‘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

‘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