I’m not a heights guy, that’s a part of it, but the larger part is that I’ve got a job to do here and experiencing ‘The World’s Long Zip-Line’ in full is just not in the cards. It is the zip-liner’s Pacific Crest Trail. That, in fact, is one of the many ways it attempts to sell itself, not by sheer length alone but also in the normalization of the extreme. No other zip-line course comes close to ‘The World’s Longest Zip-Line.’ No other outfit thinks a zip-line that stretches across the majority of the continental U.S. is a good idea. By aligning itself with the PCT, the operators attempt to pass this off as just one in a number of challenges the world has to offer. Extreme, yes. But strange? No.

But it is strange and arguably stupid and it’s expensive and time-consuming and testimonials suggest its boring in long stretches too. 

So I won’t do it. 

Instead, I visit ‘The Place Where the World’s Largest Zip-Line Intersects I-90.’ It is near the middle-point of the full course and where users start to flag. It also represents the largest stretch of the course without an anchor point or a ladder- the longest stretch without a break from hanging, so people crossing the I-90 here tend to look rough and some beg bystanders to do whatever it takes to get them down. Cut the line. Kill them. 

Whichever. 

These, I’m told, are symptoms of the line blues and I’m also told they pass so it’s largely discouraged to actually interfere with a zip-liner’s journey, here, no matter what they offer or how much they beg. Instead, volunteers have erected a pulley system where visitors can offer small gifts of snacks and water and changes of clothes for those who have soiled themselves while riding the line. I offer some trail-mix I made and watch a weeping woman carry it off into the sunset, gliding slowly along the line that continues for nearly a week south.

I don’t know that it feels like a good deed.

‘‘The World’s Largest Zip-Line’ operates 11 months of the year, closing in January for repairs and to allow for the glide of ‘The Skeleton Crew.’ ‘The Skeleton Crew’ is a community term for that small bundle of hanging corpses that requires shuffling off at the end of the season, their meat largely dehydrated in the sun. Theses rattling husks are pressed along by gravity alone, the line lifted, as a whole, from its origin point and temporarily extended into the Gulf of Florida, where the dead hydrate, burst, and sink into the sands they might have reached alive with a little more care.’

-traveler

It isn’t often that I attribute my life to anything like pure human survival instinct, but there’s something off about ‘The Showerless Pool.’ And it’s enough that I don’t want to touch it even though I’ve already changed into my swimsuit. A swimsuit I purchased for this purpose, specifically.

There’s the fact that nobody else is in the water and, beyond that, I seem to be the only visitor to the pool today. There is the absolute insistence that no shower is necessary to enter the pool. There is a proud lack of shower in the corner. The sense of the place is that ‘The Pool’ has some sort of property or mechanic that keeps it clean, but it doesn’t specify that in text anywhere. So it could actually be very dirty.

But it’s clear. So clear that it could be air, if not for a bluish tint that suggests some sort of chemical interference. The pool is still the way syrup is. Lethargic. I’m sure it would ripple but I’m too afraid to touch it. With anything.

What really gets me is that there is no smell. No pool smell. No smell at all. It’s like smelling inside a vacuum: a space vacuum, not the cleaning kind that tend to smell electric and bad. There is no smell or sound in the room except for my breath on both counts.

Something should want to live in water so clean.

But nothing does.

‘Totally safe. ‘The Showerless Pool,’ is exactly as advertised and because nobody trusts it, ‘The Showerless Pool’ stays clean.’

-traveler

‘‘The Pristine Nature Reserve’ is meant to be a sliver of untouched nature, disturbed only at its edges and, even then, only by highly qualified scientists and researchers, each wondering what the world would do without humans around. 

They are, perhaps, the only ones that don’t bribe the guards to enter.’

I slip a twenty dollar bill to the first guard I see and it’s as easy as that. Cheaper than I’d expect, with the state of the economy and the state’s low minimum wage. The guard seems neither excited or disappointed. He hardly looks at me. 

Once inside, I spend half an hour trying to find a place to be alone. There are other people there, taking pictures and struggling to picnic on an unmaintained forest floor. One woman tries to sell me a beaded necklace. Another, drugs.

Some say this is a decoy site, and that the actual ‘Pristine Nature Reserve’ is somewhere else entirely, that all that grant money goes to keeping people quiet. I don’t buy that anybody has that much cash to fork out for nature, though. I definitely buy that something nice has been spoiled by tourists. 

When I do finally break away from the other visitors I find the hard truth: that untamed nature can be pretty sucky to navigate. A lot of poison ivy. A lot of thorns. Not a whole lot going on. 

I buy the woman’s necklace on the way out, decline the drugs again.

Then I’m off. 

-traveler

‘History has pegged ‘The Constellation Field’ as the same sort of difficult, but isolated, phenomenon as ‘The Bermuda Triangle.’ It’s historically difficult to navigate in and out of if one’s basis for navigation is the sky which, thankfully, is rarely the case anymore. And we would venture to say that the average American is so wildly out of touch with a clear night sky that the majority might not notice a difference. Not immediately. 

But Orion is missing, his belt seemingly dispersed. The North Star pulses well into the south and the ursas are combined into a creature even less likely than bears. The moon takes on a particular color when viewed from ‘The Constellation Field,’ its edges ultraviolet in a way that makes it appear lifted from the dark. Closer. It isn’t an illusion. The teeth of gaping onlookers glow in that light.

Some have attempted to establish a new set of constellations to be found exclusively in ‘The Constellation Field,’ but the ideas are largely drawn from the darker aspects of Alice in Wonderland and few have fully bought in, finding the whole proposition a little cheesy. A little embarrassing. One can’t help but see where they’re coming from, however. It isn’t so much that the stars in ‘The Constellation Field’ are wrong, but no astrophysicist has ever stood in the grass there and walked away thinking they were right either.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘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