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it’s all you americans talk about… liminal space this… cryptid that
america is big, we got.,.,.,. its a lot happening here
It’s at least 3,000 miles just from the East Coast to the West, depending on where you start.
If I try to drive from here in Maine to New Mexico, it’s 2,400 miles.
From here to Oregon, 800 miles from my current residence to my relatives in NJ, then another 3,000 miles after that.
A brisk 8 day drive that meanders through mountains, forests, corn fields, dry, flat, empty plains, more mountains, and then a temperate rain forest in Oregon.
The land has some seriously creepy stuff, even just right outside our doors.
There is often barking sounds on the other side of our back door.
At 3 am.
When no one would let their dog out.
It’s a consensus not to even look out the fucking windows at night.
Especially during the winter months.
Nothing chills your heart faster than sitting in front of a window and hearing footsteps breaking through the snow behind you, only to look and not see anything.
I live in a tiny town whose distance from larger cities ranges from 30 miles, to 70 miles. What is in between?
Giant stretches of forests, swamps, pockets of civilization, more trees, farms, wildlife, and winding roads. All of which gives the feeling of nature merely tolerating humans, and that we are one frost heave away from our houses being destroyed, one stretch of undergrowth away from our roads being pulled back into the earth.
And almost every night, we have to convince ourselves that the popping, echoing gunshot sounds are really fireworks, because we have no idea what they might be shooting at.
There’s a reason Stephen King sets almost all his stories in Maine.
New Mexico, stuck under Colorado, next to Texas, and uncomfortably close to Arizona. I grew up there. The air is so dry your skin splits and doesn’t bleed. Coyotes sing at night. It starts off in the distance, but the response comes from all around. The sky, my gods, the sky. In the day it is vast and unfeeling. At night the stars show how little you truly are.
This is the gentle stuff. I’m not going to talk about the whispered tales from those that live on, or close, to the reservations. I’m not going to go on about the years of drought, or how the ground gives way once the rain falls. The frost in the winter stays in the shadows, you can see the line where the sun stops. It will stay there until spring. People don’t tell you about the elevation, or how thin the air truly is. The stretches of empty road with only husks of houses to dot the side of the horizon. There’s no one around for miles except those three houses. How do they live out here? The closest town is half an hour away and it’s just a gas station with a laundry attached.
No one wants to be there. They’re just stuck. It has a talent for pulling people back to it. I’ve been across the country for years, but part of me is still there. The few that do get out don’t return. A visit to family turns into an extended stay. Car troubles, a missed flight, and then suddenly there’s a health scare. Can’t leave Aunt/Uncle/Grandparent alone in their time of need. It’s got you.
Roswell is a joke. A failed National Inquirer article slapped with bumperstickers and half-assed tourist junk. The places that really run that chill down the spine are in the spaces between the sprawling mesas and hidden arroyos. Stand at the top of the Carlsbad Caverns trail. Look a mile down into the darkness. Don’t step off the path. just don’t.
You’re never alone in New Hampshire.
There are walls here. They meander everywhere- rock walls, knee high, built of chunks of granite dragged from the earth in an attempt to create farmable land. They crisscross, create rectangles, squares. Sometimes foundations for houses that never existed or crumbled into dust.
You don’t cross the stone walls.
One can never be sure when the road is going to just stop. The corners are tight, the edges washed out. Trees grow right up to the yellow lines and lean over, stealing sunlight and stealing perspective. The asphalt is crumbling into the dirt and not a single attempt has been made to stop it.
One wrong turn and you’re on a one lane bridge- maybe stone, maybe metal. Rarely wood, sometimes covered.
Regardless, you can’t see what’s on the other side.
You don’t know how old the bridge is, but chances are it counts its age in the hundreds. You have to drive and hope.
If you come to a lake and it’s dark, steer clear.
If you come to a lake and you can see the bottom, don’t even slow down.
The woods are full of gulches, knotty roots suddenly giving way to open air so smooth you’d put your foot out and feel the rush before you stumble on your ass.
Sometimes there are rivers at the bottom. Sometimes there are cars.
Sometimes there’s nothing and that’s the worst.
There are graveyards in the woods, too.
Most of the stones are slate or marble, covered in lichen, hard to read. Be sure to read every one, and whatever you do, say ‘goodbye’ when you leave.
In New Hampshire, you’re never alone.
Ohio is corn
The people say everything is bigger in Texas; they say it to try to prop themselves up, to try to convince themselves that they too are also big. No, every THING is bigger in Texas, and you don’t stand a chance.
Have you ever heard the stories about how goldfish grow relative to the size of their enclosure? Think about how much SPACE is in Texas; it’s second only to Alaska really, yeah? Texan legends are as much about sun-scorched delirium and paranoia as they are about isolation. They’re history, shameful history, small town hooliganism, the grief and vengeance of those who crossed the border just to be wronged by wicked men, and countless ghosts on highways that time doesn’t always remember. The nights are vast, and they are full of a horror that is equally vast, grown as big and ferocious as its environs can contain.
My hometown was the sort of place that, for all intents and purposes, seemed fairly modern and urban and as if it had always been a big city. That was far from the truth though, and more savage and rough-hewn times still aren’t that far behind 20 years from when I first remember feeling fear there. The city is cut in twain by an enormous park, and not the sort of cutesy thing with a playground and some swings that your brain may WANT to conjure up. No, they call it Legacy, but they don’t dare to tell you what the Legacy is, one of blood and misery.
No, this is bramble and underbrush and trails that more often than not lead to nowhere, or to things the people of the city would rather forget. Reality bends here, as if several timelines and eras intersect for just a moment. You and your friends tell your parents you’ll be gone for just an hour, then one of you has the bright idea to take the path that’s more overgrown but still shows signs of being trodden. What’s the worst that could happen? Sometimes you’re lucky. Sometimes you find a clearing that’s mysteriously full of flowers that aren’t supposed to grow here. Sometimes you find toys and bikes covered in rust and moss and vines, except for one even more outdated trinket that’s all-too-pristine, as if it’s so dear and treasured that not even these darkened wilds dare touch it. Sometimes though, the paths keep going a little deeper and deeper at each fork, the branches and tangle inching in just a bit more, the way back hard to even discern when you look over your shoulder. Sometimes you find one of those forgotten THINGS, you remember, the ones that are ACTUALLY bigger here? You find things like the fencepost to the place where people were hanged, covered in notches to denote each life snuffed out in twitching and desperate gasps, or the overly-inviting bridge where they say eight teens died in a head-on crash in the early 80s, or something even more primal that reminds you that this land is still alive and unconquered by the whims of the concrete sprawl that lies and tells you you’re safe. Either way, when you finally stumble out to return to whoever was awaiting you, you’re changed, and you’ve raised such a worry. You were gone for an eternity, you all agree. You check your watch, or you check your phone and see that it FINALLY has signal again, and the time ticks to one hour exactly from when you left. You swear it felt like days, you all do, and shudder at the incongruence.
No, I grew up with long shadows and ghost stories and howls and screams at night that you try so DESPERATELY to convince yourself are bobcats or coyotes or mountain lions. I grew up with fog-covered back roads with overgrowth that seemed to breathe and heave in some forgotten language that dripped with dread. I spent adult years in small apartment complexes that were all-too-silent at night, where people would rush to pull their curtains closed if shadows passed, where eyes that met you from porches and balconies signaled a wariness that only comes from trauma, and where people don’t dare to speak to each other in the mornings for fear of recounting whatever devils and ghosts and misshapen beasts they saw in the inkwell black of the witching hours. I grew up where pets and children disappearing gets blamed on the kinds of animals that are too small to cause the kind of carnage that stands as evidence that SOMETHING happened. I understand intimately that everything is bigger in Texas, every THING, and I was but a speck underfoot while I was there.
Please write a book. You have a gift.
Mind if I jump in? Not Finn, but Nate for a second. Let me tell you a little about Pennsylvania.
Now, to be fair, I have never lived on the far east side of the state, like Philly or the northeast corner. But I have been to Pittsburgh, up to Erie, in between. Over to Harrisburgh, to State College. They are all bastions of human life, human control. But each have woods, hills, even mountains within or close to them. These places where it’s dark, even during the day. These are places where they may be right in the midst of the human cities, but still it’s rare to find humans. It feels strange at first, but soon it becomes almost expected, to find these little dark places in the midst of everything.
But then… then I have also been deep into the mountains, worked at a camp for eight years near the West Virginia border. I have been to the state forest to the north, and the rolling hills and woods everywhere in between. And there is both beauty and terror. You see, at first you hear the frogs, or the fireflies, and everything is sublime. I have had many camping trips that were just amazing. But then, things get quiet. And when things get quiet, you don’t leave the confines of your fire, or tent, or home. Because then you hear the sounds that don’t make sense, or you can fucking feel the darkness. And you know something’s wrong.
At camp, I once took a bunch of scouts out to do a wilderness survival badge. The night went fine, and I fell asleep about 1. At 3, I woke up, and it was silent. Dead silent, pitch black. And I didn’t dare move. There was something there, I swear. And if I moved, revealed I was awake….
Have you ever camped at Gettysburgh? I have. It was when I was 15, and my entire boy scout troop was there. About 10, it gets silent fast, and the adults almost immediately had everyone go to beds in their tents. I didn’t understand at the time, but I do now.
Houses in the country aren’t even safe. At night, when it gets silent, don’t open a window, a door. Just don’t.
All this makes me wonder about the spaces in the cities, in the dark. And whether they become silent.
Now, to be fair, this is probably more than PA. But this is where I live and experienced it, so there. When the night goes silent, I know how to hide.
….plus its nothing but hills and mountains here so flat land and the ocean fucking scares me.
There’s something wrong about Colorado. Parts of it are so perfectly modern suburbia that you’d have trouble seeing anything but a movie set there. It’s too perfectly “slightly lived in”. Sure, there’s trash and some weathering, but it all looks so new. Even the painfully dated 90′s architecture just doesn’t feel old. It feels like a stage. Like these are props and actors. But wander away from the highway and it gets weird. There are… things in those mountains. I’ve seen them.
Small shacks, unlocked, for travelers far from the path. You leave things when you can, for the next who comes and might not be so lucky. I stayed in one, caught backpacking when a blizzard rolled in. I swear to you I know exactly where that shack was, but when I tried to go back, to replace what I’d used, there was nothing. Just the same clearing and not so much as a foundation.
There are settlement houses - or the foundations of them. Sometimes, miles from a road, you’ll find a rusted out car or truck. Once we found two - they’d obviously been in a crash and at left where they’d hit one another. We were over a dozen miles from the nearest unpaved road.
You’ll find stairs. I don’t know what these mean. They seem unconnected to any foundation or reason. Just, as if someone cut the stairs from a building and stood them up amongst the trees. Untouched by the overgrowth and moss, we left them to be. We don’t talk about them. We don’t touch them.
There are deep holes. Some look like mines. Some… don’t. The mines tend to go into hillsides or down with old, rotting wood shoring up the edges. But there are holes that just… disappear deep into the earth. You toss in a pebble and never hear it land.
The wolves are sensible, they will leave you alone. Most bears, too. But Coyotes know humans. They know that we have food. They know we can be food. They are hungry and desperate creatures and they do not fear us. Maybe they remember an ancestor once came to sleep besides us. Once, coyotes were relatively solitary. Now they have become pack animals. They move together. And they fear nothing.
Aspen trees are not spread like most plants. Their roots creep along under the ground and send up new trunks, new whole trees to reach towards the sky. I know of entire hillsides dominated by what is, technically, one huge living organism. Walk amongst those leaves and you’ll feel at peace, you know a certain calm there. But if you stay long enough, every trunk looks the same. The distance fades amongst the close branches and dense leaves. These trees are slow, but mean to keep you. You walk amongst an Aspen, and it slowly tries to make you its own.
There are small mountain towns that have gone silent. Sometimes you drive through them. Sometimes you have to go looking. But never stay. People have left these places, but you still aren’t alone. If you ever go to one, you can -tell-. Something else is here.
I have stood on solid ground, and looked down on a 727 in flight. I have looked up into a tree so tall it seemed to bend due to perspective. I have looked over ravines that beckon you to just lean forward and let go. I have heard voices amongst the trees. I have seen the snow that never melts. I have stood in the foothills and seen the entire mountain range backlit by a forest fire and smoke.
Colorado tolerates her denizens, looks on them kindly, but ultimately does not care for them. As you might smile at an insect, but not care if something were to eat it.
Indiana breaths and sighs and shifts when you’re not looking, when you’re not listening. The night is a palpable sort of darkness, especially in the places away from the city, and there are a lot of those. If you drive ten minutes away from any city, you’re lost in the shifting, sighing fields that are covered with a strange weight. Like a hundred hands pressing. Like a hundred fingers reaching. If you stand on the side of a road long enough, it will touch you. If you do not move, it may never let go.
Indiana is strange fog that covers everything you can see and leaves you wandering through dreamy memory, barely able to recognize your fingers in front of your face much less a danger in the middle of the road. There are all sorts of dangers in the middle of the road, but it’s mostly the deer that will find you. Flashing, hard bodies that dash from unexpected places whenever they want to. A blink and it’s gone, eyes in the darkness that glint and freeze and disappear, leave you wary for the rest of the drive because you never know when they might appear again, if they might appear in front of you just before the crash.
Most roads meander. Half of them disappear into thickets of trees that are not woods but feel like it–feel like being pulled back, back into something primal and dangerous even though you know the city is right there on the other side–because no one ever told them to stop being woods. And the leaves close in over your head, and you pray for light because it’s true that the woods are dark and deep. But not silent, never silent, which is the most unnerving thing.
Indiana is lost houses and forgotten farmland, each and every place like something you could imagine holding secret horrors. Be cautious of the signs they put up along the way. None of them are lying. Just like the fae folk, the people will not lie to you. Their intentions are clear, though the letters may be faded, though the sign itself may flap in the wind, back and forth, back and forth slapping against the wood that may have never seen better days, may have been put together weathered and old.
The wind. Indiana’s wind will talk to you, and it’s best not to listen. Especially in the fields. Or the dunes. Or the woods. There’s something in the wind, and it has needs that cannot seem to be fulfilled.
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