot more sense than the rest.

-traveler

‘‘The Free Mattress Dump,’ ‘The Spring Brambles,’ or, in some circles, ‘The Tetanus Garden,’ is a thousand mattresses decaying in an otherwise abandoned Connecticut field. The seed of this strange crop was planted when a local farmer, disgusted at the surreptitious furniture dumping of his neighbors, offered a place to toss mattresses right where everyone would see them daily: on his plot of land next to the freeway. This shaming tactic failed spectacularly, the farmer having underestimated the number of old mattresses that were stored in houses for the perceived cost-prohibitiveness or geographical inaccessibility of local dumps. Too stubborn to admit he was wrong, the field has been lost to the mattresses.

Some say there is a treasure in the fields and that the farmer’s mistake was actually a ploy to frustrate would-be thieves and their amateur metal detectors. This is likely half-true by way of the country’s overall saturation with hidden treasure. This is a nation that buries things- valuable and dangerous. This is a country that sometimes forgets which is buried where.’

I don’t have the money to board Hector again so he comes with me into ‘The Spring Brambles’ and, being careful from all his many years of blindness, passes between the rusted springs without much issue. I don’t fare so well, which makes me thankful for the booster shots I sometimes pick up at free clinics and for the haphazard mess of papers in my bag, among which I found proof of a semi-recent tetanus vaccine and a suggestion that, finding myself torn ragged by dump-metal, I would only need to seek out an additional injection to cover my bases.

I am not quite ragged after an hour in ‘The Bramble,’ but the thrift-store leather jacket I bought as armor for this particular outing is missing a few of its unseemly patches and I am lost, despite being able to see the motorcycle and the freeway in the distance. The nature of the mattress springs is that they have a tendency toward entropical shift. Tangled as they are, a single break can release the tension required to reshape the web of metal as far as half a mile away, closing paths that were once safe and opening new, unmarked exits.

I was prepared for this and, as night falls and I experience the disorientation caused by a flashlight beam playing across the old mattresses, I make camp at the first available clearing and resign myself to a lightless evening under the stars with the mad twanging of tense metal as the only sound but for the distant passing of a car on the freeway. It’s said that Ranger visits ‘The Spring Brambles’ on Mondays and Fridays, armed with heavy wire cutters and puncture-resistant armor to help those who find themselves stranded as I do now.

Like most Americans, I have yet to shake my suspicion of rest. But it’s Wednesday which means, barring a clearing collapse, I will have a rare day of peace made mandatory by threat of harm.

Just the way I like it.

-traveler

The top review for ‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ states, simply: It was much worse than I imagined. Reading that, I suspected I could adjust my expectations accordingly but I could not. ‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ is a site that resists seeing- a painful checkmark on any traveler’s list. It starts with the dust.

‘The dust of ‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ is a known carcinogen. Grayish-black. Powder-thin. It works its way into engines and electronics and clothes, emerging months- sometimes even years- after a visitor leaves the park behind. Law firms sometimes volunteer to press charges on behalf of those affected but there is no one to sue. It is nature at its most cruel.

‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ is, realistically, just piles of this dust. Piles tall enough to be considered landscape. Beneath is a field of sharp rocks, the tips of which sometimes break off and work their way up into the dust. Amongst the rocks there are biting insects. Amongst the insects there is disease.

There is a sport people play only in ‘Horrific Wastes’ and that sport is survival. People attempt to stay in the ‘Wastes’ longer than anyone else and then must survive at least 90 days afterward, proving they did not consume too much of the dust too quickly or contract the ‘Horrific Wasting Disease’ from the insects. The record is a week and a half, set by a man who died 91 days after his stint.

A hit and run.’

I board Hector before heading into ‘Horrific Wastes.’ It doesn’t seem worth trying to shove him into the suits they’ve made for hiking dogs, but it does leave me explaining that I am not the one responsible for his hairlessness and the charred complexion of his skin. It leaves me worried I’ll be reported somewhere, even if all signs point to Hector being healthy and well fed in the present. I leave him with sunblock and that seems to help put their concerns to rest. Anybody who buys top shelf infant sunblock for their rabbit must be good to pets.

Right?

I leave my number and tell them I’m going into ‘Horrific Wastes’ for a night. They recite the names of the people they’ve known who have died there and I assure them I’m taking all the normal precautions: renting a safety suit from the Rangers nearby, spending just one night, and fasting the entire time so that I only have to breach the lower portion of the suit while relieving myself. It seems like too much to be telling strangers, but they nod as though it’s business as usual.

The ‘safe zone’ of ‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ is maintained such that the dust is regularly flattened, some, and that there is a hospital nearby. I struggle to set up my tent in the swirling wastes before realizing it won’t make a difference. I lie down in the dust and wait for the evening to pass.

And the dust swirls about me in clouds.

And the insects hover like stars on the bubbled glass of my suit.

And it’s nice, almost, until I have to pee and feel the stinging of the cancerous terrain on the most sensitive portion of my body.

And until the bugs get inside my suit.

It is much worse than I imagined it would be and I only stay a few hours.

-traveler

‘There was no intention to create ‘The Doll Slum’ when ‘The East Coast Doll Museum and Shop’ rolled out its volunteer program for local kids, but here we are, one doll slum richer for those good intentions. It seemed like a good idea on paper: local students were tasked with creating homes and backdrops for dolls that were a little too old- a little too worn- for proper displays within the museum. Those projects were cute, of course. They were kitschy.

Most of all, they were structurally unsound.

More and more dolls poured into the museum and, as the curators for main display specimens became increasingly selective, the vast majority of the new arrivals flooded the children’s display. Dolls were packed tightly into rooms meant for one or two and as the weak, child-made infrastructure failed under their weight, many dolls were forced to pose outside. Despite the obvious flaws in the initial structure, child labor is still the main source of upkeep in ‘The Doll Slum’ and so the cycle of detriment continues. The uneducated and unpaid are exploited for their labor and the needy are left without the space to thrive.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside