“Well, we had been walking most of the day at that point- totally off-trail through thick jungle. Like nothing you would see stateside. It was hot, our packs were heavy, and we were more than a little lost. But we keep seeing her- this old grandma elephant, anytime we come to a place open enough to let her through. Our guide, he didn’t speak much English, but he explained the elephants had trails all throughout the jungle. He said it was dangerous, that he didn’t normally take foreigners along them, but that we seemed like we knew how to handle ourselves.…”

“What was he worried about? Leopards or something? Snakes?”

“Poachers. They’ve got a law down here, anybody can kill poachers on sight. Poachers act in kind.”

“Jesus.”

“So, we started down this trail the elephants took and that same old elephant appeared ahead of us. ‘She watching us,’ our guide said, ‘See if we the bad men.’ He said we should follow her, but keep some distance. She saw us there and started to speed up but every time we thought she might be trying to lose us, she would be around the bend, waiting to see if we were still there.”

“That’s amazing.”

“It gets better. The sun was starting to set and our guide didn’t want us to be out much longer. We convinced him to go a little further, even though we hadn’t seen the elephant in nearly an hour. I was sore, man. My arms were sore from kayaking in- I found out later I was walking with a concussion from before- but how often do you get a chance like that? Finally, we came to a clearing and she was there! She had a whole family with her, she was the oldest, but there were a couple little ones there too.”

“Aww.”

“Well, I say little, but they definitely came up to my chest. ‘She invite us,’ the guide said, and we stepped into the clearing. ‘Old lady knows the bad men,’ he told us, and he showed us where the old elephant had been shot and survived.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Well, they had found their place in the jungle. We stayed for about an hour and just watched the little ones warm up and chase each other around. The ‘old lady’ even took some of our bananas and shared them with the rest. I don’t know a lot about religion, but out there in the jungle with those giants, that was the closest I’ve ever felt to God.”

‘It is a mistake to assume that hardship makes one event worthier than another and, yet, it is difficult to speak of successes without detailing a painful journey that preceded them. Perhaps it is endemic to all hostels, but ‘Wander Haven,’ with its oozing pipes and creaking floors, reliably brings these stories to the forefront of the weary traveler’s mind. It is a place that would attract no customers in a sane world but, because a night there has been dubbed a ‘rite of passage,’ it seems to thrive.

The author’s experiences lead him to believe that a hard-earned success and a lucky one are equal on all scales except by judgement of strangers. There is an amount of masochism that is expected among travelers and establishments like ‘Wander Haven,’ which exist to satisfy some need for self-affliction, fuel it. It is this publication’s view that pissing contests should be avoided when possible, particularly when victory amounts to passing the greatest number of stones.’

The ‘Wander Haven’ is truly unapologetic, selling a variety of ‘I survived…’ type merchandise at the desk and charging about as much as a low-tier motel. In its poorly ventilated common room, I huddle, in a corner, over my copy of Shitholes and unabashedly eavesdrop on the large gathering two tables over. It is the convergence of several traveling groups, of everybody who has walked into this room but me. They are young, younger than me, and pretty, prettier than me. They are dirty in the way travelers are often dirty, but they are energetic and they are optimists. Their light shines brightly against the dismal shadows of the ‘Wander Haven.’

I am drunk.

“I’ve hated every jungle I’ve been to,” a woman says, replying to the young man, “They’re stifling. Can’t see shit.”

The young man shrugs. He seems to enjoy hearing her swear.

“I’ve been back in the states all of a month,” she continues, scratching at a tattoo on her ankle, “And it’s fucking stifling here, too. In the three months before that, the only time I had something over my head was when it got too cold to sleep outside a tent. Give me the stars back!” she finishes dramatically.

“How was the trekking?”

“Fuck,” she says, “Hard. It started out hard and I told myself it would get easier but it just got harder. Each time you finish a climb you hear about something just a little higher with a view that’s just a little better. I met some guys along the way and we decided to do a climb one of them had done before. ‘Who needs a guide?’ they said, ‘There’s only one way to go.’”

“You got lost.”

“An understatement. We turned off a trail and got on the wrong ridge, ended up fucking tip-toeing across with a wall on one side and a sheer cliff on the other. Rain came in, as you might expect. Soaked the tents before we could get them covered. Rain became hail, hail became snow and it got cold. I was colder that night than I’d ever been. Everything was wet, nothing would burn. I put on every dry piece of clothing I had and hoped the water wouldn’t come up over the mattress and into my sleeping bag.”

“But you survived.”

“That’s not the end of it. I finally fell asleep, fucking shivering, and I wake up in the middle of the night to this creaking. No wind, no trees nearby. My brain’s trying to piece the thing together and just as I realize it’s one of my poles bending under the fucking snow, the whole thing collapses on top of me. I end up crawling into the guys’ two-person tent, you bet they fucking loved that.”

“And you still miss it?”

“Well, the next morning the sun came up and I got out of that fucking stuffy tent as fast as I could. I stepped out into the snow and the sun and I was finally fucking warm. Up on that peak you could see for miles- not a cloud in the sky. The mountains around us were white from the storm, the sky was bright blue, and there probably wasn’t another person in three miles.”

“And you saw God in the mountains?” someone jokes, jabbing the elephant guy.

“God was in the fucking storm.”

A solemn sort of quiet passes as the group seems to let out a collective breath. One of the men, at the far end of the table, breaks the silence.

“You don’t really notice the character of places until you’ve gone through something like that, huh?” he asks, “You just take shitty situations personally and shut down to whatever might be redeeming about them. How many people would walk into the lobby of this place and just walk back out without ever giving it a chance?”

They all nod and I take a drink from my water bottle, thinking it’s time to start on the road to sober. The water goes down wrong and I choke and cough and make a scene in the relative quiet that had existed in the room before. When I’m able to breathe again I turn to see everyone looking my way.

“You want to join us, man?” the elephant guy asks after a moment.

“No…” I sputter, “I should head to bed.”

“You look like a guy with a few stories.”

“Not me,” I tell him, “I live a pretty… straightforward life.”

“I saw you come in on that bike parked out front,” the mountain woman insists, “What happened to your handlebars?”

“Stupid driving,” I tell her, “And a sharp turn.”

“You race?” she asks, and I sigh.

“On that thing? Look, I was checking out this stretch of road a few hundred miles east of here that’s supposed to be, uh, shorter than it is. I’d taken it a few times because, well, in order to disprove something you’ve got to show your work and I kept cutting milliseconds off my expected drive time.”

“You think this road is like a teleporter or something?”

“Not me,” I insist, “But some people think something kind of like that.”

I look around the table and see I’ve already lost a few of them but, because the blonde guy is still listening, I continue:

“So, some of the people reporting this said that if you take the curve just right, you hit this series of little bumps and divots that reverberate up through the wheels and sound like a song- they build highways like that in Japan I think. Anyway, that’s supposed to trigger it.”

Even the blonde guy is starting to look doubtful now.

“Long story short,” I say, “I thought I had finally gotten it right, like, there was this rhythm just on the edge of the road that sounded like a song coming up the spokes of the bike. I thought I had gotten it right…”

And then I was somewhere else entirely.

“And then… uh, a squirrel ran out. I stupidly, well, you know…”

“Nothing stupid about that,” blonde guy says, “You’re out there long enough and you realize that the lives of animals are as sacred as our own.”

“Yeah…” I say, running my hands through my hair, “Yeah…”

“Where’d you hear about that road?” mountain woman asks, but a door slams above us before I can answer.

There are frantic footfalls in the stairway before another woman bursts in and runs to blonde guy.

“There’s something in the wall up there,” she says, “Like a fucking mold dog!”

“It’s probably just a spider…” he croons, but she hold up a boot that looks like it could have spent a year on the side of the road.

“It ate my fucking boot, Donny, it’s not a fucking spider.”

“It came out of the wall?” I ask, “Through a hole about a foot across?”

“Have you seen it?”

“Something like it.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Leave it the boot,” I say, standing to go, “And tell the story when it’s been long enough to be funny.”

-traveler

I lose another tooth along the way- a sharp turn on the bike and my face on the handlebars. There are scrapes and bruises too, but the tooth… I don’t find it. Its brothers are shaken and they ache.

God, they ache.

The stranger does not call immediately. He was shaken too- his shaking shakes me. A veritable earthquake. I drive uneasily after that. Too slow on a motorcycle is just as dangerous as too fast. You have to believe in the physics of the thing to make a turn- lean in a way that should make you fall, steer in the opposite direction, and have faith that this time will be just like the last. You won’t fall, you will turn the right way, you will straighten out.

If you don’t believe, it might not happen.

‘‘Paradise Row’ breaks from the horizon like the sun, the tip of its discount plastics store man and earth’s middle finger to the sky. You will have known it was ahead of you, the gargantuan outlet mall advertises for miles in every direction as though anybody traveling this particular strip of road could choose to miss it entirely.

If a capitalist system were to be given the traits of a living thing, ‘Paradise Row’ would undoubtedly be somewhere near the end of the digestive tract, a place where waste accumulates for its last wringing of nutrients. ‘Paradise Row’ is the where capitalism tries to sell the people its poop, and where people flock to consume that poop, to pay money for it.’

Spite and necessity keep me from taking the author’s point to heart. The botched turn tore open the right leg of my last pair of jeans and the hodgepodge safety pins I had on hand won’t last. Why not feed the beast, author? Even your book has a price on the cover.

I putter into the parking lot at ‘Paradise Row,’ busy for a Wednesday afternoon, and spend a moment weighing my options on a map. Outlet malls, in my experience, are just strip malls dialed up a couple notches. They lack the comforts of a true mall: a roof, a reliable layout, a place to buy sugary pretzels. The map more or less confirms my suspicions. I settle on a place a few stores down, a place called ‘JEANS & Co.’ because jeans are exactly what I need and I’m curious, too, about what sort of company they keep.

The shoppers at ‘Paradise Row’ don’t much like the look of me. My face is still swollen from the lost tooth, my clothes are tattered beyond what is fashionable, and my pack is a transient’s tumor, stuffed and edged with my whole life’s possessions. I would have chafed at this attention earlier in my journey, but I have formed callouses.

And I have medicated myself, following the crash.

A little something extra until the pain passes and the swelling is down, that’s all. I tug at my shirt pocket, where the comb case was before. An old habit, dying slowly. Or, maybe, a present habit, losing a vestigial limb.

Still, I feel a growing uneasiness under the medicated fog as I wander along the sidewalk toward ‘JEANS & Co.’ The stores of ‘Paradise Row,’ I notice, do not have windows, or, they do have windows, but they seem to be obscured from the inside.

I pause near a water fountain and pretend to read another map. There are lines at the front of each store and, given their turn, shoppers seem to open the doors carefully and just enough to squeeze inside. Those who exit are red-faced and harassed- they stumble out onto the cement and brush off an invisible dust.

A man approaches me at the map, he is dressed in a light blue polo with ‘Paradise Row’ embroidered tastefully on the breast. This is a man that tucks his shirt in- not a man to cross lightly.

“Hi there, sir! Have you heard about today’s sales?”

“No,” I say. Another man pushes into the store behind him.

“I’ve got a brochure here,” he says, “Coupons worth a total of $300 and all redeemable at ‘Paradise Row!’”

“For ‘JEANS & Co.?’”

“Sure! Buy one pair, get the other half off. Looks like you could use a new pair!” he laughs.

I make a point not to smile and the man holds out one of the brochures, as blue as the shirt he wears. I reach out to take it and I tug once, twice, but he holds it tightly in his hand. I look up to see he is staring at me, staring intently into my eyes. He reaches out with his left hand before I can withdraw my right. I feel his grip on my wrist- hard and meaningful and maybe even painful. It’s difficult to be sure of pain in this state. The man holds my arm dearly and we both hold the brochure. He trembles with a whole-body rigidity and then releases me all at once.

“You know what to do now,” he says, his voice sincere, hardly a whisper.

He tips an invisible hat and turns back to greet others. I put some distance between myself and the man before I flip through the brochure. The coupon for jeans is near the back, part of a full-page advertisement for the place.

‘We’ve Moved!’ it says, and the accompanying illustration shows a pair of cartoon jeans striding to the center of the complex, the inner layer of ‘Paradise Row.’ In this simplified overview of the mall, free of branding and logos, I notice what I hadn’t before. The complex consists of two circles, one inside the other.

The all-seeing-

“Hi, sir!” a woman says, “Have you heard about-”

I stalk quickly away, pretending not to have seen her, and I keep the brochure visible in my hands, hoping it will ward off the others.

The windows of ‘JEANS & Co.,’ like those of the other stores, betray little of what is to be expected inside and I hesitate behind the man waiting at the door.

“Is there some sort of sale going on?” I ask, trying my best to appear less drugged-out and road-rashed than I am, “What’s with all the lines?”

“Whoa, buddy!” the guy jumps a little as he turns.

“Sorry, I turned over on my-”

“You’ve got a full booklet there, my man,” he says, pointing to the brochure, “Still got all your deals in there?”

“Uh… yeah.”

“Razor World? Scooter World? Food court tickets?”

“I haven’t used any of them…”

“Not your free scoop at ‘The Lil’ Creamery?’ Your spin on the ‘Deal Wheel?’”

“No man…” I tell him, “I’m just here for some pants.”

“How do you like cutting lines?” he asks.

We are the only two people outside this store.

“Like… go in before you?”

“Yeah,” he says, “Like that.”

“And you want…”

“Your booklet,” he says, quickly.

My hand tightens absurdly around the brochure.

“Half the booklet,” he says, “No, the whole thing- but you keep your coupon for jeans.”

“I… want the ice cream too.”

“I’ve got a daughter at home, man.”

“Ice cream and pants or no deal.”

“Fine,” he says, “Fine. Jeans are at the end, ice cream’s on page 4. The rest is mine.”

The man watches greedily as I flip through the brochure and find my coupons and he punctuates my fumbling attempts to tear them out with nervous hisses.

“Don’t rip the barcodes,” he reminds me, “Watch the expiration date.”

When I’ve finished, I hand him the booklet with the tips of my fingers, fearing a repeat of the last time, but the man grabs the paper and ushers me ahead to the door.

“You’re a thin guy,” he says, walking away, “You might be able to squeeze in now if you try.”

When he’s rounded a corner I turn to the door and prepare to heave it open, having watched others struggle with an apparent weight. A sort of luck means that my body is in the way when the door swings open easily and a tall stack of denim, that had been relying on the door for support, begins to topple toward me. I catch it as a muffled voice from inside reaches me.

“You need to pay for your merchandise before you can leave sir!”

I hold the tower carefully and scooch inside, carefully pulling the door closed behind me. It is a tight fit and as my elbow digs into another, more solid pile of folded jeans, I hear someone groaning from the other side.

“Careful over there,” she says, “I’ve barely got room to breathe as it is.”

‘JEANS & Co.’ is a denim sea. It is difficult to navigate, more swamp than maze but certainly taking cues from both. I wade carefully between blue pillars, navigate under acid-washed arches, and keep my distance from other shoppers, who eye me suspiciously through torn legs and open flies. I lose sight of the door, of any wall that is not fabric. Occasionally the ceiling disappears as well. I hear a screaming but, by the time I reach what I suspect is its origin, the screaming has stopped and there is nothing but a ragged pair of knee-length cut-offs and a handful of human hair.

I find two pairs that fit, trying them on in a secluded alcove near a drooping rack of overalls. My waist is considerably diminished and I had forgotten the small comfort of well-fitting clothes. I stay in that dark corner of the store for a long while, resting and looking forward to a time when my new pants will be as soft as the weather-worn pair that now clings desperately to my shrunken frame.

-traveler

‘The man will remember me, reader.

The owner of ‘Eats’ is a man that claims to know a great deal, and it is men like this, men who are so caught up in knowing, that they aren’t much aware of the day-to-day details. They forget the names of their drivers, of distant, poorer relations. They forget employee birthdays- not individual birthdays (though they forget those too) but employee birthdays as a concept. They resent being reminded.

Of anything.

Their knowledge becomes a wall between themselves and the world. They carry the wall and speak through it and eventually forget that the voices on the other side are people like them.

It was my intention to include an interview with the owner of ‘Eats’ in this guide but the situation went awry. Suffice to say, the man will remember me.’

It has been a good long time since I have experienced the sort of nervousness that stretches several days, looming like a dark cloud over the landscape of my life. I have been plenty scared- I have been terrified- but terror leaves the body quickly and often with a great rush of relief. Terror gets me out of trouble. Nervousness hangs on me like shackles; it leaves me raw underneath.

It serves no purpose.

I am always nervous when I speak to someone who embodies an approximation of the zeitgeist. It seems, to me, a dangerous thing to align one’s beliefs too enthusiastically with those of the present. Beyond dangerous, it is blindly empowering. A train powers across the earth by the virtue of relying on tracks. It does not need to concern itself with steering, only with how quickly it is moving forward. The nature of a train is such that it will not be able to stop for something laid across the tracks, that leaving the tracks unexpectedly will be necessarily violent and damaging. The nature of the zeitgeist is the same.

I take the author at his word, that the owner of ‘Eats’ will remember something about their run-in, and I decide to continue in his footsteps. The owner’s house is well known about town. Not infamous, exactly, but enough of a local landmark that I don’t seem too suspicious asking. I drive by once before giving the man a call- a real gaudy place, not what I expected at all. A lot of purple paint. A seasonally appropriate flag waving just under the stars and stripes. Looks like Father’s Day is coming up. Who knew?

I call the house and explain I am writing a travel book. I tell the owner, Richard Jones, that I’m writing a travel guide and wanted to feature ‘Eats.’ I tell him it will only take a minute or two.

And he cheerfully agrees.

He doesn’t even ask my name.

I am nervous, reader, and I park my bike several blocks away so that I can build up the nerve to reach the door. I am nervous as I step under the man’s flags, flapping noisily. I hesitate on the stoop but eventually bring my hand to the bell. It rings cheerfully behind the curtained windows.

I wait, nervously.

The warning sound of a patrol car’s siren stops me from ringing it again a moment later. It has appeared in the street like a blue ghost, attentive and unmoving. I turn around and look both ways down the block and then back at the car. Sunlight on the windows obscures the officers inside. I can’t tell, at first, if I’m the suspicious one here.

When I reach for the doorbell again, the siren whoops and the passenger door of the patrol car swings open. A man steps out, an unsmiling police officer. He does not expect that I will run.

And I do.

Terror sends me fleeing through the neighborhood as it has led me through forests, fields, and highways before. I run without looking back and, somehow, manage to escape. I nervously return for my bike some time later and, some time after that, I do a little more research.

Turns out I was visiting Richard’s new place- the one before it burned down a couple years back in an act of arson. The suspect, a man that spoke to Richard shortly before the fire, was not found. The papers published a police sketch, though, and looking at it is like looking into a mirror.

-traveler

What is it that a drive-in burger place is trying to accomplish by existing between the standard restaurant form and the drive-thru? Is it so much more comfortable to eat in one’s car than it is to eat in the privacy of one’s home or in a restaurant, a venue designed for eating in? I doubt it, but then, I’m eating on the seat of my motorcycle and the weather has turned chilly again.

An early fall for this part of the country.

‘The drive-in, known only as ‘Eats,’ floats in the distant, unnamed suburbs of Bay Minette. It claims to be open 24 hours a day but this has not been true for some time and the high school age employees do not appreciate being quizzed about the discrepancy. They seem to appreciate very little.

‘Eats’ claims to have pioneered the toy-with-your-meal model of children’s fast food long before larger, more successful chains perfected the approach with the accidental (and nearly fatal) inclusion of three marbles in a child’s burger patty in 1975. An ill-received campaign following the incident featured children coughing up other small toys after taking a bite of their ‘Mini-Eat,’ much to their, and their parent’s, delight. Several branches were forced to close but the flagship store remains a cult favorite.

Because popular IP’s and reliable manufacturing services are beyond the scope of ‘Eats’ budget, their toys are designed and introduced solely based on the whims of the owner. Age has made him cynical and he makes the toys in kind.’

Leaves scrape across the ground and pile up underneath the motorcycle’s wheels. Brown and gold and red, like the colors of a midwestern high school.

Two places to my right is a group of black-teed teens, listening to an old punk song I think I remember and eating their burgers. Two places to the left is a family in an SUV. One of the children hangs out of the window, bored and hungry. The older brother laughs and tries to pull the runaway back in by its pants. The child kicks and laughs and eventually disappears back into the vehicle, leaving a trail of dust and saliva on the door.

Their father taps absentmindedly on the dash. I realize, after several minutes, that he is tapping in sync with the punk song. It doesn’t seem like he should be able to hear it from all that way over there. An unrelated mystery.

I turn my attention back to the teens when he catches my eye. With their windows closed, they might as well be in a different world. I find myself tapping as well, tapping and searching for a comfortable way to sit on my parked bike while I wait for my food.

The nucleus of ‘Eats’ is a roundish building with no windows and just two doors, only one of which ever seems to open. The name of the restaurant is spelled out in faded shingles across the roof- a large, practical font that could likely be read from the highway before the neighborhood grew too high around it. The color scheme is dated: brown, gold, and red like the leaves. ‘Eats’ is not a place that is trying to be retro; it is a building that never left the era that bore it.

When I ordered a children’s meal they asked me whether it was for a boy or a girl; a question that is, no doubt, destined for retirement soon. With little to sway me one way or the other, I went with my gut choice: girl. Why not?

There is a squeal from the SUV as a young man approaches with a heavy tray. It’s made to hang from the door but the woman in the passenger seats waves it away- wouldn’t want to scratch the paint. The food disappears inside before I get much of a look at it, but a few minutes later I catch glimpses of some sort of toy solider, puppeted about the window in the hand of the youngest.

My food arrives shortly. The waiter looks briefly between my bike and the tray.

“I don’t think it attaches to motorcycles,” he says.

“I didn’t expect it would.”

“You had one girl’s Mini-Eat?” he asks.

“That’s right.”

He hands me a bag and turns to go as I open it. Inside is a broken soldier.

“The toy…” I begin.

“It’s supposed to be like that,” he answers before I can finish, “It’s a wounded soldier.”

“This is the girl’s toy?”

The young man turns back to face me, clearly uncomfortable but practiced in this sort of situation.

“The boys get a whole soldier to encourage patriotism. The owner wants…” he sighs, “The owner wants young women to be prepared for taking care of them once they’re back.”

A greasy slip of paper in my hand suggests that the soldier’s stump leg can be dipped in ketchup for added effect. I fold it thoughtfully between my fingers.

“That’s fucked up,” I tell him, “On a lot of levels that’s some fucked up shit.”

“It’s a summer job.”

“It’s autumn,” I remind him.

“They asked me to stay on a couple weeks into school. Just on the weekend.”

“How do people react to these things?” I ask.

“The locals know what to expect. Strangers tend to get upset. I can take it back if you want.”

“No,” I tell him, dropping the toy back into the bag, “That’s all right. I had an inkling of what to expect.”

“Is the food for you?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“Do you want more fries or something?”

“Do I look hungry?”

“No,” he says, “It’s just that we pack smaller portions in the girl’s meals. The owner says American women are getting too fat.”

“And he wants them to learn young…”

“Most people think he’s just an asshole.”

“He does sound like an asshole,” I sigh, “What’s the chances of me getting an interview with the man?”

-traveler