‘For a country with such capitalist ideals, there is nothing more damaging to the American ego than the common ‘For Sale’ sign. It appears in a city as the first blister of a pox, reddening windows and hopping from the threshold of one business to the next. Storefronts collapse like rotten teeth, leaving ugly gaps in the once-smile of Main Street. In these trying times it’s easy to wonder who passed this wasting disease to us- which of the world’s sick economies has coughed in our direction most recently?
Rest assured, reader: our affliction is auto-immune. In America, everything is, and always has been, for sale.’
The Editor is heartbroken to find an empty storefront where ‘Zeitgeist Publishing’ once held a branch. She refuses to admit it but, in terms of heartbreak, there’s no more obvious tell than hiding one’s face.
We’ve both seen the signs, or, I’ve seen the signs and I suspect she has too (I’ve been told I read to closely into silences). Neither ‘The Waterhole Death Sequence’ nor ‘Speculation’ boded well for the Editor’s town and it’s not often a path veers so far off course that it’s entirely unpredictable. I try to tell her as much (I’ve been told I offer solutions when I should be offering condolences).
“Do you know the difference between a path and a trail?” she asks, drawing an ‘X’ across the dusty pane of glass.
I chew the inside of my cheek and narrow my eyes: “No.”
“When you’re on a trail, you’re following something. When you’re on a path, you’re just walking.”
“How long do you think we’ve been on a trail?”
“Maybe this whole time.”
-traveler
The Editor’s home is only a few hours away when we drive through ‘Retro-Speculation,’ a façade that stands, like a headstone, where a real town once stood. Each building is constructed with two faces and the installation is set up in such a way that Main Street southbound appears as Speculation once was and Main Street heading north is Speculation in ruins. The Editor prepares me for as much but I still nearly run us off the road, distracted by the ghost town in the side mirror. She jabs my ribs in warning and I park in order to safely satisfy my curiosity.
‘‘Retro-Speculation’ does as much to encourage nostalgia as it does to criticize it, the ultimate interpretation of the project heavily dependent upon which direction a traveler is driving: toward the city that drained Speculation of life, or away from it. On one hand, the mirrored Speculation sits heavily on the conscience of those entering the city and becomes a blatant condemnation for those exiting the same way. On the other, it is easy to suggest that ‘Retro-Speculation’ was constructed purely as a timeline- a visual reminder of the city’s history (a preface and epilogue written on the same page).
The grant that once provided for the upkeep of ‘Retro-Speculation’ has recently been dissolved and both sides now fall into disrepair. Renewed interpretation relies heavily on the viewer’s belief in a universal sort of irony and their comfort with impermanence in its broadest application.’
There’s not much to see in ‘Retro-Speculation’ that can’t be taken in from the bike. It’s not a place made for stopping, though graffiti suggests we’re far from the first to lean through the empty windows and test the doorknobs. We take pictures standing at angles that aren’t meant to be viewed- the post office decaying on the right and simply weather-worn on the left. The Editor tells me the story of how she once lost her parents in the real Speculation and how, in the tear-filled interim, they didn’t even realize she was gone. She tells me Speculation set the standard for Halloween. We share a bag of chips in the field behind the façade, ignoring the exposed wooden supports. We gather ourselves before dark and put the grim town firmly behind us.
The Editor hopes Zeitgeist will have answers for her and I hope sympathetically, swallowing my doubts, aware that they will sit in my body like gum.
-traveler
The Editor and I go several days without fresh food on a long, empty strip of interstate that runs through the center of Nebraska. By the time we reach ‘Sebastian’s U-Pick’ we’re starved for anything that isn’t plastic-wrapped or roller-warmed and we’re ready to stretch our legs.
Autumn, here, is cold and dry and the knuckles of my hands are chapped by the ride. I notice the Editor shivering, sometimes, and I wonder what she thinks about on the long, silent stretches between destinations. She would never tell me and she would never admit to the discomfort but we are both clearly relieved by the relative warmth of walking in the apple orchard at ‘Sebastian’s.’
We quickly fill a basket and stop ourselves before filling another, resting, instead, at the base of a tree. After an hour, the woman from the front finds us both napping over the books we’ve neglected for months, each having managed only a few pages more.
“Don’t get up on account of me,” she smiles, seeing our embarrassment, “I wondered if I could just get some quick input from you.”
The woman slides a tablet from her bag and it opens to a question:
‘Should Sebastian’s U-Pick transition to a management structure suitable for conversion from a ‘Partnership’ to an ‘LLC’?’
The woman kneels long enough for the Editor to drowsily press the ‘Yes’ option and smiles again as she stands:
“I’ll get that going right away!”
“Get what going?” the Editor asks, paranoid, suddenly, “I didn’t agree to anything.”
“The management conversion.”
‘On paper, nothing is lazier than a so-called ‘u-pick’ farm, a business that has the audacity to charge customers to take the position of workforce. The reality is that a business’ average customer is entirely ignorant to the nuances of the products and services that they consume. America has not seen a revolution in ‘U-Sew’ sneaker factories because the average shoe-wearer would sooner be sucked into the complex factory workings than understand the first thing about the intricacies involved in even capping the laces that hold them to their feet (destroying the expensive machine and creating a gruesome litigation scenario in the process). A ‘u-pick’ farm, in reality, maintains the normal workforce and hires baby-sitters to keep the pickers from harming themselves or simply descending upon the crops like SUV driving locusts. It is the worst of many worlds.
‘Sebastian’s U-Pick’ embraces the madness of ‘the customer is always right,’ allowing strangers to pick their fruit and to make sweeping, corporate-level decisions based on nothing but their seasonal whims. It has dissolved dozens of times but rises from bankruptcy like a suicidal phoenix, suffering the combined trauma of a lifetime of failed trust-falls.’
Weeks pass and the Editor’s choice follows her. She spends free hours carefully researching tax law and sifting through the poorly digitized newspapers of distant Nebraska counties for any mention of ‘Sebastian’s.’
“It was a moment’s peace,” she explains, “I can’t be the one to ruin it.”
-traveler
“Holy shit, this was a stupid idea!” I shout, too scared of the water to be seasick, “You told me you knew what you were doing!”
The Editor grits her teeth at the helm and says nothing, steering the little houseboat with the dramatic flourish of a toddler mimicking its parent’s driving- back and forth, back and forth, seemingly into every opposing current the river can sustain. Something falls off the side of the boat behind me, a wooden plank- thankfully something from above the river. The plank holds steady with us long enough for me to pull it back up onto the deck. This is apparently upsetting enough to the Editor that she starts talking again.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“I want my deposit back!” I shout.
“You won’t get anything back if you fall into the-”
The Editor is distracted by a boulder that looms up out of the water. We pass it so closely that I can smell the moss clinging to its ridges.
“How much longer do we have?” the Editor calls again.
“You think this,” I ask, clutching the frankenstein Shitholes 131 away from the water, “Goes into specifics about how far ahead this place is? Does it ever say anything like that?”
“What?” the Editor calls.
I flash back, briefly, to the scene at the docks this morning. It was sunny and still- a pleasant day. It’s hard to imagine that it’s still the same pleasant day, that the only danger on either of the shores that sandwich us is falling into a restful nap, lulled by the sound of rushing water. We must look like idiots from there.
“Just read out whatever it says!” the Editor calls again.
So I do.
‘It is a common, though erroneous, assumption that the wayside is associated strictly with what lies just off-road. In reality, veins of the wayside run winding into the country and it is the roads, modern by the standard of myth, that subconsciously reveal its pattern over time. Take, for instance, ‘Red Kraken Lake,’ which is deep in the unpaved wayside, easily a week’s journey through dense forest and beyond a series of steep ascents. Much of this trouble can be avoided in traveling by boat on a river that enters the lake on the northern tip and exits to the southwest, eventually flowing back toward civilization. The river, unpredictable at best, is only a viable means of transport in the autumn, rain-swollen, but hardly the hateful, frothing monster that feeds on spring’s snowmelt. It is faster than the hike, and easier, though it’s not at all easy.
A trying era breeds superstition and a trying path breeds legend, a discrepancy due, perhaps, to humanity’s sporadic, if well-warranted, distrust of its fellow man and it’s steady, if not naïve, trust of nature. The way to ‘Red Kraken Lake’ is difficult and the rumors surrounding it grow more vivid with each hiker-gone-missing, their grieving families subject to fluff-retrospectives that pick apart autopsy reports for any suggestion of the mythical creature of the lake.
The creature, if it exists, twitches below the surface like a human heart, vast for all its distance from the road, and red for all its silence.’
I throw up, finally. The combination of the waves and the reading push me over the edge, allowing some of my vertigo to subside. A short while later, the river calms somewhat and I take the helm while the Editor pisses off starboard, reminding me not to look as though I would take my eyes off the river for even a second to watch something like that. She and I are still strangers in many ways.
We’re still floating when night falls and I reluctantly agree to sleeping and steering in shifts. I wrap myself in a blanket and find the rocking of the boat puts me out almost immediately. Occasionally I wake, thinking the Editor had said something but, if she had, it wasn’t something meant for me.
When she does wake me up it’s well past time. She wraps herself in the same blanket and I stand, nervously centering the boat between the dark banks. The day’s clearness persists and, even without a moon, the stars manage to light the forest and the river ahead. I consider, just once, turning off the boat’s front light to experience the area as it would be without out trespass but, even as I reach for the switch, I hear the Editor grumble behind me.
“Don’t be an idiot.”
I had planned on letting her sleep in but, as morning dawns, a rocky outcropping in the distance begins to approach the banks from either side. Though the river maintains its size, steep cliffs rise to cut off any easy means of turning back. The Editor jolts awake when I call for her but takes the change of scenery in stride.
“Better than climbing them.”
I try to hide my growing nervousness from the Editor, a latent claustrophobia that’s inexplicably soothed by being inside the small cabin, away from the looming rock walls. When she calls me outside I realize she must have known. The cliffs open up ahead of us, circling ‘Red Kraken Lake.’
The plan was to spend a day or two anchored on the lake itself, to sit together in solitude and compile what we know about ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ and the company responsible for publishing it. We’ve uncovered too many pertinent details folded into our histories to ignore them any longer, things that go unheard in the noisy world of motel rooms and fast food pit-stops. Things we hoped would find voice on the water.
But the moment the anchor splashes into the lake, I know we won’t be staying long.
The silence at ‘Red Kraken Lake’ is deep and ominous. We find ourselves checking the water over the side, staring into it for any sign of movement. Floating on the lake is like being suspended in the air- weightless, yes, but consumed by the fear of falling. As the sun passes into the late afternoon, the Editor is the first to admit it out loud.
“I don’t think I can sleep here.”
We arrive at a ramshackle dock the next day, 24 hours before the man from whom we rented the boat (and who agreed to tow the bike) is due to meet us. We work a little and sleep on solid ground. I wonder what nightmares I left on the lake.
The man comments on our exhaustion when he arrives and he takes the boat’s damage well, asking only $20 from the deposit.
“Enough for the beer I’ll drink as I fix it,” he says.
We shake hands and pointedly avoid speaking about the lake or the kraken, a decision, I realize later, that might only further the myth.
-traveler
‘‘Autumn by the Wayside’ is primarily a book about strange places and the events they sometimes host but it is also, occasionally, a book about strange events and the venues at which they sometimes occur. Take, for instance ‘The Waterhole Death Sequence,’ which is not limited to any particular locale but occurs regularly in every U.S. town, city, and urban sprawl (and likely outside the U.S. as well, if one believes in that sort of thing). An archaeologist will tell you ‘The Waterhole Death Sequence’ is an ancient tradition, an American feature before roads existed to define the wayside’s boundaries. But they only know it for what it was.
Animals congregate at a waterhole and, inevitably, some of them die there. Their bones gather in the soil, frozen in the positions of death long after the water and life have gone from the place. We find them layered in nested circles, huddled closer about the center as time passed and the waterhole shrank to a puddle.
The ‘Waterhole Death Sequence’ can be observed in real time. As cities consume towns, as gentrifiers consume neighborhoods, the locals find refuge in the waterhole and the waterhole, in turn, hosts death. When the post office has closed and the cemetery encroaches with the molasses-speed of vultures grown fat, the waterhole’s light will be the last to wink out, casting skeleton shadows of the way things were.’
“We used to come here every week,” the Editor says, peeling the laminate from a cocktail menu, “I thought it’d make me happy to be back.”
‘Yui’s’ is a shithole, a dive bar for financial reasons rather than aesthetic. The ash tray between us shivers under the ceiling fan. It spills its contents over the plastic rim, deformed as it is by burns. The place is crowded, as though everyone still living in the gutted town nearby is present, but nobody speaks. When they do, it’s only to murmur something in the ear of their neighbor or to order a drink or to cough. ‘Yui’s’ is a shithole but it’s not among those listed in ‘Autumn by the Wayside.’
One of the Editors used to come here and the current Editor was insistent we stop.
“Every Sunday for three years we came to this place. And if something came up Sunday? We’d go Monday instead. Once a week, no matter what, until…”
“Until what?” I ask.
“Until she found out what was happening,” she says, suddenly more willing to distance herself from the previous Editor, “She was the one with the limp- the one that died on the gray road. Before we-”
“Became friends?”
“Realized we weren’t unlimited.”
“Shitty way to go.”
“The town I’m from is a lot like this. I think they all are. That’s why there’s always an empty lot to walk past.”
“Hmm.”
A group of three steps into the bar and stand at the entryway, seeing that the chairs and tables are taken. They look expectantly at the Editor and I.
“We should track down the people from Zeitgeist Publishing. There’ll be, like, records of them somewhere.”
“And then what?”
“And then we find out what’s going on!”
The group at the door have stopped moving altogether. They don’t approach us. They don’t approach the bar. They wait for the table and I raise my own empty glass to my mouth so that it might encourage the Editor to finish her own drink- a quarter cup of watery beer she’s nursed for nearly 45 minutes. When she doesn’t, I speak.
“Every time I think I find someone who knows what’s going on they tell me I’m supposed to be the expert. The rangers told me they didn’t make the path, they just keep it safe. The strangers didn’t make it either, they’re trying to turn it back over to whatever it was before people came along. I assumed there was at least a direction or a destination until you told me that the organization of the book is meaningless. What makes you think the publisher knows anything?”
The Editor is quiet, then, but she finishes her beer.
“Sometimes you find a path in the woods,” I tell her, “And it’s just something an animal made. Sometimes it’s just the easiest route between two places.”
“What sort of animal made this path?”
I shrug.
“There’s nothing easy about this.”
-traveler