As I jot down my notes for the trip I realize I”m no longer alone. After parking in a secluded area of an oasis of a grill/restaurant in the middle of nowhere, I now look in my rear view mirror and see not one, not two, but three semi-trucks pulling into the diesel fueling area. Each truck driver is laughing and talking — obviously taking part in a shared joke over their shared radio signal.
This is a town of surprises.
I reached this town purely to get gas, but a man can’t get gas without a snack. Directly off the highway I found a deli attached to a Chevron gas station, but I steered clear because of its corporate relationship with Chevron. I continued driving down the road for a few blocks when in the side of my view I saw a four-letter word that had the letter “E” in it; it must be a DELI, I thought, one that wasn’t associated with a multi-national conglomerate. I quickly turned around in a driveway (while watched by a small, unleashed dog), and parked next to the large wooden structure I thought was a DELI. Walking in I realized the word instead was FEED, and I obviously thought how convenient a name that was for a place to buy food. Soon I would realize that the location had nothing to eat for humans.
Upon entering the store I saw the true nature of the store. One half of the store, surprisingly, was dedicated to Xeroxing and assorted printing duties. Behind the desk was an older woman with a steady smile who, after my entrance, quickly added structure to her face and asked, “How may I help you?”
I replied, “I’m just looking around.”
She looked surprised, and I’d soon realized she should be, as I was a 20-something New Yorker “just looking around” in a farm animal feed store. Farm feed and a printing office in one space.
As I searched the aisles for bags of chips or candy I quickly realized bird feed and cage dirt weren’t intended for me. Trying to gain some legitimacy to my trip for food, I darted towards the refrigerator located by the manager’s desk and quickly opened the fridge door to find a glass bottle of Coca-Cola.
The white nutrition sticker on the bottle revealed the container’s mystery, and together with the store manager, almost in unison (as unison as one can be in a printing and bird feed store), we both said, “It’s Mexican Coke, so it has real sugar.”
Anyone who knows me knows how big a deal real authentic Coke is to me. In the U.S., Coca-Cola replaced sugar with high fructose corn syrup, a liquid-form sweetener that’s cheaper to produce in the states. Cost cutting measures killed the soda, and any chance to go back to the historic drink’s original recipe is clearly a moment to celebrate the true “Coke Classic.”
The two of us then chatted about my trip, and the woman brought me to the back to see her cage full of baby chickens. Hidden under a blanket (to preserve warmth from the heat lamp), over a dozen baby chicken squawked around the cage. Some would grow up to be roosters, some would be typical chicken, and three of the babies would grow up to have big furry heads of hair, much like one of the characters in Chicken Little.
I left the location satisfied and clearly content with the reward of traveling a little further from the highway for what I thought would be a quick snack.
But it all comes back to Chevron, the gas station I chose to refill my car and also the location where three semi-truck drivers are now chatting behind my car.
After refueling the car I entered the corporate gas station’s dining area for a bathroom, and was surprised to not find a corporate deli but instead “Original Kelly’s Grill,” an authentic, four table dining area with a menu full of all the fried and deep fried food anyone fast-food enthusiast could want. Clearly this had to be rewarded.
I stepped up to the grill, ignored the chatter from the older men behind me (“In 30 years Americans will be killed for being original.”), and asked what the veggie burger consisted of. I had to be healthy, after all, I planned exercise on this trip, and not being hungry, I steered toward the menu’s lighter fare. The woman behind the counter opened the fridge and took out a veggie burger. It looked like a decent patty, but wasn’t wrapped in any plastic, and was stacked on top of rows of hamburger meat. The unsanitary patty let me down, but the woman’s sincerity in showing it to me was too innocent to be punished. I ordered the chicken sandwich with fries, and soaked up the grease in my car.
After eating the food in my car, I took out my notebook, wrote down notes from the trip, and looked in my rear view mirror.
Which brings me back to the present tense, in a world where older truckers celebrate the setting sun and notepads are meant to be stained by french fry grease.
