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

‘Billed as a novel concept but certainly not one-of-a-kind, ‘The Indoor/Outdoor Pool’ invites visitors to vote on which side of the partition offers the ultimate waterpark experience. Is it the outdoor pool area, with its seven steep and curling waterslides, its lazy river, and its deeper-than-deep swim zone? Or is it the mysterious indoor pool, housed in a massive cement box which can only be accessed from below the water in that deeper-than-deep zone and from which no one seems to return?’

The cement box looms tall and blank beside the otherwise colorful, if not joyfully faded, outdoor portion of ‘The Indoor/Outdoor Pool,’ and if it were not for the absolute black of the deeper-than-deep end and a small sign just below the surface indicating that the entrance to the indoor pool could be found below, I would assume it was the sort of industrial shed that held, I don’t know, a big water pump? Or tubs of pool cleaner?

As it stands, no person in their right mind should want to enter there and yet I watch with growing stress as the male half of a couple bobs up and down, up and down, his phone doing its very best to illuminate the pitch black below him through a ziplocked baggie, his girlfriend gently asking him to cut it out but asking, also and each time, if he sees anything. 

After about 30 minutes of this he claims he does. He sees the entrance to the indoor pool. They go down together and they don’t come back. 

I look toward the lifeguard on duty and he shrugs. The pool, where he can see it, is clear. The couple is now the problem of other lifeguards elsewhere. 

-traveler

‘Likely the oldest business in the Crease, ‘The Whistling Wire’ is a pay-what-you want forest of umbrella-style clotheslines situated in and around the narrowest section of the valley. Historical accounts of ‘The Whistling Wire’ describe the titular sound as ‘…a soothing chord by which one might locate their forgotten linens in absolute darkness.’

Something has changed. 

The laundry lines shriek, now. Unrelenting winds squeeze through the pass and turn the rusted posts in their bases, creating an absolute choir of screaming metal that, one has to admit, could be used to locate the destination in the dark from a mile or two away. Clothes left to dry in ‘The Whistling Wire’ come away stiffened and sometimes torn, nearly always marked by red-brown lines where the cloth has whipped against the degraded cords above and below their anchor points. This has long been the fashion in the Crease, not for any reason but that the denizens must dry their clothes somewhere and electricity in the sunken middle of America remains intermittent. 

Clothes shaped by ‘The Whistling Wire’ have found a small audience of second-hand buyers in recent years, though little of what is sold can be verified as having once done time in the Crease’s moaning woods. At least one popular merchant has been exposed as having drawn the trademark lines on otherwise unremarkable pieces- another ploy to sell the idea of hardship to those unwilling to suffer it directly.

Come to the Crease and pay what you will. Know that the price is sometimes steeper than the tag suggests. 

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘Operating on a system of airlocked experiences, ‘A House in Textures’ maintains dark exhibits to keep guests focused on their sense of touch. This works well, unfortunately.’

‘A House in Textures’ isn’t the worst destination I’ve visited on the Wayside but the experience is up there. The first is a room of standard carpet. The second is a room of shag. Each room is followed by a short, bright hallway in which the actual specifications of the previous ‘felt experience’ are explained. They describe carpet like some people talk about coffee or wine, indicating notes and ages. It’s lost on me and it goes that way for some time, me feeling around for each exit, worried I’ll move too fast and bump into someone ahead or move too slow and keep up an imaginary line.

There were no other vehicles in the lot when I arrived. 

Dark room with carpet.

Bright hallway with description.

Dark room with carpet.

Bright hallway with description.

The next carpeted room is less pleasant. It has a smell and there are pieces of something broken into the fibers of the carpet. The next hallway explains that this room was ‘Unkempt Shag,’ furthering specifying that chips, popcorn, and animal hair have been worked into the fabric. 

The next room is damp and perfumed. The one after damp and mildewy. 

Then the wood floors. The first is waxed and sturdy. The second hard but creaking. Several rooms later I enter a cramped tunnel made of dry, splintering planks and when I attempt to move backward I find the door locked behind me. After struggling with the knob for several minutes, a glaring red exit sign pops on ahead. It leads to the next hallway where I read that I’ve just exited the ‘Splintered Deck Crawlway,’ a whimsical interlude at the termination of ‘A House in Textures’’ first act. These boards, it says, were swollen with snowmelt and dried in the sun over several seasons. Meaning they took them from an old, abandoned house somewhere. The signs asks, rhetorically, if I noted the leaded paint chips. 

I see them now, on my palms. 

I do miss houses, sometimes. I’d forgotten what it was like, all the domestic comforts and horrors.

I feel ahead into the next room and discover tile below my fingers. It’s cool and smooth and immaculately clean but I imagine it will get worse.

And it does.

-traveler

‘There’s nothing legal about what ‘The Welcome Garden’ does but there’s only the scantest of law in the Crease to disapprove and the jurisdictions involved in ‘The Garden’s’ alleged crimes are complex enough to be bureaucratically repulsive. Its owners have stolen the ‘welcome’ signs from various American cities and landmarks and transported them to a flattened hilltop that rises only halfway up the walls of the Crease. The hill itself has been adorned with massive neon letters that flash the word ‘WELCOME’ so brightly that formal complaints have been lodged, both because it is an eyesore and because, it’s been argued, the display indicates a level of safety that is not at all accurate to the situation. 

‘The Welcome Garden’ does not discriminate between guests, you see, and the implicit welcome is rumored to draw those spirits and creatures that rely on permission to enter spaces.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside