‘The National Battery Recycling Center’ is an electric dump kept low in California, as though the US is hoping Mexico will accidentally take the land and have to deal with the final shape of whatever is brewing there.
Look at me. After so many years of reading the Guide I’m finally beginning to sound like the author.
A lot of the rumors about ‘The National Battery Recycling Center’ like to add cartels into the equation but I’ve determined that these are largely false and maybe mildly racist. Whatever dangers the wastelands hold are entirely American made and a look at the place through the rubberized (and now condemned) viewing area suggests no activity, legal or otherwise, is worth conducting inside.
‘It’s likely that ignorance played some part in the very early stages of ‘The National Battery Recycling Center,’ which was established before any technology might allow us to jettison our old batteries into space instead. What’s a handful of AAs in the dirt, after all? What’s a half pound of watch batteries going to do in the dry desert sand, baking under the sun going to do that affects anything outside of a yard’s radius?
Well, it turns out quite a bit.
A few batteries in the earth acts as a sort of general permission to add a few more and before it becomes a problem it becomes a tradition and people get feisty when you try to take away their traditions. A pile of batteries became a vein and the conductivity of the sand allowed for a current and soon the very ground was electrified and when the wind picked up the sand that same electricity would jump through the air and this all happened before people even considered that legislation might be passed to prevent battery dumping or to hire anyone to enforce those laws. Initially, all that happened was the release of a short PSA regarding the dangers of ‘The National Battery Recycling Center’ that brought national attention to the site and that, unfortunately, made it look very, very cool.
People started dying after that and the legislation came, as it always does, just a little too late.’
I don’t understand why the entries grow but never update. The storms have spread quite a bit since my edition of the Guide was published. Worse than the storms, though, is something happening underground, the same thing that condemned the rubberized shelter that I stand in only for a few minutes and only while the (very unofficial app) forecasts less danger. The viewing center’s rubber is melted into the sand around it and the bones of a family are fused within- just shards, now, after less respectful travelers have taken grim souvenirs.
Sometimes I wish I was religious enough to pay proper respects to the dead but, as it is, I stand quietly and think about the paper-thin membrane between life and death and choose to believe it’s enough.
-traveler
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