ON WATER TOWERS

UEL ARAMCHEK

Beyond a handful of major cities, the American Midwest can be understood as an archipelago of small towns rising from an agricultural sea. For most travelers, these isles are little more than waypoints between two nodes in a great concrete network: exits from the highways where gasoline is gathered, and urine is left behind. 

At night, when the influence of the moon is at its peak, these isles are submerged beneath rising tides of grain as their residents sleep. Only two types of structures remain visible above these amber waves: the radio antennas, each aflicker with an abundance of red eyes, and the colossal, cephalopod-like monstrosities known as water towers.

The latter of these loom over their communities as giant, steel totems. Many are painted with the names of their kingdoms in capitalized letters, and some are even given faces with their own personalities. These serve as reminders, in the seventy-mile-per-hour blur of the interstate, that a real place is present beneath them, where human beings are born and marry and die. No matter how small these domains may be, their metal titans still stand guard over them, announcing to the world with their dignified posture that “this is not simply a place where gasoline is gathered, and urine is left behind.”

Despite their ubiquity, the origin of these structures is poorly understood. There are few who question whether or not they merely contain water, or how deeply their long, metal tentacles reach beneath the soil. It is altogether possible that, in their stillness, the towers are dreaming of being surrounded by human life, a contagious dream that spreads through the water supply. After all, while it is not considered wise to dwell on such things, there is a shared, unspoken superstition throughout the region that, should a water tower collapse or be removed, the town beneath it will soon follow.

Then there's the matter of desert highways.

America is a kingdom that nurtures its lies.

It's easy to vanish when you live in the middle of nowhere.

There are far more reliable sources of water than towers in these parts.

the invisible states of america
HALUTH, THE SPHERICAL STATE

Sometime during the Hadean Eon, long before the formation of life as we know it, a comet fell to Earth in the most gentle manner astrophysically possible. It ended its approach at nearly the same relative velocity as the planet's own orbit, then sank into the sea of molten iron below, in which it cooked over the course of several centuries like a colossal Baked Alaska.

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ON WATER TOWERS

Beyond a handful of major cities, the American Midwest can be understood as an archipelago of small towns rising from an agricultural sea. For most travelers, these isles are little more than waypoints between two nodes in a great concrete network: exits from the highways where gasoline is gathered, and urine is left behind.

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tale of the tumbleweed.png
TALE OF THE TUMBLEWEED

Another tumbleweed rolled into town yesterday- the third of its kind this month. This time around, the professor’s trap finally worked: we found the damn thing snagged in a tangle of barbed wire, screeching loudly, trying in vain to unfurl its hungry tendrils. This one was at least thirty feet in diameter, so we figured that something good had to be buried under all those thorns.

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NO PLACE LIKE HOME

“You have such an interesting accent. Where are you from?”

“Maza, North Dakota. It’s a town out in the middle of nowhere.”

“You don’t sound like you’re from North Dakota, though.”

“Well, the middle of nowhere isn’t exactly in North Dakota- in fact, it’s not really anywhere at all. Hence the name."

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THAT GREAT TOMB THAT KNOWS NO SOUND

The Hoover Dam is said to be filled with human bones. So the story goes, during its construction, workers who fell into the structure’s wet concrete were left inside, as those in charge believed that the cost and risk of retrieving their bodies would be too great. For those who believe this tale, the dam doubles as a colossal tombstone for those buried within.

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THAT'S ALL, FOLKS

The coyote awoke one morning to find that his roadrunner was gone.

He’d disappeared, beyond the asymptotic horizon which outlined their desert, that unreachable boundary between two nowheres. Together, as predator and prey, they’d followed the same highway westward for thousands of miles, always encroaching on that same horizon, yet finding no end to the repetition of sagebrush and sand.

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THE TOMB OF PAUL BUNYAN

While hiking through the woods of Selganac, east of Minnesota and west of Wisconsin, I happened upon Paul Bunyan’s tomb. Though I spent seven days wandering the perimeter of its brasswood walls, I couldn’t find a single corner or entrance. I turned around before noon on the eighth day, for though it was clearly the work of human hands, the structure had proven endless.

During the return journey, I crossed paths with a carpenter from Duluth, who told me that he had been hired to help build the tomb. “Yep,” he told me. “It’s still very much under construction.”

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THE BOTTOM FEEDERS

Just before it reaches the state of the same name, the Mississippi splits in two- one river above, and one river below. The old waterway’s underground sister diverges into numerous caverns, most of which prove to be dead ends. One of these branches spirals downward for almost a mile, however, into a vast, subterranean kingdom where the borders of the nations above have no meaning.

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ON THE SECRET SOCIETY OF HEADLESS AMERICANS

You’ve probably seen one of their members in public before and never suspected that anything was, well, off. One can only join the Society of Headless Americans if it is not readily apparent that they are missing a head, as this privilege is only extended to those who can prove that they have mastered their own decapitation.

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LUCID DATING

“Pannasosia?” Her date narrowed his eyes. “There’s no way that’s a real state.”

“It’s as real as it needs to be, I suppose.” She sipped at a spoonful of wild rice soup. “The whole place is an underground lake, save for a few aquifers and caves. It’s actually pretty big, but not many people live there.”

“Hmm.” He thought back to memorizing the state capitals in middle school geography, all those annoying songs they had him memorize. Alabama and Alaska, Arizona Arkansas… “I can’t say that I’ve heard of it. You sure that it’s not a Canadian province or something?”

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THE GOD OF OBSOLESCENCE

Payphones are an endangered species, soon to be extinct. Though they continue to be taken out of service, one after another, technicians across the country have been leaving their iron stalks behind. Given the expense and labor required to remove them from the concrete below, this is understandable. They have likely grown thick roots over the years, having been watered by thousands of voices.

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A RELIABLE NARRATOR

After several years spent bathing in a white noise of ink, Jason could at last hear the narrator’s voice. The world melted into view, and he could see the walls of the gas station that surrounded him, the shelves lined with rainbows of high-fructose nothingness, and the broken roads of a desert town just outside the window. His nameless manager leaned over and whispered to him, “check out that guy on pump three.”

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THE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL LABYRINTH

The Roosevelt National Labyrinth begins near the state of Selima’s easternmost border, and never ends. At times it is like a forest, for its bricks change color with the seasons, and many of its walls shed them in the months before winter. At other times, it is more like a dungeon, for the walls grow so high that the sun appears not as a disk, but rather, as a single, narrow line. The bass drone of giant crickets rattles the bones of those lost inside.

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FOUND FOOTAGE

You’ve come to this forest in search of the creature known as "sasquatch." By now you’ve learned that he is human; at least, by some definitions of the word "human." His flesh has been warped by years of long-exposure photographs, and his skin has blurred into a pareidoliac wool. A grotesque thumbprint remains where once there may have been a face, neither able to see nor speak.

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A WRONG TURN AT ALBUQUERQUE

You remember Utah, and how the mountains were reflected in the pale mirror of the salt flats, and how the salt flats were reflected in the pale mirror of the sky, and how the road, with nowhere else to go, was reflected into itself. You remember exiting onto the lonely stretch of concrete and tar that was I-13 as you made your way towards Reno, sleepless and broiled, your own pulse visible in your peripheral vision.

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THE INVENTION OF KISSING

HARDCORE ASTROLOGY