Autumn tends to be orchard weather. Orchard weather for things like pumpkins and squash- old apples and peaches that fall apart in your hand. Gardens, on the other hand, don’t have much going on at all in the autumn. That’s been my experience. Gardens become cemeteries for themselves, their dry bushes marking the lots where something beautiful has grown and died. ‘The Ash Garden’ is grimmer than most, because in ‘The Ash Garden,’ death is not an afterthought.

‘Perhaps a result of the sheer number of people out there these days, the market has cultivated a demand for quirky means by which to dispose of human ashes (‘quirky’ because the act of purchasing such a vessel denies the consumer the chance of being genuinely ‘creative’). There are beautiful and tacky urns. There are amulets and chains. There are molds and molten plastic which might allow for the deceased to become, say, a doll or a trophy or the base of a Christmas tree, why not? Past the initial grief-busting high of receiving such an object, none of it is very satisfying to have. Certainly not for the generations that follow who, if they kept every item imbued with dead ancestors, would have no room for their own things.

‘The Ash Garden’ is just about the perfect compromise. It relies on the premise of its forebearers, that it would be a shame for the mortal remains of a loved one to just be buried, and pivots to the forebearers’ forebearer which is to say: it convinces people to bury them anyway. This switcheroo is accomplished through the narrative of ash being important to the growth of flowers and flowers being symbolic of life and symbols of life being important to popular traditions and ceremonies regarding death. To cut through the babble: one might pay ‘The Ash Garden’ to add their relative to the soil they use to grow flowers for funerals (also at a price). Thus, the enterprise has sourced specialty resources and captured a specialty audience all for the price of seeds and property tax.

It was working pretty well until the pandemic.’

No in-person funerals. A lot of dead people. ‘The Ash Garden’ is all ash and no garden now. I have to pull out a mask for the first time in a while just to stand at the outskirts. A man at the center beckons me over and I wave him away. I don’t need my shoes full of this stuff. It’s already in a cloud around me, layering my clothes like unmelting snow. A small sign indicates what ‘The Ash Garden’s’ signature gray-blue flowers look like in peak season. This is not peak season. I’m not sure that season will return, here.

The man beckons again, urgent. A younger me would give in but I’m tired, these days, and suffering from the sort of loneliness that perpetuates itself. I’ve forgotten how to interact with others. Talking to strangers makes me nervous and self-aware.

The man waves again and I call out this time, angrier, maybe, than is necessary. “No!”

He waves again so I wave back, exaggerating the movement. If he has something to say, he can come to me.

The wind changes, slows, and the ash clears somewhat. The man is a scarecrow.

I might need to talk to someone soon.

-traveler

‘A hole in the ground can garner a great deal of suspicion. Rightfully so- that’s where a great deal of us will end up when we die. But the uncomfortable presence of a hole in the ground is not in question, here. Rather, it’s the ease at which one might make a hole in the ground seem less suspicious- friendly even- that pertains to ‘The Universal Charging Station’ in Mississippi.

A grate, for instance, makes a hole more palatable. A manhole cover takes a whole and makes it reassuring- necessary, even. A few orange cones, a flutter of police tape: these indicate the bare minimum, that a hole has been reported and that necessary actions are being taken to deal with it. A hole in the ground with a house on top is just a basement. A hole full of water is just a well. A hole in a face, wet with teeth and tongue, is just a mouth. It doesn’t take much to make a hole friendly.

But ‘The Universal Charging Station’ makes no attempt.’

It isn’t hard to see what the guide is talking about. ‘The Universal Charging Station’ is essentially a hole in the ground made more conspicuous by the large, metal pole encompassing and sticking up out of it, twisted off so tightly that it comes to a jagged point. There is a hole in one side where someone has helpfully scrawled “charge here.”

Like others before me, I examine the pole with care. I tap it, in case the entire thing is electrified, and I tap it again to test the depth of the hollow. Once I have made sure the thing is benign, offering up my skin before my precious phone, I unwind my charging cable from its careful curl and lower one end into the pole.

A car passes on the interstate, its wake blowing through my clothes and kicking up dust. When I clear my eyes I see: the phone is charging. The cord hangs loosely in the pole, clanging against either side, but it’s drawing a charge from somewhere all the same.

Amazing.

My phone is at 5% and the lighter-port in the camper is broken, so I decide to stay for a while. I barely make it to 20% before the unlit stretch of interstate, before the quiet, is too much. I’ve always needed an excuse to talk to myself: a stuffed animal, an imaginary friend, an old rabbit. Now I have nobody and I’ve lost my voice.

-traveler

‘Out past Santa Fe- out past even the outskirts of Santa Fe- there is a rundown little diner called ‘Betty Sue’s.’ A sign on the door advertises ‘The best coffee in the USA.’ What makes ‘Betty Sue’s’ different than all the other diners that advertise similarly?

Nothing.

All of them are lying. You will not walk into any diner in the USA and have the best coffee there. You will not ever have the best coffee in the USA. If you are reading this book, or even looking at the cover, or even standing in the same room as a copy, you will never have the best coffee. The best coffee in the USA is reserved for the wealthy elite. The demographics for readers of this book and for the obscenely rich are two separate and perfect circles, never meeting. The wealthy elite who drink the best coffee in the USA have never heard of this book or even of a travel guide. They have people that describe places to them and those paid place-describers are likely wealthy enough to have never read this book either.

People like you and me are allowed to consume the worst coffee. We are allowed to consume the hottest coffee. We are allowed to consume coffee, in general. These are privileges that, at any moment, could be stripped away by the sort of wealthy elite who drink the best coffee. They could, at any moment, make coffee hotter and worse than anything we could imagine. They could halt the harvest of coffee, make its consumption illegal. If they then chose to brew only the worst coffee in the world, then it would technically also be the best coffee and it would belong to them.

There are those of you who might think that your own technique for brewing coffee is best on a personal level. You are wrong. There are those who believe any coffee shared with a lover or intellectual rival or with a cigarette is the best coffee. Wrong on all counts.

The best coffee in the USA available from a roving pop-up barista for-hire. She works for whomever will pay her the most per cup. She only brews once per day. When pressed for her secret she says ‘It’s just hype, anyone can make a perfect cup of joe.’

But then she smiles and winks to suggest that’s not the case at all.

She does not drink her own coffee. The wealthy elite forbid it.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘It’s difficult to know what circumstances led to the emergence of California’s ‘Angry Rabbit Tree,’ both because nature has always been willing to churn out monsters when humanity is least prepared, and because a lot of paperwork handled by ‘The URT’ staff has gone missing under mysterious circumstances.

Catching glimpses of ‘The ART’ remains somewhat difficult as of this entry. It is cordoned off and sporadically patrolled by Rangers who don’t know what to do with the thing. Past that ‘The ART’ is admittedly kind of dangerous. The sort of place this publication can’t recommend visiting in its current state without risking an amount of liability. Readers beware.

First: Rabbits inhabit the area. Their holes are a hassle in and of themselves. They twist ankles and cause the ground to collapse at odd times, the earth there being honeycombed and unstable. Then: the rabbits themselves are mean. Territorial. Smart. And organized as though by a single mind. Reports suggest that all rabbits on the premises are simply roots and branches of ‘The ART,’ a single rabbit budding multiple fruits. They haven’t killed, yet. But not for lack of trying.

The tree itself has gone dark and leathery. More like flesh than wood. It shivers in the cold and sags in the heat and twitches when the odd insect lands here or there. For all that it’s angry at those who approach it, Rangers insist it rests into contentment when left alone. They ask for room while they attempt to make peace with the thing. Donations of rabbit food are received gratefully at this time.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

There are fewer and fewer sacred places on this earth- fewer places unworn by the feet of travelers. Some of the roughest edges of the Wayside have been smoothed by the great stampede of people like myself, who look for an escape here and, finding that here is much the same as everywhere, attempt to squeeze in through or into the dirty seams and cracks of places that seem unbroken. Those places do exist, but they’re growing thinner and dirtier and the internet has made travelers lazy.

I’ve grown lazy.

‘The Universal Receiving Tree’ in California is a marvel for the mainstream. It is a massive redwood that, over many, many years, has been grafted with the branches of nearly a hundred fruiting and flowering trees. It sustains these branches, requiring little maintenance beyond the initial grafting supports. It blooms in the spring, summer, and fall and creaks like an old skeleton in the winter, a hodgepodge monster among its neighbors, none of which have boasted the same flexibility.

I’m starting to sound like the book, I know, but the book says something else entirely.

‘Oh, a pretty apple. Oh, a juicy orange. And both? Amazing!

That’s what you sound like when you visit ‘The URT.’ You sound like someone who has never been to a grocery store. The sad truth of the matter is that ‘The URT’ isn’t doing anything particularly interesting on the surface. Tree grafting is an old, if not tedious, technique and ‘The URT’ is just a prize pug at the dog show: dolled up and wheezing for the masses. Did you know ‘The URT’ draws a diverse population of butterflies the likes of which can be found nowhere else on earth? Did you know that the tree’s seeds are collected and burned to keep its secret proprietary?

Did you notice there aren’t any squirrels in that tree? No insects around its base?

The Wayside is the metaphorical shoulder of the highway- the place that exists between road and ‘other.’ But metaphors are limiting. Sometimes the Wayside is as much the places above and below the highway. Take, for instance, ‘The URT.’ Why does nobody collect the fruit that falls until after closing? And why does the parking lot never clear?’

It’s difficult for me to see ‘The URT’s’ park and its structures as anything but shady, having first read the guide’s entry. The rest of the forest is entirely open to the public, with the usual restrictions regarding hunting and camping. ‘The URT’ stands alone, fenced off at a distance one expects from a tiger’s enclosure. The site is overstaffed and manned by people who take their job way too seriously if you believe their job is to simply guard a tree. And life does avoid ‘The URT’ at ground level. It’s difficult to tell for sure from the raised platform, but nothing obvious moves down there. No bugs. No rodents. Birds stick to the branches. Bees stick to the air.

When I look too long a man pulls me back and tells me I was leaning too far out.

He’s the man I ask about closing procedure.

“The thing is,” I tell him, “I’ve got a friend that’s got a friend that did the underground tour, you know. Off the menu. And he said for money, for like, $500, it can be arranged.”

I don’t have friends, as you must well know, and I don’t always have money. The man asks for more but I stand firm. I’m not good at haggling- I just don’t have any more money than that to give. He accepts when I offer the money upfront, and he tells me to meet him in the parking lot an hour after closing.

The camper is not inconspicuous in the near-empty lot and I make it more conspicuous by peering through the shades every few minutes, thinking that a rogue leaf is someone coming to tell me where I should and shouldn’t be. When someone does come to the door, I don’t hear approach at all.

One tentative knock. Two louder knocks after that. The knock of someone second guessing what they’re doing, someone nervous, I think, which puts us on even ground.

I open the door and find a woman. She’s younger than me, dressed in unbuttoned flannel and unlaced boots. I recognize another traveler and she must have recognized the same in me.

“Are you waiting for the tour?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“You want company?”

“I have company,” I tell her, and I gesture to Hector, wheezing on his bed in the corner.

“What’s wrong with him?”

The wheezing started a couple weeks ago. Then he got sluggish. The couple vets I’ve seen tell me it could be anything. The rabbit’s old and he’s got more miles on him than most. They all agree that it doesn’t look good. Lately he’s taken to chewing a hole in his back, a habit that’s landed him in a cone.

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve got a coffee pot in my car if you’ve got electricity in this thing.”

“Sure,” I tell her, “I could use coffee.”

The man is late coming to retrieve us, but he makes good on his promise. He doesn’t blink when I haul along a sick rabbit. Eve, the woman, side-eyes me.

Through a back room and down a series of cement stairs, we find ourselves in the hollow chamber that allows for access to ‘The URT’s’ roots. They emerge from the ceiling and reenter the soil through the floor and walls. A number of people in lab coats mill about the exposed roots, examining the illicit grafts. It’s mostly animals and pieces of people. There’s something that looks like a robot across the way, but when I stare too long one of the uniforms gestures at our guide and he pulls me away.

The tour is wordless until we reach an alcove in the far wall. The earth is exposed, there, and the grafts go mostly unobserved the employees. Our guide points with his chin:

“Deposits.”

I take off Hector’s cone and stroke his head. Then I set him close enough to the roots that the ragged flesh around his chew-wound touches the wood. He doesn’t move from the spot.

“This keeps things alive, right?” I ask.

“It sustains them,” the man says. It’s a practiced deflection, but sustaining is enough for now.

I look over at the woman and she shrugs: “More coffee?”

We camp there, in the lot, until someone finally arrives to tell us we have to go.

-traveler