‘Romantic? Depressing? A glitch in the simulation we understand as life? ‘The Place of Interminable Sunset’ is said to be all three and more which leads to a sometimes-tense intersection of Wayside tourists. The romantics want privacy, of course, and the depressed claim they want the same but need more attention than the others. The nihilists, admittedly rare, are a menace to both, sometimes depressing the romantics and sometimes romancing the depressives. ‘The Interminable Sunset,’ like an eclipse, brings out the worst in all of them- exaggerates their tics and syncs them into the beat of a massive, oppressing heart. 

They are largely too distracted to notice. 

‘The Interminable Sunset’ is explained as a phenomenon of light, which doesn’t really explain it at all. The result, however, is that within a half-acre of land in eastern Tennessee, one can always see the sun setting. Sometimes this lines up roughly with the proper horizon. Sometimes the horizon appears elevated, the sun slipping like a sliver into the skin of the atmosphere.

It’s difficult to watch, all the terminal whimsy and nostalgia of day’s end stretched long. Humans are always striving for the finish of things.

But some things outlive them.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘If one rides the Crease from West to East, exiting at the last possible moment before the ocean terminus, they will find themselves traveling under ‘The Hotel Tree,’ which makes for better souvenirs than the unremarkable ‘Muck Trough’ that marks the Western end. ‘The Hotel Tree’ takes its name in part from being the universal source for the materials from which hotel slippers are created. The tree’s bark peels away in scales, thicker and more flexible than birch. Its leaves, once matured, take on the texture of course velvet. It is resistant to burning and disease. 

And its resistant to pests, a categorical threat that includes the humans that strip it for parts. 

In the many decades since its discovery, ‘The Hotel Tree’ has attempted several adaptations to ward of human interference with its growth. Its leaves induce rashes. Its peeled creates sappy blisters of venomous liquid. It has sprouted all manner of prickles and thorns and its branches have developed a fragility at the joints that causes them to sporadically drop, leaving those beneath it injured and itchy. Sometimes dead. 

But humans are stubborn and they crave routine. Sometimes that routine involves the highly specific coarseness of hotel slippers in residences four-stars and above, now boiled and bleached and processed to remove the tree’s resistances. The domination of the tree continues, the routine of suffering toward pleasure writ small but constant at the very edge of the country. 

This is the story of the Crease: danger well-contained.’

Following an internet tutorial, the video for which I have to backtrack up a hill and download through two thin bars of cellular service, I slide a knife between ‘The Hotel Tree’ and a scale of its bark. I snip a leaf, my face masked and hands gloved to ward off the itching hairs it sheds in the process. Pulling the stems and its veins from the leaf is like de-boning a fish. Like what I imagining de-boning a fish is like, I guess. This splits the leaf. A thorn from the tree works as a needle. The fibrous leaf veins, thread. 

In an hour I have a natural approximation of a hotel slipper, a thing that looks quaint and inviting but would give me a rash on the bottom of my foot, where it’s hard to itch without tickling. The internet suggests these make great prank gifts in circles where one can appreciate the irony and the thought leaves me feeling emptier than I expected. Community seems like such a distant concept to me, now. 

Day breaks over the Crease and I make the ascent, driving up the steepest stretch of interstate in the country. I crest and see the ocean ahead. Soon I’m driving parallel to the water, south finally, no longer charging the sun. Behind me, in the mirror, the Crease seems to close like a wound, thinning until it is a heat mirage then disappearing from view altogether. 

-traveler

‘There is a point in the sky above the Crease through which all domestic flights must physically travel in order to reach their destination. This ‘Flight Nexus’ is among the safest of the Crease’s offerings, a quiet and starry viewpoint that can only be half-enjoyed, for while it provides a respite from the dangers of the journey, it is invariably a midpoint. The journey must continue and the dangers of the Crease surround it.’

I’ve never flown on a plane. Not in all my 34 years. I’ve bought plane tickets, but only because there are destinations in the Guide that are past security. One was a locker system that impossibly shuffled its contents. One was a smoking room that a traveler could become lost in, the fog inside so thick as to impede visibility and the room’s walls so wide as to defy the space that contained them. 

Airports haven’t sold me on the idea of flight, but I see grace in the criss-cross patterns of ‘The Flight Nexus and wonder if my heart hasn’t opened to the idea. Not now, but in the future. Someday, maybe, my journey will be about the destination and everything else will be an inconvenience. 

I spend more time than I should and peel myself away only when the cold drives me into the camper which shifts slow, left and right, left and right, so that I’m too seasick to sleep. I start the drive out early, sure that I’ll sleep better elsewhere, some place in the shade of this dangerous valley.

I’m almost through the Crease now.

-traveler

‘Well-meaning but largely racist anyway, ‘Them All of America’ is a tinkerer’s quaint and obsessive take on Disney’s classic ‘It’s a Small World,’ ride located in the eastern region of the Crease. The first iteration of ‘Them All’ began with the relatively simple overhaul of a disused automatic car wash and, though it has grown since that time, the first leg of the journey still begins in the same aging structure. This prelude, which largely focuses on cultures native to the Americas, offers guests some insight into the evolution both of the exhibit’s technological aspects, as well as the manic guilt the owner seems to feel regarding the plight of American minorities, an umbrella term that has expanded beyond race to encompass sexual and gender minorities as well. 

Manic you ask? Well, yes, let it be clarified:

Few rational citizens could argue with the ‘Them All of America’s’ owner in his understanding of underprivileged demographics. Some might even call the wide and yet increasingly specific net he casts a noble, if not ultimately impossible, inventory of the country’s misdeeds. Nearly all citizens, rational or otherwise, however, would agree that his representations of these cultures are drawn from the shallowest caricatures available and the result is a gaudy minstrel act that, assuming one refuses to abandon their car mid-show, lasts just over two hours in 2024. Previous iterations of this Guide have attempted to describe portions of the ride’s narration, half-spoken, half-sung, but these passages have been removed for being inflammatory even in the form of summary. Suffice to say, it is an embarrassing watch for any demographic. 

It should be noted that ‘Them All of America’ is considered responsible for the death and disappearance of several families over the course of ten years. The ride itself is harmless, but the destination sometimes preempts search results for ‘The Mall of America,’ leading drivers into the valley of the Crease wholly unprepared for what awaits them there.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

I might have enjoyed ‘The Pickle Gallery’ more when I drank. Sober living has made the reprieve of the occasional destination bar more of a slog- a trial in which I fight with an inner voice that tells me I must order some minimum amount of alcohol-adjacent items in order to justify my existence at a venue centered around drinking. ‘The Pickle Gallery’ makes it easier than most. There’s a kitchen, at least, and I arrive before noon which is not on accident. Arriving before noon is one of the silent excuses I make for not drinking. Sometimes I’ll nod to the camper outside, to the warm pavement, as though to say I’d love to drink, I really would, but you know how it is. Gotta drive. Gotta think of the law, those bastards. Can’t get another point on my record. 

I’ve never understood how the points on a license worked. Maybe that’s a system for a different state. Regardless, I tell them everything but that I don’t drink and I don’t know why.

‘Some bars collect license plates. Others tack dollars or women’s underwear to their ceiling. ‘The Pickle Gallery’ is the Crease’s best-known dive and it collects those pieces of its customers that have fallen off early. A thumb in formaldehyde. A jar of powdered placenta. A basket of teeth and a tack-board of umbilical cords, flattened and age-crisped like flowers pressed in a book. There is a corner dedicated to hair and fingernails but its placement indicates the relative weakness of the contribution. ‘The Pickle Gallery’ wants substance, and though their collection may have started small, it has become something altogether ghoulish over time.’

The Guide fails to mention the vinegar stench of the place, which makes it difficult to eat the food I do order. It doesn’t say that the bar is illuminated from sources behind the walls of its collection, light filtering brown-green through suspended, chemical decay. The floor creaks as the woman behind the bar moves between bottles and its shifting wood rattles the jars. They tinkle together and their contents sway, a dozen right hands suddenly beauty-queen waving. A layer of skin sloughs off a brined skull in the shelf ahead of me, joining a jelly-fish clump of scalp and hair beneath it. 

That can’t have left its owner early. I wonder, as I often do, about the legality of the collection and remind myself that I’m wanted in several states for a variety of misdemeanors, most of which involve a failure to pay parking or speeding tickets and the further failure to learn my lesson about proper parking or speed. 

Several more employees join the woman at the bar over the course of the next half hour and, at noon, they reach a critical mass and the jar shuffling begins. Forming a neat line, the men and women begin to pull specimens from the shelves and hand them off into the back where, presumably, they are wedged into vacant places along the venue’s original walls. Unseen employees push new jars forward from behind, filling the gaps in quick succession. The spectacle is impressive for its efficiency alone, but the goal for people like me is to experience what has been called ‘The Sour Float,’ a sort of vertigo brought on by the lights and the movement of the liquid.

Sure enough, a grim aurora spills over the floor and the room begins to spin. Several of those men and women who preceded me here slump to the ground, dizzy and content. I see them and resist the same euphoria. Who know when they last cleaned the floor?

Among them I note those bleached splotches where jars have inevitably fallen and I wonder what happens to those parts that escape. Rot comes for all things I suppose. 

Everything ends eventually. 

-traveler