‘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

I hate public bathrooms, so you can imagine the hell this trip has been. I figured, early on, that I would get used to it but the Wayside has made it worse. Popular destinations have reason to keep their toilets clean and mystery free. Places on the Wayside don’t share this motivation. Their restrooms are dirty, that is without question, but they’re often also assertively weird. They emit strange sounds. They invite strange company. Like anything that’s been used too hard and for too long, they are embittered.

I waited to visit ‘Ansville’s Haunted Toilet’ until I had a toilet of my own. The restroom in the camper in cramped and not without a distinct smell, but it’s clean and boring the way a toilet should be. With some months of that stability, I finally make the stop.

‘There’s no proof that the toilet in Ansville is haunted. It’s warm, that’s all. Warm like somebody got off it minutes before, but always warm, even if they didn’t. That sort of trick can be pulled with an electric seat. It could probably be accomplished wirelessly. It could probably be accomplished with targeted heat emission.

Could just be a warm bathroom.

The kicker, though, it that ‘Ansville Bites,’ the restaurant in which the haunted toilet can be found, doesn’t charge for admission. They don’t advertise. They even chafe a little at being asked which stall it is. If nothing else, this seals the deal.

Mishandled denial has a funny way of indicating the truth.’

On a crisp autumn night, all I can say about ‘Ansville’s Haunted Toilet’ is: pretty cozy. Maybe my first five-star visit in all these years. Once I get past the weirdness of the warmth, by reminding myself that I’m not sharing the germy butt-heat of another living human, and once I get past the subsequent there-may-be-a-ghost-here-now, weirdness, there is just the warmth and my own bare skin. And that’s not something I’ve felt for quite some time.

-traveler

‘Aging, but still beautiful, ‘The Model of Crook’s Pass’ is a mainstay for hikers and reasonably adventurous road-tourists alike. Friendly for a man trapped by his own vanity, Darren Meek claims to have visited Crook’s Pass before the concept of ‘the golden hour’ entered into the mainstream and, finding himself so well-lit at nearly every hour of the day (for the magic of Crook’s Pass works even in the moonlight) he has thus far refused to move from the spot even for an afternoon.

He’s never looked better.

A winter’s beard fills out in the shadowy crags of the pass, making him something of a pretty-boy mountain man. Malnutrition chisels his jaw in the fall. His skin tans to a bronze by the end of summer. And in spring, well, everyone looks good in the spring.

Meek has put in the work, too. The state granted him permission to build a small cabin for himself at the pass which he did, shirtless all the while. Pictures from the process were collected for an advertising campaign that was ultimately deemed ‘too risqué’ for print. He hands out the discarded samples himself and personalizes them for $20.

Meek has recently become a somewhat frenetic spokesperson for climate change awareness. A little evidence and a great deal of speculation suggests the weather is changing the quality and duration of light at the pass and that Meek is looking a little worn in the new glow. Visitors are cautioned to proceed with care and to lead with compliments- advice that may become a mandate if ‘The Model of Crook’s Pass’ wins its quiet bid to become a national monument.

A note: ‘The Model of Crook’s Pass’ is not to be confused with ‘A Model of Crook’s Pass,’ the scale replica of Crook’s Pass on display 100 miles west of the actual site. Though this model now includes a tiny scale replica of Darren Meek, he has refused to acknowledge it, claiming that the artists have failed to properly capture him.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside