Outside the Backrooms

or: hitchhiking through Osh Kosh

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Outside the Backrooms

When I was younger and lived out of a backpack, sometimes when I woke up I had no idea where I was. I would lie there, with my eyes closed, and think “I wonder where I am?” The space between sleeping and waking was a non-place, and I loved it. That non-place, that sense of possibility, was the closest I had to a sense of home.

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This week I drove down to Southwest Virginia to report on some of the last trials for the protestors who fought against the Mountain Valley Pipeline. That was a wild, ten-year fight that created its own constitutional crisis at the federal level, in which people locked themselves to heavy equipment, lived inside 42” diameter pipes, and held down the longest tree sits in the US east of the Mississippi. The movement created a coalition of punks, hippies, and mountain people, many of whom came out this week to support the last felony defendants. That coalition, or the bonds forged during it, will outlast the end of the campaign, I have no doubt.

That’s not what I’m writing about today. (Well, it is what I’m writing about later today, but it’s not what I’m writing about this morning, while I lie in bed much to the consternation of my dog who would prefer that I start my day). I’ll be putting together some podcast episodes about the trial and about the campaign and about the people that I met this week and the stories they told me, but this morning, I want to talk about the Backrooms of Osh Kosh, Wisconsin, and about my own time in Osh Kosh.

I suspect that most readers will be more familiar with the Backrooms than I am. There’s a sort of cursed image floating around the internet of three indistinct and banal rooms, used to evoke a vague sense of the dread of the mundane. A place of infinite boredom you might become trapped in that is called the Backrooms. While I was driving home from Virginia, a many-hour drive in my van (which does not pretend to move with any great haste), I listened to the 16th Minute episode about the Backrooms.

16th Minute is one of my favorite podcasts, because Jamie Loftus is just about the most talented podcaster I know. Hearing about the Backrooms and liminal space while I drove back highways felt somehow appropriate. Then I learned that this cursed image was taken in Osh Kosh, Wisconsin, which was neat, because I spent a memorable day in Osh Kosh once, many years ago. Then I found out that the photo was taken in 2002, and I thought “wow, that’s the same year I was there.” Then I found out it was taken on June 12, 2002, and I realized only nine days after the photo was taken, I was hitchhiking with a machete through the same tiny city.

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The appeal of “liminal space” always made sense to me, since as I mentioned I traveled full time for more than ten years, from 19 until my early 30s. One night (early July, 2002), myself, my partner, and her not-small dog Piper slept on a 2-foot wide ledge of concrete under a highway underpass near Normal, Illinois. It was not a comfortable or spacious place to sleep, but there was a heavy storm and it was the only flat, dry place we could find.