‘‘The Couch Cushions’ are a rock formation in northeast Iowa, named for their vague resemblance to a mountain-sized sofa and their nearness to an interstate, as though abandoned there by some lazy behemoth, the giant having upgraded their furniture and hoping someone will take the old set before rain obligates a trip to the dump. One might attribute the mild droop of the trees there to a certain natural eyerolling, the hills having existed long before the advent of furniture or roads or the practice of leaving one on the side of the other.
One might also attribute the overall sickliness of the area’s wildlife to the new tradition of carrying old couches to the top of the formation and dumping them into the gaps between the ‘cushions’ while filming, a sort of meta-ironic art movement that allow many to justify what normally amounts to littering. Relative newcomers to the area assume the numerous ruined couches there are the basis for ‘The Couch Cushions’’ name.
The newest trend among traveling artists is to sculpt or paint small pictures of roadside couches and to painstakingly descend into ‘The Couch Cushions’ in order to leave the art pieces between the uncapitalized couch cushions that litter the crevices. The more interesting and dangerous the placement (for many of the couches become wedged partway into their descent) the more respect is given. Following a gruesome incident involving the disgorged mechanism of a fold-out couch (rusted and sharp), rangers have taken to patrolling the area and turning back would-be couch surfers while the earth slowly processes a century’s artful indigestion.’
There are no rangers about when Hector and I climb past the base of ‘The Couch Cushions’ and venture into the nearest crevice to escape a chilly autumn storm. Hector is a little more active these days, seemingly a little more willing to interact with his surroundings. I bought him a sweatshirt meant for pugs in the last town we passed through, thinking he could use some insulating as we travel through the cold snap. It doesn’t suit his pot roast lump of a body but doesn’t seem to narrow his range of motion either. Hector has contented himself with life on the road.
Taking cues from their miniaturized equivalents, ‘The Couch Cushion’ crevices are grimy but not without a few small treasures. A particularly thick conglomeration of wedged couches keeps the sofas on the ground dry and the two of us stop underneath to wait out the rain, Hector occasionally perking up his ears at the creaky settling of the furniture ceiling.
It seems like a long time ago, but I once climbed into the palm of a rebar giant and felt both significant and small. The irritated earth we call ‘The Couch Cushions’ imparts a smallness in much the same fashion but the longer we loiter there the more I find any assumptions I once held about my significance disappearing. By the time we leave, the hills seem less like a couch and more like teeth, we the passing detritus of a recent meal.
-traveler
‘The old adage suggests that almost all accidents occur within a five minute drive from a person’s home. ‘Almost,’ because a good deal more occur on ‘The Long Right,’ an interstate exit that seems to exist in perpetuity.’
It takes about 30 minutes of leaning into the curve before a dozen small muscles in the right side of my body begin to complain. The car I’ve been following (a steady blue sedan) pulls ahead as I slow, just far enough that I lose it for a moment, and a minute later I see where the road guard is torn as though by a recently jettisoned vehicle. It could very well be the scene of a previous accident, an ominous coincidence, but is shakes me all the same.
Not long after, ‘The Long Right’ branches into one of its many fractal turn-offs where, at the center, a few less-than-legitimate businesses set up temporary shops. I buy a cup of coffee and a small bottle of anti-nausea pills. Hector and I watch other vehicles pass until that proves dizzying too. Rumor has it that taking ‘The Long Right’ past dark, when all of its blinking safety lights have come on, will grant a driver the gifted visions of a dead god, so we don’t stay for long.
-traveler
‘It would seem reasonable for the cooks at ‘World Burning’ to cut corners during preparation, given that the wood burned to smoke the meat is so laden with an era’s carcinogens (the varnish, the dust) that the taste profiles swing wildly between two meals that read the same on paper. Nevertheless, they go about the work with all the care of a world-class kitchen and deliver food to customers who are willing to forego future health concerns for a taste of something tasteless.
‘World Burning’ is, in some ways, a museum in perpetual decline. Its owners bid on the wood left behind by otherwise disastrous fires and display the wreckage on their walls. Customers order meat by the pound and the wood over which they would like it to be smoked. Steaks over a door from the house of your unfortunate childhood neighbor come cheap. Kebabs cooked with paneling from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory are expensive and increasingly rare. The meal that put ‘World Burning’ on the map, a deep dish pizza cooked in a brick oven with historical scrap from the Chicago fire itself is long extinct, but they’ve kept behind a plank on which they occasionally smoke oysters as a special.
The restaurant has been criticized for its poor taste, both literally and figuratively, but reservations are booked out weeks in advance in spite of poor reviews. ‘World Burning’s’ owners claim the restaurant’s model and the controversy itself reflect a simple lesson in supply and demand. Nobody wanted the wood until they began to burn it.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
After three days of filling and re-filling forms, speaking to managers, sub-managers, and associate supervisors, and subjecting Hector to a variety of physical, mental, and seemingly spiritual tests, I decide to give up on the long application process required for admitting the leathery lump to ‘The Rabbit Hole,’ a wildlife sanctuary outside Maine. The office does not seem at all set up to receive visitors and, more than once, it’s suggested that ‘most mammals just wind up here.’ They emphasize words in a way that seems suspicious but isn’t otherwise threatening. They offer me self-guided tours of the grounds and seem baffled or disappointed when I return. The last straw is a man that bursts through the sanctuary-facing door, thickly bearded and dressed in rags.
“I’m back!” he screams, “My god, I’ve finally returned!”
He seems a changed man, his perspective on our mundane world greatly altered by whatever occurred to him inside ‘The Rabbit Hole.’ He laughs gleefully as the manager calls him a ride-share and somehow I get the stink-eye for having arrived with a rabbit and not with a revelation. Hector and I take our business elsewhere and, on the way, we drop the gibbering man downtown.
‘One might assume that a wayward hare, run to ground, would find refuge in ‘The Rabbit Hole.’ Typical of a woodland bureaucracy, ‘The Rabbit Hole’ is a liminal haven, at best, useful only as long as one is content to run in place. Most who take up residence there find nothing special about the forest, only that its benefits stem solely from the respite it provides from the city. ‘The Rabbit Hole’ is a wilderness and, in preserving the ecosystem it is careless with the individual parts. Life is inconvenient, there, meaning most emerge with a new respect for civilization and nearly as many simply die.”
-traveler
‘It’s difficult to say whether the death cult behind ‘The All-Year Christmas Tree Arboretum’ recognizes a certain hypocrisy in their perpetuation of an off-season holiday. It seems likely enough that the angle is toward some mysterious higher purpose, given the unsettling references to the resurrection story embedded in their promotionals and a fervent use of the word ‘evergreen’ in contexts where it only just applies. A failure to see the irony in prolonging something that has already extended its natural lifecycle would represent a severe disconnect between their PR branch and the core beliefs they’ve never quite admitted to (nor ever fully denied).’
The friendliness with which I am greeted at ‘The All-Year Christmas Tree Arboretum’ sets the loudest of my internal alarm bells ringing. Three immaculate men in immaculate uniforms surround the bike before I’ve even reached for the strap at my helmet and for all their timeliness they wait, silently, for me to say something before speaking themselves. The air is dense with the smell of pine, the field beyond the fence a forest in clean lines. Hector sniffs meekly about in his cage and one of the men bends awkwardly to look at him.
“That’s Hector,” I say, “A rabbit.”
The creature’s hairlessness has made the clarification necessary several times now.
“Cute,” the man smiles, “Hello Hector!”
“I was going to walk him out on the curb before…”
“Please, bring him inside!” another of the men says, “Plenty of wild animals roam the arboretum and the small fellow’s droppings are as welcome there as any other!”
“He could stay,” the first man chimes in, sensing somehow that our partnership is temporary, “He would be taken care of, here, and when his long life ends his body will…”
The unspeaking man ends the suggestion by gently placing his hand on the first man’s back.
“Ah, well,” the first man says, “Perhaps a tour?”
Picture a nervous traveler walking a blind rabbit while three clean men patiently follow, each holding an axe that they’ve retrieved from the barn where a dozen more clean, smiling employees knelt as though interrupted in prayer. The men talk in circles around the subject of inevitability and death, each a cheerful vulture in their choice of words.
“It’s an honor to tend to life in the arboretum,” one man begins.
“Even if the fruits of our labor fall to the axe,” another continues, “The evergreen essence returned to dirt.”
“It costs nothing to fell a tree in this place,” another chimes in- or maybe it’s the first, “Nothing to the customer, that is. It costs the plant everything.”
“Nothing to the arboretum as a whole.”
“Nothing to the world.”
“But enough…”
We stop while Hector sniffles about in the grass.
“I believe your little rabbit has chosen,” a man says. All three hold out their axes.
“You saw what I drove in on, right?”
“We’d be happy to take care of the remains if you have no use for it. Firewood for a pyre.”
“A pyre?”
“A bonfire.”
“If you need wood, can’t you chop it down yourself?”
They laugh and hold out their axes. With no little reluctance, I let one of the men hold the end of Hector’s leash while I go about the suddenly distasteful business of chopping down the rabbit’s tree. One man shouts advice and encouragement. The others smile and weep loudly. Amidst the crash of the fall I swear I hear cheering from the direction of the barn, but it’s quiet again in the aftermath.
One of the weeping men silently returns Hector’s lead and the three of them begin to cut the tree into smaller pieces with a zeal that makes me nervous enough to carry the squirming animal out in my arms rather than trust his default meandering. I tell myself, on the drive out, that I’m made no more complicit in their occult dealings through my actions in the arboretum than I am made a sponsor for war in paying taxes, but find the thought falls flat.
I try to forget it altogether.
-traveler