Nowherology, the study of forgotten, forbidden, foreboding, and fantastical places that fall between the cracks of most modern cartography. Not the hidden mystery sites of the globe, the Shamballas and the Mines of Solomon, just the places inside ordinary places that don’t seem to fit into the map. These areas hidden within supposedly well settled and entirely ordinary lands are endlessly fascinating to the careful eye because if there is one universal truth it is this: ordinary is weird. America is the esoteric capital of the world, and is it any wonder why? The New World, occupying the space Medieval map makers assumed to hold the Garden of Eden, populated by the great schismatic tribe that left the European-Asian supercontinent, up through the frozen depths of Ultima Thule, and over a bridge of ice, spilling across the vast continent and penetrating into it’s deepest darkest reaches. These people forged empires of blood, lived in seas of emptiness chasing the plains buffalo, built sacred mounds and communed with the spirit world in places where now stand malls and garages. Is it any wonder than that small towns and even suburbia seem so strange? Islands of Western Civilization standing over the ancient graves of the first people to ever step foot on this land of tyrant lizards. As if the urban metropolises are any better, the largest and most populated city in this nation was bought by an isolated island tribe, who knows what forgotten secrets lie beneath Manhattan?

But it’s not just the ancient mysteries that concern the veteran Nowherologist. It’s the very aura of strangeness. You follow Route 66 through the circulatory system of this country and you will encounter things that baffle the mind. Who said the bizarre thrives in isolation? Dragons sleep next to transcontinental superhighways. By following the map of escalating weirdness one is lead through places big and small, from ghost towns to packed posh upscale malls, through lonely islands of solitude in the woods off the road a way to the impenetrable depths of the Appalachian hedge-maze which remained unexplored by civilization until the 20th century sought to re-assimilate the elusive backwoods folk.

Nowhere is anywhere that exists as an island of uncharted territory inside of a well established part of the map. It can be the internal foothills of that scenic tourist haven mountain range, which might be home to such horrors as primordial gods fallen from the stars or, worst, drug farmers with automatic weapons. It can an attractive, nearly empty town you never heard of lying on a lake you always saw on the map but never paid much attention to. It can even, nay, thrives, in the middle of unchecked suburbia. Cities build over their mysteries, leaving them to tombs dark and dark embraced by the earth. Small towns ignore the Fair Folk taunting them at the edge of their vision, patrolling the borders of their town like they were the borders of reality itself. But suburban developments…not enough people to drive the weirdness below ground, but people who feel too safe in the numbers of the herd to not go looking into places where they ought not. Take a vast stretch of emptiness, take the sacred woods of the gods, and then plow over it and put up-scale affordable housing for the people who want to leave the cramped corners of the state’s larger cities. The commuters want to live out in strange country, but only because they are comforted by the fact that they can drive back into the city limits any time. It’s here that American nowhere country really begins.

So next time you, your wife, and your best friend are driving down a nice paved road on a sunshining day in the middle of August in your home state, through the land of nice white houses, remember these words of the old diehard Nowherologist. Houses, minivans, and malls can exist in forbidden country and in fact lend well to hiding the treasures and monsters of the age. People spread out and comfortable, too civilized to be superstitious, feeling safe in their homes. What hobgoblin wouldn’t treat such a place like a hunting preserve? But strangeness if often not macabre at all, only baffling. Who says that the city of gold isn’t just off of the highway. Who says that the lake that seems to go on forever doesn’t? Just because it can fit into what should be a tiny speck on the map doesn’t mean that it doesn’t continue on the other side. Whenever you leave civilization, be it the shared reality of a town where everyone knows each other or the huddled masses of a big city, be prepared to pass through the impenetrable wall of fog without feeling a thing, to enter Arcadia each time you return home from the city after a long day of work. Because there’s nothing weirdness loves more than the manufactured tranquility and mind-crushing mundaneness of suburbia, on the intersection of urban legends and rural folklore, where rural superstition and urban curiosity collide to form a murky sea of surreality much larger on the inside than on the outside.