Rest stops on highways are liminal spaces where the veil is thin and nobody can tell me differently
Explain
The explanation is that liminal spaces are in between places that bridge Here with There, so in fairy tales we often have the Fairy Ring, the Forest Clearing, the Sudden Misty Foggy Forest, the Bridge, the River, graveyards, in some cases
We also have a ton of american urban mythology around famous roadways and sites off the sides of roads
Archetypes like these occur to mark the places in the world where the veil goes thin and humans can have extra-worldly experiences, out of the ordinary way of living
So why wouldn’t transient spaces like rest stops where everyone is just passing through from one place to the next, never stopping for too long, not be a liminal space where spirits frequent, too
Especially since nobody would know if they were real or not
Ok but this speaks to me
I always feel like something isn’t quite right at rest stops
I once slept though three gas stations on a road trip, and the second the car started to slow to turn into a rest stop, I was basically wide awake.
My mom and I were on I-90 in a blizzard once and pulled off at the first exit we could find. Turns out that if we’d gone even a mile further, we would have happened on a 49-and-counting car pileup, and that 90 was closed for MILES. How we found an unblocked ramp was a matter of great debate, but where this gets weirder still is that at the bottom of the ramp was a closed truck stop and an open church full of teenagers–they went for youth group, the blizzard started, and they were stuck until the snow stopped. They fed us leftovers from their potluck dinner, prayed with us for safe travel, and when the snow let up they saw us on our way.
Three days later–Sunday–we were traveling back and decided to stop at that church to thank them. We found it thanks to the truck stop, but this time it was the truck stop that was open and the church that was closed. Neither of us remembered it looking so decrepit on the trip down, and granted we saw it first at night in a snowstorm, but you’d think we’d have noticed the boarded-up windows. So we asked in at the truck stop.
The church had been abandoned for ten years. And yet I still had one of their youth group programs under my sun visor, very clearly labeled for the previous week.
To this day I’m sure we crossed dimensions somewhere on I-90, and that’s how we stayed safe. You could tell me it’s because the truck stop was a liminal space and I’d 100% believe you.
I don’t mind when this post goes around again because sometimes I get stories like this
so my school had this thing called “senior skip day,” except that senior skip day didn’t exist and every year the administration sent out emails in the spring that were like DON’T FUCKIN SKIP CLASS OR YOU WILL RECEIVE RESTRICTION (restriction was like, my boarding school’s equivalent of detention where instead of staying after school you had to go to bed early and help stuff envelopes advertising the summer program until your hands were BLOODIED AND CRIPPLED BY CARPAL TUNNEL) and every year the seniors were like YOLO THEY CAN’T PUNISH ALL OF US!!!!!
spoiler alert: yes they can? THEY ALWAYS CAN.
200 years of american high school and teenagers still think that there is a cap limit on kids in detention and that you can leave after 15 minutes if the teacher doesn’t show up.
anyway, my senior year, we all got together and nattered at each other until some brave soldier (i feel like it was my friend paula but WHO KNOWS) was like “OK SENIOR SKIP DAY IS THIS THURSDAY!!!! NOBODY GO TO CLASS OR UR A SCAB.”
she didn’t say scab because she’s not from the 1920s and we aren’t newsies, though this story would be way more interesting if we were
what she said was “YOLO THEY CAN’T PUNISH ALL OF US!!!!!”
except not yolo because it was 2009 and drake hadn’t been invented yet except as a dear sweet boy in a wheelchair.
we also used this email system to communicate with one another that has very deeply informed the way i understand email and which probably makes it very frustrating to be my friend and receive emails that have subject lines like “URGENT” and then just 42 links to the same florida georgia line youtube video.
I’M NOT ASHAMED, but in that way where like i kind of AM ashamed so i’m really aggressively NOT ashamed?
so the day of reckoning rolls around and my alarm goes off at 8 (class started at 8:05 but i liked to PLAY WITH FIRE when it came to being late; my mom actually asked the school to stop emailing her when i was a sophomore because i was late so often that their rote “Mrs. Ofgeography we are emailing you to say—” was CLOGGING UP HER INBOX and she was like “i GET IT MY CHILD IS THE MOST BORING MISCREANT OF ALL TIME.”) and i looked at my roommate elle and she looked at me and went, “you going?”
“hell no,” i said. “YOLO. they can’t punish all of us.”
elle, who was far prettier and far cooler than i was with the notable exception of her obsession with tswift’s “love story” and her tendency to look at the endangered species list and cry sometimes during study hall, quickly bizounced across the street to this shopping center thing where all the cool kids smoked in secret where huge trucks dropped off clothes for the Dress Barn. i think there were also tennis courts nearby. more importantly there was this chinese food delivery place and a lil restaurant that made HELLA BAGELS.
WHAT KIND OF BAGELS?
FUCKIN
HELLA.
off goes elle! meanwhile i’m like, “yessssss i’m gonna use senior skip day to watch 14 hours of tv shows and eat frozen peanut butter bars that i stole from the dining hall! I’M GONNA LIVE LIKE I’M 23 ALONE IN CHICAGO ON A WEEKEND WHEN MY ONLY PLAN IS TAKEOUT AND CUDDLING WITH THE FAUX-SNOW-LEOPARD BLANKET I WILL ONE DAY SURELY OWN.”
of course, during this time the administration was continuing to send out emails that reminded us with increasing urgency that senior skip day was NOT A THING and that we were ALL GETTING RESTRICTION if we didn’t get our STUPID ASSES TO CLASS, GODDAMNIT, WE ARE NOT RUNNING A CIRCUS HERE.
but i was like! yolo, motherfuckers!!! i already got into college, YOU CAN’T TOUCH ME.
at some point during the day elle and our friend ginna came back to the room with takeout from the chinese delivery place and we sat on our floor eating it and probably watching veronica mars or looking at the endangered species list and crying.
all of a sudden, elle said, “guys shut up, guys shut up, GUYS SHUT UP,” and ginna and i were like, “WHAT we have a LOT to SAY about FRIED FUCKING DUMPLINGS, ELLE,“ and elle said, “did you hear that?”
“hear what?”
“that!”
‘that’ was the sound of one of our dorm moms, mrs. f, knocking on doors and saying things like, “IF YOU DON’T GET YOUR BUTTS TO CLASS IN 5 MINUTES YOU’RE ON CATEGORY 4 RESTRICTION FOREVER.” elle quickly scampered up our raised beds to hide in the corner, where a tiny human like elle could actually hide from view; i leapt immediately into what we called a closet but was basically a cubby with a flap that was DEFINITELY not meant for a 5’8” individual with knobby as hell knees.
our door, which was never locked because we both hated the effort of typing in the lock code, opened. mrs. f said, “mollyhall?”
i held my breath.
i should add here that i seemed to be operating on like a scooby-doo level of logic where basically i thought that she was somehow NOT ALLOWED to investigate?
like, if she can’t see me, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that she could prove i’m in here, right?
she’ll just poke her head in and be like oH GOSH NO KIDS HERE and leave!!
you can see the flaw in my logic.
mrs. f sighed. “mollyhall, i know you’re in here, i literally heard your voice ten seconds ago.”
there’s no WAY she guesses i’m in the closet!!!
“mollyhall, i know you’re in the closet.”
NO YOU DON’T
I AM SCHRÖDINGER’S SENIOR
“mollyhall—”
there was a creak. mrs. f stopped. it wasn’t actually a “creak,” so much as this like, prolonged groan? like it’s the sound an elephant would make if it sat on a really large accordion.
i poked my head out of the closet. mrs. f looked at me. elle sat up.
i said, “where’s ginna?”
YOU KNOW WHERE GINNA WAS.
“um,” said elle, “she’s in the—”
GINNA NO
ginna yes.
i really wish i could describe the sound the ceiling made when it collapsed. it sounded a lot like the way losing your breath feels. i sort of remember ginna falling in like, really slow motion, like i could see the expression on her face. i didn’t really think about how i would describe this in words. ginna’s face said:
oh no.
what have i done?
this was a mistake.
i regret a series of decisions that i have made.
is there a way out of this?
are those oreos under mollyhall’s pillow?
why are there oreos under mollyhall’s pillow?
mollyhall, you HAVE a food cupboard, what good is a food cupboard if you don’t—
oh, crap.
she belly flopped onto the floor. i mean, the girl bounced. and then she just laid there. mrs. f looked at her. elle looked at her. i looked at her, still mostly in the closet. we were all going to get category 4 restriction forever.
ginna said, “hi, mrs. f. i feel like i should explain.”
Seriously, it kills me when I see people hold scientists up as pinnacles of logic and reason.
Because one time the professor I was interning for got punched in the face by another professor, because mine got the funding, and told the other professor his theory was stupid.
This same professor told me to throw rocks to scare the “stupid fucking crabs” into moving so we could count them properly.
SCIENCE
thank you
this is one of the best comments this post has recieved
I have witnessed:
Two professors hiding around a corner and snickering, “Shhh, here she comes!” While a female professor approached and, when she finally found them, she proceeded to scream while pointing from one to the other, “You! I called your office but you weren’t there! So I tried to call YOUR office to figure out where HE was but YOU weren’t there!”
Two grad students standing outside a closed and locked door yelling, “Come out of the damn office. You haven’t left for days. If you didn’t have a couch in there I’d be concerned as to where you were sleeping!”
A religious studies professor apologizing for being late to class because, “security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit”
Watched a professor snort the results of my experiment to determine if I had the right final compound.
Two archeology professors toss priceless fossilized teeth back and forth in an attempt to figure out who is smarter by “guessing the type of tooth and species of animal before it lands”
Multiple fully degreed individuals throw dry ice at one another in an attempt to be first to use the lab/get that piece of equipment/or change the iPod song.
A genetics professor build furniture out of stacks of paper and planks of wood because she is that far behind in grading papers/responding. One of the impromptu furniture pieces housed a fish tank.
I could go on but I think that covers the larger portion of the insanity…
Every time it comes around on my dash, it gets better.
– I have had a professor buy a huge fuckoff bottle of rum during fieldwork in Costa Rica and let the undergrads get wasted because “you’re not underage in Costa Rica and we’ll be up all night with the bats anyway!”
– Same professor hung a bat from her headlamp and wore it as a decoration for an entire night.
– A whole swarm of older women – and these are women with PhDs and world-renown bat experts, the bigwigs – all, to a woman, go to the formal charity dinner at an international research symposium in Toronto in late October dressed in skimpy Batgirl costumes. Because Halloween was that weekend, you see.
– At a different conference, a professor get blackout drunk and pass out on the side of the road.
– “Yeah, we have to say we did it properly for the grant but to be really honest, Miracle-gro works better.”
– Teaching lab: we had liquid nitrogen for a demo, and after class the professor, the other TA, and I spent a good two hours freezing and breaking things in it.
a chemistry class begins with 30 students nine months later just six of us left sitting on tables dipping paper into contaminated chemicals to see what happens when we burn it teacher making idle suggestions while he marks our work
“go to the fume hood thing, yeah now put some potassium in chlorine” can i burn the results sir? “fuck it sure whatever its tainted anyway”
The prof I’m working for just asked me if I knew how to pick a lock, and when I responded “yes” she replied, “see, this is why I hire the former delinquents instead of the suck-ups. You’re actually useful.”
I then let her into her office.
“Security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit.” I would bet anything this has happened to Dr. Medievalist.
Semi-related non-academic anecdote: The concert hall security guys tried to throw out our violone player in between performances this spring because they thought he was a homeless guy. Despite the fact that he was wearing concert black… and carrying a violone. There is no more obvious instrument.
One of my English Professors admitted that sometimes “you just have to do a soliloquy” and would phone up the main office of the department on the internal phoneline to recite a Shakespearean monologue at them. No greeting, no warning, just “To be or not to be”.
every time i read this stuff i think about how upset vulcans would be to meet earth’s greatest scientific minds
so I work at a library now and during training we were shown each section and how they’re organized bluh bluh normal stuff, until we got to the 680s and my boss sighed at this shelf nearly busting from the weight of a shit ton of yarn books. now you may be wondering “how much is a shit ton of yarn books exactly max???” well let’s just say it’s about 2 shelves worth crammed onto one.
so when we got to this area my supervisor looked at us new pages and said in the most serious voice, “if anyone EVER gives you book donations never EVER accept donations of yarn books. EVER.” and we all laughed but deep down in the pit of my stomach I knew that was not a joke.
fast forward to a month later (today) and my shift starts pretty normally, I’m casually chatting with my co worker about video games and sorting books in the workroom when this couple walk into our workroom with big boxes saying they wanted to donate some books. so my coworker nods and says something about just leaving them there and he’ll grab our manager. so they put down these boxes and leave. so my manager comes along exclaiming how nice it is to get such a big donation and so she walks to the boxes, opens them, and starts shouting “JAMES GET IN HERE RIGHT NOW JAMES IT HAPPENED AGAIN” and so now I’m interested and I walk over and it just looks like boxes filled to the brim with books until I see the books all had library stickers on them and all have the numbers 680. so james comes running over and sees them and drops to his knees and starts shaking his head.
so then we got the details. apparently all libraries in my city all have too many yarn books and since you can technically check out a book and return it to any library and they’ll just shelve it there, all libraries just try and get rid of the books by tricking other libraries into taking them in. ways of this happening is staff from one library checking out the maximum amount they can of yarn books and dropping books around another library, or just viciously shoving these books through our returns, and now this, and apparently it’s a full out war with war maps and planning sheets written inside these yarn books. so please for the love of god never donate yarn books to your local library
