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

‘Weighted via underground anchor and balanced on a careful mechanism, ‘The Teeter Toppler’ is the statue of a man whose creator understood what it means to seem unlikeable. Handsome and sneering, dressed in a style that indicates influence but isn’t particularly beholden to a single decade, the subject looks as though he’s won a victory that seemed inevitable and a plaque at his feet indicates just what this victory entailed.

This plaque changes.

The artist, or someone with the same sense of humor, switches between plaques that detail fictional, but highly believable, events and philosophies that would cause partisan strife and, when the political divide becomes great, one mob or another marches to ‘The Teeter Toppler’ to pull it down. The forementioned mechanism provides some satisfying resistance to an average mob but eventually allows the statue to be pulled horizontal. The forementioned anchor causes it to rise again, making this something of a practice statue- something of a punching bag- for the modern angry crowd.

A fence was recently erected around ‘The Teeter Toppler,’ the government response to an event in which a man was crushed to death under the statue. He had been the sole counter-protestor at a toppling in which the plaque indicated the statue memorialized those Nazis who ‘turned things around’ and ‘really did us a solid’ in their contributions to the first atomic bomb. ‘The Teeter Toppler’ came down so swiftly, it’s said, that the mechanism underneath brought it up too quickly and failed to stop it from swinging back to the ground in the opposite direction, extinguishing the not-all-Nazis crowd with a single blow.

The fence is largely ignored and the mechanism that holds it steady seems to be degrading. It creaks and tilts and hardly puts up a fight. There is a movement, now, to save ‘The Teeter Toppler,’ effectively fixing it into place. A counter-movement asserts this goes against the very meaning of the thing. 

And so the plaques are no longer necessary. And so they no longer appear.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

A straight line represents the shortest path between two places. A shortcut is never straight. How can these things be equally true? How is it that a shortcut through the American countryside, through any part of America, is more winding than its better-known alternatives.

I don’t have answers for this except to say that the Wayside, and nature generally, don’t really operate in straight lines. Accordingly, they both like to bend the rules.

Take ‘The Crease’ for instance.

‘Oh you thought that was nothing? A byproduct of taking a very large image and making it into something that could fit in a glove compartment alongside the car’s user manual, one glove, several opened but unfinished tissue packets, aging hard candy, a long-dead powerbank that needs to be recycled, a handful of automotive business cards, a stiff and dirty hand towel, a flyer for a restaurant that no longer exists, and a tool for breaking the windows from inside the car in case of an emergency, hidden well below everything else such to be essentially useless. We understand why you thought ‘The Crease’ was a byproduct of design and not an indication of landmass.

But you were wrong.’

‘The Crease’ is essentially a valley, non-descript except that it crosses the nation like a latitude line and is the setting for any number of regional legends, both modern and historical. Those roads that enter ‘The Crease’ are anything but straight. They are largely dirt and they twist like deer trails through the deep forest inside, sometimes riding the edge of the wall but slithering, more often, along the bottom.

Each of the three times I’ve cut through ‘The Crease’ myself, I have wasted the better part of the week extricating myself from an unexpected problem that would not have occurred if I had chosen, instead, to drive for some time in the opposite direction of my destination to access one of the many bridges the cross the gap. I’ve learned to avoid ‘The Crease’ to the best of my ability but, like it or not, the Wayside doesn’t avoid the deep forest like I do.

So, I suppose it’s time.

I’ve chosen a length of ‘The Crease’ that should be accessible to the RV, though I may have to hike out from a few curves and trailheads to see those things I need to see. My home sits heavy on its wheels, recently full of food and supplies in an amount I’ve never felt the need to carry before. I hope to check ‘The Crease’ off my list in one simple swoop.

But I don’t expect it to go well.

-traveler

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