The government’s non-acknowledgement of ‘The Crash Site’ and the site’s potent toxicity have put everyone in a bit of a catch-22. On one hand, it has made for what is perhaps the most subversive stop on the Wayside. ‘The Crash Site,’ after all, is assumed to be the sprawled totality of an alien spaceship or the burst remains of a supervillainous lair. It is peppered with psychedelic crystals and threaded-through with stiff, paper-thin steel.

Everything inside the site proper is lethally radioactive. Geiger counters indicate danger several yards out and, rather than dissipating, the radiation has only grown stronger. Several informal lookout sites have been established and then abandoned again as the dangerous area grows wider at the fringes. On a bad day, the radiation will sometimes reach the highway. It’s weak, now, but there are questions about what should be done and whether a car passing through at reasonable speeds will be enough to protect travelers who had no intention of stopping. 

The government sees no problem.

The crystals and the metal have thus far proven too dangerous to steal away. They manifest shallow ribbon cuts on any flesh within three inches or so. They cut and burn, even through protective equipment. The cuts do not easily heal and, for the span of about a day, they are contagious. The burns blister and scar and blister again, sometimes for years after contact. Souvenirs are only theoretically possible and, as always, not worth the price.’

You couldn’t pay me to get close enough to ‘The Crash Site’ to experience any of what the Guide affectionately downplays as ‘side-effects.’ I view it, instead, from an area nearly half a mile away where an enterprising person has planted a pair of those pay-per-view binocular systems, configured in such a way as to be immune to the unexplained visual distortion that plagues most normal looking devices. A sign near the binoculars suggests the immunity can be attributed to the device’s being made from material retrieved from ‘The Crash Site’ which, if I wasn’t 100% sure this was a lie, would have made it a no-go as well.

Observed from a safe distance, ‘The Crash Site’ is beautiful like a snake, sharp and oilslick in the sun. The crystals sparkle and gline, dust-free despite the arid New Mexico desert. Despite the wind. Despite years of weathering and covert attempts to smother the area in something that would block the radiation or at least keep people at bay.

The only other visitors are two teen boys who seem to be daring each other to approach, who are already so much closer than I would ever be to something unknown and dangerous. One of the boys runs at the site, swoops in close and then circles back to where he started. The second boy does the same, only he cuts deeper and he trips, stumbles to the ground. Lies facedown. The first boy calls for him. He pulls out his phone but remembers that it is off- that turning it on too close to ‘The Crash Site’ will cause the battery to swell and burst. He runs back toward the car that brought them, is still running, facing away, when the fallen boy stands and brushes himself off and trots after. 

A joke, maybe? They say ‘The Crash Site’ changes some people, but nobody seems to know how. 

The wind changes and my vision warps. I leave the binoculars with time left and try to remember the person I was just before. I think I was the same, but I won’t ever really be sure. 

-traveler

I don’t know the in-and-out legalities of every state, but someone once told me that booby traps, even those established well in the bounds of one’s private property, are largely off the table. I haven’t looked it up since then- I try not to use my phone when I’m driving- but this fact was delivered with the surety of a professional party-pooper and, though I had no real plans to set traps up myself (or any piece of property for those traps to protect) I was a little disappointed. Even more disappointing was my understanding that, having survived a booby-trap, an erstwhile victim might sue the creator of the traps. Meaning there is monetary gain to be had from entering and surviving a booby trap. 

It feels like that goes against the point. 

‘Willow Lake’ seems to think that proper signage will mitigate any lawsuits resulting from their ‘tradition,’ but I suspect that the only surefire defense is a great deal of money for settling cases out of court (though not as much money asked in the lawsuit itself). It’s hard to find a sympathetic jury when it’s kids who are drowning. 

‘Long before images of the eerie geometrical ice patterns began to make to make the news and long before the quick publicity pivot that seemed to suggest the patterns had been the intent all along, there was this idea for a manmade hot spring. A hot lake. A hot lake where residents of the highly exclusive ‘Willow Lake’ community could soak or steam in the winter months- could watch little clouds rising from the surface of the water from their bedroom windows and enclosed balconies. 

But it’s hard to heat that much water and to keep it heated without some sort of insulating cover. As the first round of cold months made the water inhabitable and as haphazard suggestions that ice plunges were, in fact, very trendy fell on deaf ears, the lake started to freeze. 

But it didn’t freeze totally. 

The windblown surface of the water developed a crystal skin that captured air patterns in its formation. It was beautiful and fleeting. No pattern remained for long before a sudden gust broke the ice and remade the surface. It was more entertaining and far more unique than the original hot spring idea had been and so the very-wealthy residents were comforted. 

Then two children, a brother and a sister, fell through the ice and drowned. They had been visiting their grandparents (residents of Willow Lake) and were promised ice skating by their parents, who had misunderstood the situation entirely and, upon hearing of the thin ice, had forbidden them from going anywhere near it (an action that seemed to have catalyzed their intent). 

These children were the first of many. Kids loved the lake and no matter how many signs the operators of ‘Willow Lake’ put up, the kids either wouldn’t heed the warnings. Rumors spread of a ‘daring’ game. A game of how far out someone could get into the lake without falling in. Worse, rumors spread of a deep apathy among ‘Willow Lake’ residents. The HOA, in particular, had been skeptical of the signage at the start, fearing it would undermine the simple aesthetic of the community and prove to be controversial among residents who feared having their rights- any of their rights- taken away or limited by third parties. 

Betting pools formed between people of a certain child-hating sub-community, these people generally having become too angry and tired by the world to see or interact with children in any way, or being so traumatized by the reciprocal bad treatment by their own children, that they were willing to make a game of the ongoing tragedies. 

The patterns at ‘Willow Lake’ remain, and so does the signage. Little else has changed about the situation and some fear we have witnessed the rise of some child-killing cult. Though no proof of this has yet made circulation, religions have formed around less interesting premises.’

-traveler

‘It’s suspicious, isn’t it? Anything that’s free? Is that true, universally speaking, or is it a uniquely American understanding of the volatile lust for profit? We understand the dangers of gasoline, but we still use it to propel our cars. We tell ourselves it is controlled and ignore the occasional fire. The cancers. The damage to climate. Fuel is the way propel our cars and profit is the way we propel our lives and we must accept the inherent dangers if we want to get anywhere at all.

Right?

‘The Pest Depository’ advertises itself as a free service and it is convenient and clean and well-staffed, attributes one might expect a non-profit to have one, maybe two of total. It operates with the sure confidence of a cult, its employees well-dressed and enthusiastic but hardly forthcoming. There is an emphasis on the value of life- of all life. Of the lives of pests.

This seems important.

‘The Pest Depository’ does not catch pests. Its services do not extend beyond their several locations in the state of New Jersey, aside from the occasional pop-up at conventions and fairs. They take only lives pests but they take them all with equal reverence: mice, possums, insects, bats. They have the means of ungluing rodents from traps, but only if they are allowed to keep the result. They claim to set broken bones, though they offer no public menagerie of recovering souls.

They do not, in fact, make any claims about what happens to the ‘pests’ once they have been deposited.

Whatever they do, it must pay the rent.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘Taken at face value, ‘Just Table Legs’ goes about its business honestly. The business sells no tables but only their legs, with discounts on matching sets of four or six (but reasonable prices for odd numbers between). They offer custom work for the existing table that needs a leg replaced. The shop reeks of warm sawdust. The owner’s hands are smooth and calloused.

Every chair leg is sold with nails pre-installed, sharp and silver and difficult to transport.

People are found with these nails inside them all the time, the legs swung with such ferocious intent that those pictures of crime scenes that have been made public show the wooden limbs still projecting from the flesh and bone of the victim in whom they have become embedded. 

The owner does not comment on the tendency for his work to be used in murder- only gestures to the sign at the front. 

‘Just Table Legs.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘Timberline Froyo’s’ mascot is a winking man in a trench coat and its buffet pickings are largely (but not completely) inedible. Past the whirling drums of frozen yogurt (plain, chocolate, or swirl), the toppings start with ammunition. Ammunition for firearms. There are a few trays of your standard caliber offerings up at the front, but most people come for the weird and legally gray stuff and it shows in quantity.

Hollow point.

Irradiated lead.

Dragon’s breath shells, which I believe are incendiary.

All this and more can be scooped into the bowl with that dollop of frozen yogurt. In fact, ‘Timberline’ offers a small, sunken lid-like piece of plastic for keeping the toppings away from the yogurt. A sign suggests this is to keep things from getting soggy during transit, but it’s framed as a speech bubble emerging from the mouth of the same trenchcoat-wearing figure. 

An unnecessary flourish, really. Nobody gets this far without knowing something’s up.

‘Colorado is a liberal state, chock-full of repressed liberal hunter-types that sometimes see the fun with which their conservative peers flaunt insane and unnecessary weaponry in states with lax gun laws and decide they’re willing to flex their own moral boundaries in private. Mostly this has resulted in even more insane and even less necessary weaponry, designed by people who, in the day, use their degrees to engineer jet engines or refine highly efficient fuels. 

It’s all still illegal, of course. To make. To sell. And nobody wants to lose their jobs. 

Enter ‘Timberline Froyo,’ which is laid out like any frozen yogurt buffet except that their toppings are largely donated by the same freaks that make exploding guns. ‘Timberline’ keeps its sources anonymous and, due to a quirk of Colorado law, they’re able to sell those donations legally, as long as they do so by weight and as long as they’re sold with a visible portion of frozen yogurt. 

The largest take-away container on offer at ‘Timberline Froyo’ is a ten-gallon bucket, and people leave with them teeming all the time.’

I go for the smallest bowl portion and really consider my options. The by-weight cost of the frozen yogurt at ‘Timberlines’ is outrageous, something they seem to pride themselves on referencing as bait for the FBI or the ATF agents that must lurk about and make purchases of their own from time to time. They talk about the serene life of the cows. Of organic farms and ethical milking and slow-churning and love. 

I move past ammunition (none of it would fit in my gun) and into an area labeled ‘animals, living,’ which indeed features snakes, birds, and insects the colors of which suggest they are exotic, at least, but probably also venomous. 

I don’t think I’m ready for a new pet. 

Past ‘animals, parts’ and ‘drugs’ (prescription and recreational) and ‘furs’ I start to understand that things are set up alphabetically and that it isn’t the chaotic mess that it seems to be. By the end of it, the only thing that has really caught my eye are a pair of magnets so strong that one normally needs a license and a good reason to own them. The thick, plastic encasings to keep them separated don’t add much to the weight, and they make a fun but expensive souvenir from a place I doubt I’ll have the money to visit again. 

A day later I accidentally loose one magnet from the case and it affixes itself to the top of the camper. When I try to use the opposite end of the other to pop it up enough for a fingerhold, the original magnet promptly flips and attaches to its brother, pinching off a piece of skin from my finger about the size of a grain of rice.

I count myself lucky and leave the magnets where they are. 

A place like ‘Timberline Froyo’ could be dangerous for a guy like me. 

-traveler