I imagine there will be a time when cameras exist that can capture the full majestic silliness of ‘The World Hat’ and I, the aging millennial, will go white in the knuckles as the new generation makes a trend of posting those pictures until something happens to the site, accidentally or otherwise, that ruins it.
Just the hypothetical makes me angry.
I’ve been feeling that a lot, lately. The anger at imagined wrongs. I suppose some of it is the helplessness I feel when I read the headlines. I suppose some of it is this unending road trip. The loneliness. It’s been some time since I had a traveling companion or even a nemesis and now, with the camper, I’ve got all this room for either. It’s like driving a haunted house across the country.
And I suppose all of that comes suddenly into focus because I find myself upside-down with my head in a hole and there’s nobody to take my picture from the viewing deck.
‘Given the gaudy extravagance inherent in certain Wayside destinations, ‘The World Hat’ is something of a palate cleanser. It began with a naturally formed stone divot at the top of a rock formation on the edge of private land, owned by a woman named Rhonda Lasser who has never been seen on the property nor quoted speaking about it. Timothy Cortez, whose relationship to Lasser is unknown, is credited with finding the divot and recognizing that it was about the size of a one-size-fits-all hat and, eventually, installing two handlebars on either side of the divot so that he could flip himself upside down and briefly claim to be wearing the planet like a hat. This all happened with relatively little fanfare until a local news article chronicled Cortez’s attempts and failures to be recognized for this feat by a publication like the Guinness World Book of Records (he had broken no record) or Ripley’s Believe it or Not (this was not exactly unbelievable). The story did some rounds on the morning news programs of several neighboring counties and Cortez excitedly showed off pictures of himself wearing the world until the question of landownership came up and then he promptly disappeared from the public eye.
‘The World Hat’ has never quite reached the viral draw that other picture-specific destinations have. Despite Cortez’s bars, standing on one’s head on a stone surface is difficult and uncomfortable and subjects of pictures tend to be red-faced and straining, leading to a secondary nickname: ‘The Space Toilet.’ It doesn’t exactly draw the social media crowd.
At its heart, ‘The World Hat’ is a stupid idea executed with genuine intentions and its construction guarantees that it will be a Wayside destination for some time. Travelers are recommended to bring a friend, both for picture-taking and for spotting. Slipping out of ‘The World Hat’ at just the wrong angle may result in a bone-breaking fall and the nearest hospital is 50 miles down the interstate.’
There is something about wearing ‘The World Hat.’ When I turn upside down, I expect to feel the weight of my body like the weight of the world and to be reminded of all the troubles ahead of us. Instead, I find my worries pushed away as my body strains to stay in position and the horizon stretches out before me like the wide brim of a hat.
-traveler
It is a good day for the beach. It’s more warm than I normally like, but the sky is speckled with clouds that allow for an occasional reprieve from the sun, and a breeze tends to appear when it’s most needed, playing over the ocean and cooling the people at ‘The Slight Beach.’ I glance up from my towel and think that this could be a picture taken from a postcard, if it weren’t for all the warning signs.
‘One of nature’s deadly little illusions, ‘The Slight Beach’ is named for the grade at which the sands drops into the water past the shore. In a word, it is ‘slight.’ So slight, that one’s descent into water that covers anything above the waist takes a concerted hour’s walk straight into the ocean, by which point, many beachgoers find themselves exhausted and even a little lost. Far enough away from land, and without any sort of tangible slope, it’s common for visitors to become lost, wandering around in water that is only four feet deep but unable to drink or rest or even swim very comfortably.
Those who choose to enter the water are advised to do so with a lifejacket and one of the many specially-designed shore-pointing compasses sold at the local souvenir shops for exhorbitant prices. Rescue boats leave the shore at 5pm but space is limited.’
I forgo the life jacket but do buy one of the compasses fro mthe local Ranger’s outpost, only because it has a picture of a disapproving looking Ranger and the words “Wish you were here” under the arrow pointing at the shore. The man who sells it to me asks me not to go in the water, explaining it’s his job to ask that and that there is nothing legally he can do to stop me but it’s really pretty dangerous. I point out that he waited until after he sold me the compass to start on the warnings and he gives up, suggesting I should skew northwest if I want a good seat on the rescue boat when it comes by.
Once I’m on the water, I start to realize what the temptation is. Standing ankle-deep is supremely unsatisfying and, the further I walk, the more the sounds of the coast begin to recede. The experience is comfortable isolating and the view gets better past the signs. I take a few pictures at knee-deep and determine to go a little further, keeping the colorful umbrellas behind me in sight as I walk.
The trick, of course, is that between the heat and the water, those indicators of land are there one moment and then gone the next, melded into the vague technicolor of light playing on water. Something brushes past the back of my knee and I nearly drop my phone.
I hear someone yelling in the distance and see a man struggling to swim in the water. He says he’s gone too far out- is too tired to swim anymore. I motion for him to stand and he does, looking slightly embarassed. I check my compass and point him back to shore, glad to see that he isn’t compelled to talk to me or thank me for saving his life or anything like that. He waves and wanders off and fifteen minutes later I realize I was reading the compass upside down.
-traveler
‘The Bone Garden’ smells. It smells for about a mile around its perimeter, which, given that it’s grown in this shrubby not-quite-desert of the outer Death Valley, doesn’t seem to bother anyone. Most people cycling their A/C from the air in the car could drive by without ever noticing it- the stench isn’t permeating exactly. With an open window, though, and paired with the vultures overhead, it isn’t exactly hard to miss.
‘There’s not much to the surface of ‘The Bone Garden.’ There shouldn’t be, anyway. ‘The Bone Garden’ is an informal place where community members have come to bury carcasses in chicken wire, leaving them for a year or so to decomposition and hungry, burrowing insects but confounding the sorts of animals that might attempt to dig them up and scatter the bones.
It’s the bones that people are after. Given time, the chickenwire fills with the skeleton of the animal in a form that’s near to life. What people need these skeletons for is not a simple question. For some, it’s a morbid curiosity, for others, it’s nostalgia for a lost pet. Some people make art with the bones. Others claim to cast spells.
There has been some drama in ‘The Bone Garden’ of late. A sign has appeared, handwritten but on wood, that asks the gardeners to not place human remains on the premises. This has been met with backlash, not so much for the rule itself, but for the idea that anybody should be able to regulate a community project such as ‘The Bone Garden,’ which has been maintained for over a decade now. Efforts to organize a clean-up of the discarded bones that litter the ground have been met with similar derision.
“Those bones belong where they fall,” said one gardener, casting about with the skull of a rodent, “How would you know it’s the garden without the bones?”
The woman is later recorded tripping into a pile of remains as she searches for her plot, waving away the camera from the ground and swearing she tripped on her own shoes.’
The guide fails to mention that the ground of ‘The Bone Garden’ is swarming with insects, and I suppose that’s because they’re the sort of uninterested, half-alive larvae that feast on the dead and ignore or even resent the intrusion of the living, but had I known the earth beneath me would be so saturated with life as to be undulating beneath my sneakers, I probably would have tied bags on my feet or something. As it is, I waffle on whether or not to hike up my pant legs, choosing instead to tuck them into my socks and hope that nothing capable of squirming in between the tight fabric will choose to do so.
The bone layer on the ground moves slightly with the earth beneath it. The bones make a noise, like the rattle of an insect, course and grating. Piled remains sometimes topple with the sound of hollow wood, the effect of which is to drive some deep instinctual fear of predators into overdrive. I turn reflexively each time this happens and my eyes try to make sense of the shifting landscape, occasionally determining that something large seems to be moving just below the surface of the ground, before the pattern collapes back into chaos.
I stick around long enough to take note of the plot system- loose at best. Gardeners plant little signs- a name, at least, and an entry date. Some indicate the contents or an estimated time of retrieval. Others advertise their social media accounts.
Before I leave, I watch a vulture fall from the sky, breaking its neck as it crashes into the center of the garden. I came upon a short scientific article about this. These birds are drawn in by the smell and become locked into a loop, waiting for a meal that never comes. I suspect the dead vulture may feed the others, but before they can descend a woman has made her way out of the woods with chickenwire to bury the fallen bird.
Another vulture breaks briefly from the circle, hesitates, and returns, drawn in by a promise nobody intends to keep.
-traveler
‘Nestled in the parking lot of a local grocery store in Walter, Montana is a pile of snow and dirt that has not fully disappeared for as long as historical records of the area have been kept. ‘The Snow Pack,’ as its called locally, is actually the reason for the grocery being there in the first place, it having served as a natural refrigerating service in those wild west days of sarsaparillas and gun shot wounds. The grocery soon outgrew the need for ‘The Snow Pack’ but the snow remained all the same and eventually became the easiest place for plows to gather snow from nearby streets, only increasing the likelihood of ‘The Snow Pack’s’ survival.
Now, the citizens of Walter baby ‘The Snow Pack’ with a care that borders upon anxiety. Unseasonable warmth has threatened the phenomenon, seeing it shrink to a mere ten-square feet in 2022 and, according to some reports, releasing something of a stench that has been frozen under the ice for decades. In the years between, residents have taken to dumping their sidewalk’s snow on ‘The Pack,’ hoping to see it last another year.
The city of Walter has reacted strongly to smear campaign created by Claremont, MO: their football rivals. The campaign has nothing to do with football: it features only a picture of ‘The Snow Pack’ as it was seen at its lowest point with the words: ‘What are they hiding in Walter?’ in bold print underneath. The unusual tone of the campaign has made it popular online and some have arrived at ‘The Snow Pack’ with shovels, in order to get to the bottom of things, both literally and figuratively. Members of the local football team (The Pack) roughed up one such visitor and were released with only a warning, indicating what may only be the tip of a much deeper conspiracy.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
‘Well they’ve done it and we, the people who make a living on the interstate, are all so happy you’ve gotten what you want. As of this edition, likely to be printed in 2023, Texas has completed construction on the nation’s first, and hopefully only, ‘Interstate Loop.’ This is not a loop in the normal sense, that being a sort of long roundabout meant for traffic consistently moving between two likely destinations. This is a loop like for toy cars: dangerously vertical.
And its results are likely to be much the same.
It’s estimated that a vehicle will need to be travelling well over one hundred miles an hour to make anything close to a successful pass at ‘The Loop.’ It’s also suggested that, for a successful pass, a vehicle will likely want to cross lanes of traffic, meaning that, in the unlikely situation of two vehicles attempting to complete the loop at the same time from opposite directions, there’s a decent chance they collide mid-climax and crash to the ground.
The state of Texas has seen fit to give drivers every chance they might need to succeed at this new strip of interstate. Steep hills on both sides of the loop offer a means by which to gather the speed theoretically required for making it across. The asphalt is smooth and sticky on the wheels, for maximum grip. An ambulance is kept nearby to rescue those survivors of ‘The Loop.’ Say what you will about the project- they’re putting in the work to make it a reality.
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside