I’ve never been very good at the places where you’re supposed to find something other than the destination. I didn’t have much luck at the diamond fields or any of the presumed meteor landing sites. Panning for gold, I never found anything but mud and rocks. When I find something it tends to be a nasty surprise- usually what’s left of whoever came before me. I suppose that’s its own kind of luck. 

I try to learn from their mistakes. 

‘Travelers will want to confirm their tetanus vaccinations before attempting to comb ‘The Lure Trench,’ a narrow valley in the already-recessed Crease. ‘The Lure Trench’ might have been a mainstream destination if not for the danger it presents. And for the smell. It is geographically interesting in that it remains so narrow despite a large majority of the country’s fresh water passing through it. This is due, in part, to the porous rock formations that precede it, these acting to lower the water pressure to a trickle so that, despite the filtration, the water stagnates and runs still. Those fish who attempt to pass through ‘The Lure Trench’ rarely survive and their bodies further thicken the waterway.

Evolutionarily speaking, these fish should have learned their lesson by now but this too can be explained by the relatively mundane. The mountain at the far side of ‘The Lure Trench’ (which also serves as the safest and most accessible viewpoint into the Crease) emits a magnetic field and the fish that choose to attempt ‘The Lure Trench’ all have one thing in common: they carry metal.

It’s fishhooks, mostly, all of them sharp despite the rust. But among those hooks are lures and any fisher worth their rod will tell you that good lures are lost to the sport all the time. These lures can be expensive and rare and there are collectors out there willing to pay a fortune for something that can be dug up for free (discounting personal safety).

Leave your magnets and your metal detectors at home. They work too well, here, failing to differentiate between the trash and the treasure. Travelers hoping for a souvenir should search with a partner and both should prepare for difficult, bloody work.’

The few men in ‘The Lure Trench’ when I arrive bleeding freely from their feet and legs, where hooks and lures hang by shallow folds of flesh. I’ve read that dedicated searchers here forgo protective garments after a few days. Cloth beneath the knee snags and slows them down, trips them up. Offers minimal protection. When something catches their legs they know right away, can stop to see whether it’s worth extraction in the moment or if it can wait until a break. 

I watch some of the men pull lures from the shallow, stinking muck that technically constitutes a river. Sometimes, when they are impressed, they plug them into their arms. It serves to differentiate them from the refuse, I suppose. And it gives them status. 

These people are not well.

I don’t move beyond the shore but as I’m starting back on the path to the Crease’s main thoroughfare I feel a sharp, plucking sting in my heel. A deep red lure with bright white eyes stares up from the back of my shoe, where its hook disappears into the fabric. It takes me an hour to remove because I am a baby about these things and because I refuse to give it up to the men who see me struggling, who offer to help if I’m willing to give them the find. 

I carry it back in my hand because I’m afraid it will burrow into anything I try to store it in. Back at the trailer, I drop it into a glass bottle from the side of the road. The smell makes me want a beer for the first time in months. The bottle goes into the cup holder while I patch up my heal, wondering where I’d even begin finding my medical records without the help of my family. 

Someone at home would know whether this might kill me.

Nobody at home knows I’m still alive. 

Some people have tried to draw parallels between the number of metal fillings one has and their willingness to search ‘The Lure Trench’ for profit. Just like the fish, the more metal one carries, the more likely they are to find themselves in water no sane creature should want to brave. The contrary opinion suggests a third variable and a cause for both: desperation via poverty. 

Whatever the cause, I fit neatly within that correlation: my mouth largely alloy, my foot still bleeding from ‘The Trench,’ my finances a wreck.

I would prefer to know that I do this against my own free will but it seems too easy to be true.

-traveler

I see why people used to get trapped here. ‘The Place That Feels Like Home’ feels exactly like home, even after I paid for it. Even after I signed waivers indicating my willingness to be removed from the property when my time is up. Those are not so different than the sacrifices a person makes to stay at home. A financial trade-off. A limiting of privacy and rights. 

My spot in ‘The Place That Feels Like Home’ is one of the cheaper ones. Limited furnishing. One small window overlooking the parking lot. There is nothing homey about it. No effort has been put in because none is necessary.

It’s nice.

‘‘The Place That Feels Like Home’ is a trap older than recorded history- the human equivalent of a roach motel. It was a bit of a Bermuda Triangle for early colonists and, for a while, it was the site of long-lived pseudo-Christian cult. Long-lived because followers didn’t have a tendency to go spreading their blasphemy in good ‘actual Christian’ settlements, and pseudo-Christian only because the leaders went to great lengths to rationalize their inability to leave ‘The Place That Feels Like Home’ via Bible verses taken well out of context. 

The colonists did eventually figure it all out, though, and they hung a few of the cult leaders and scattered its followers and, using a rope-around-the-waist system for a few willing entrepreneurs, successfully mapped out the perfect circle perimeter of ‘The Place That Feels Like Home’ (though it was later discovered to be a sphere. Then they did what any good colonizer does: they started making money off land that didn’t initially belong to them. 

And they’re still at it.’

By the end of my hour in ‘The Place That Feels Like Home,’ I’m pretty sure it actually is a place I spent time before this. Maybe in a previous life? It’s very familiar and deeply comfortable in the way that nostalgia tries to be. 

So when they ring the bell to tell me I’ve got ten minutes, I ignore it. And when they ring the bell again to signal five, I reason I should just enjoy the time I have left. Pretend like it will last forever. 

And when they’re dragging me out, I wonder why it was easier to leave my actual home, to stay gone so long.

Maybe I’m not meant for comfort. 

When I settle in the trailer again I send a short email-message of apology to the staff at ‘The Place That Feels Like Home,’ though I’m sure they get it all the time. An auto-reply indicates ways I can go back to feeling like I did before engaging with ‘The Place That Feels Like Home.’ I read them and try to relax in the cracked leather of the driver’s seat, which is comfortable, still, but that feels nothing at all like home. 

-traveler

‘It’s true that the world’s supply of the standard ‘glow in the dark’ material is harvested and refined entirely in the North American Crease. A single deposit of the phosphorescent substance was discovered in the late 1950s by Stuart Bewler in an acreage of the Crease he purchased at a steep discount for being ‘highly haunted.’ The so-called haunting, history assumes, was likely inspired by the cave system eventually known as Bewler’s Cavern, where the phosphorescent material inherent to all modern glow-in-the-dark products can be found in intricate veins, charged daily by the particular angle of the entrance and the sunset (and guarded by a malicious spirit, since exorcised).

Bewler’s initial enterprise, guided tours of the cavern, failed for lack of interest and the sheer dearth of happenstance tourists in the Crease. He made very little money and, worse, found those few who entered had a habit of taking illicit souvenirs. As the veins dwindled, he closed the cavern to the public and carved what remained of the veins out to sell himself. He boarded up the entrance and the cave remained unvisited for the better part of a decade.

Bewler ‘rediscovered’ his own cave in 1961 when the deteriorating boards began to give away and light once again entered the cavern, revealing that the depleted veins had replenished themselves. Further research indicated that this process occurred quickly- more quickly than any one scientist was particularly comfortable with. The glowing material exhibits none of the established traits of life but, given optimal conditions (those conditions being strictly within the veins of Bewler’s Cavern), the material grows like a moss. Despite expert suggestions that Bewler didn’t fully understand the substance he was handling, the man charged forward with entrepreneurial zeal, coopting a number of techniques he had seen implemented by the researchers to dilute and refine the substance into the marketable glowing ‘ink’ that is widely used in childrens’ toys today. The process has not changed since, though Bewler, and every other manager of ‘Bewler’s Glow-in-the-Dark Cavern and Refinery’ have vanished suddenly and under mysterious circumstances within five years of consistent and direct work with the material. Nobody has yet determined whether this pattern exists on a wide scale or how much interaction with the substance, and in what amounts, defines the catalyst for disappearance.

‘Bewler’s Glow-in-the-Dark Cavern and Refinery’ does not offer tours but the recent owners have done the very minimum to rebuff curious travelers who arrive outside of working hours. The bulk of the refinery has made the terrain somewhat confusing, so the author recommends visitors arrive in the early hours of the night. Those travelers entering the cave are said to disappear sometimes too, but that is inherent in the nature of the role and is likely a coincidence.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

My first stop in the crease is ‘The Library of Fatal Maps’ and, no, the irony is not lost on me. A lot of these maps have earned their place in this library for leading people into or through ‘The Crease.’ Must be convenient for the librarians, to have their materials delivered so neatly.

That isn’t true of the entire collection, of course. And even I, who have seen so many of the nation’s museums, have to give credit to the sheer volume- to the diversity of what is on display. Initially broken up by region, and then again by state and county, the final categorization method for maps is why exactly these maps proved to be fatal. There are those that included some sort of misprint, leading users astray. There are those that were accurate at the time of printing, but reached travelers only after the landscape shifted in some terminal way. There are those that were printed wrong on purpose. Exemplars are displayed in each, next to real or simulated twins that show how a small correction immediately makes the directions less disastrous.

A small very small section in the back houses maps entirely behind a glass case, these having been printed with materials or inks that proved fatal physically, though their content was sound.

Turns out, there are a lot of ways to die.

‘The advent of GPS has done very little to minimize the fatalities associated with those items featured in ‘The Library of Fatal Maps.’ If anything, it has only led travelers to untimely deaths more efficiently and with great precision.’

I sink nearly two hours just browsing ‘The Library of Fatal Maps’ before I am drawn in by the suggestion of an interactive exhibit on another floor. Another hour passes as I wind my way between staircases and doors, finding myself in less and less likely rooms and hallways, using the light from my phone’s screen to see the directions included in the pamphlet handed to me with my admission ticket.

Then I begin to worry.

-traveler

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. I don’t trust the ocean. I don’t like that it’s so big a deep and strong and chaotic. I don’t appreciate any of those attributes in isolation. I especially don’t like the way they mix. I don’t like the way things look or smell when they’ve been in the ocean too long. I especially don’t like things that originate there. I don’t eat fish. Not even tuna salad. I definitely don’t eat shellfish.

I don’t like the way aquariums make it feel like I’m walking through a stranger’s house- through the house of a fish- and acting like I just belong there. Like the fish are the weird ones for being upset at my tapping on the glass. But at least aquariums are safe. 

‘The Dock Out to International Waters’ is not. 

‘It’s not really a dock, because nothing is allowed to dock there. ‘The Dock Out to International Waters’ is more a raised path, technically speaking, but it looks like a dock and things sometimes dock there anyway so a dock it has become. Regardless, ‘The DOtIW’ is a 12-mile series of metal platform, anchored to the ocean floor and bound tightly enough to each other to remain stable but just loose enough that it tends to snake a little in a storm. 

A storm is not the time to visit ‘The DOtIW.’ It shakes and wobbles and is sometimes submerged under a foot of salt water for the better part of an hour. It attracts lightning, as one might expect, but strangely, also, fish which gather at its edges and stare up at passersby, their mouths agape. They gather in such a density that it is difficult to swim near ‘The DOtIW.’ Difficult to pull oneself up from a fall. 

For some time the end of ‘The DOtIW’ sported a stamp station for the ‘Passport to Your National Parks,’ but the journey proved so regularly fatal that it has since been moved to the melancholy Massachusetts beach from which the structure juts. Few people walk the length anymore. 

I start in the early morning of a day that is meant to be calm throughout and overcast. The ocean is gentle but the sun rises early and beats down on the crowded fish, cracking their lips and making a stink that I don’t get used to. Some of these fish, I see, have hooks in their mouths. I wonder if they’d stay still long enough for me to remove them, but I don’t try. 

The platforms are less steady past the seven-mile mark and my walking slows. I’ve seen nobody else in either direction. This bothers me less than everything else. By Mile 10 I feel myself burning under the sunblock, sweating under the layers I wear to protect me from the cold ocean wind. 

I see the station like a mirage, at first, the Soldier’s Station at the end of ‘The DotIW.’ It seems to come and go and only the frequency of this hallucination hints to me that it might be reality after all. A mile out and I take in the rules of the Station. The soldier is not to be spoken to unless it is an emergency. The soldier is not to be touched. This is not a stuff British guard. This soldier will break form to put visitors in their place. 

I have no motivation to antagonize the only other person out here.

The soldier stands with his back to me, anyway, and the ocean very likely masks my approach. I wonder how he stands for so long without looking back, trusting there is nobody with ill-intent behind him. As is tradition, the soldier’s firearm is in his hand and his hand is raised. He aims the handgun out- out into the ocean. It moves with the waves but doesn’t waver, his finger ready on the trigger. 

-traveler