‘The Mall Mother’ comes with all the same pleasures and disappointments of an early-genre novel. The tropes are all here in their most basic forms so it’s all of what I hope for in the most boring ways. An arcade with the classics. A food court with bland American-Chinese and a non-franchise Mexican place that competes with a pizzeria that only has pepperoni and cheese. The smell of the food court saturates the stores and the clothes they sell. The same bored teenagers work in every store, varied only by their uniform. It’s like coming home.
It’s like coming home and remembering why you left.
‘Every mall that has ever come to be in America has grown from a clipping of ‘The Mall Mother,’ which was discovered, already formed and alive with employees, in the mid-1950s. It was, for a time, allowed to operate like any of the malls it spawned but, in part because nobody knew where its products came from, and in much larger part because nobody seemed to be making money from it, ‘The Mall Mother’ was converted into a look-don’t-buy style museum piece, not unlike the replica pioneer houses the dot the same region.
More recently, access to ‘The Mall Mother’ has been restricted further. Wayside Rangers believe the country is witnessing a colony collapse and attempts to save America’s malls have thus far proven ineffective. If the mall-deadly phenomenon makes it back to ‘The Mother,’ we may see a total extinction.
Visits to ‘The Mall Mother’ are now by appointment only. They are carefully guided and very expensive. The upside is that you’re allowed- encouraged, even- to buy its junk again. Everything inside holds the seed of a mall.’
I do buy a few things- some discount CDs from a second-hand rack that I can play in the trailer until the old sound system scratches them beyond fixing. Once they’re dead, I figure they’ll end up in a dumpster somewhere and since I’m traveling the states over and again maybe a few of those dumpsters will take root and turn into something worth seeing for future travelers like myself.
I guess I’ve been thinking about my own passivity. I kid myself into thinking that I only observe the Wayside, but the truth is I’ve changed it in the same ways it has changed me. Largely for the worse. I’m wondering, these days, if there isn’t room to reverse that. To maintain the Wayside and be healed by it.
-traveler
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