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:
- ‘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:
- ‘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:
- ‘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
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