This Is America

This spring I was driving through the rural American West and, as is normal, I drove for two hours without passing anywhere to get gas. Finally, I neared the town I knew was my only chance to get gas before another long stretch of desert. But I also knew the town had been formed when city planning was an unknown concept. And now, thanks to past people's lack of understanding regarding vehicle based traffic, the town had a huge congestion problem. All I wanted to do was get gas and go to the bathroom, but in this place, it was faster to gestate a kid.

So, imagine how excited I was when I realized someone had built a big travel plaza just before the town. I could get gas, go to the bathroom and be back on the road faster than it would take me to get through the left hand turn light cycle at the next exit. Winning.

I got off the highway and waited at the ramp intersection to take a left to the gas station. This shouldn't have taken any time, except that a car drove in and out of its lane toward me. I could have just gunned it but I figured, they certainly aren't turning onto the on ramp. I'll just chill here.

And then when the car finally got to me, it did try to turn onto the on ramp. I witnessed a very confused driver peer around like they had never been somewhere so unscripted before. Their eyes contained pure terror at what I guessed was, in their opinion, a lack of sufficient signage regarding how the on and off ramps worked. The car stopped before hitting me and eventually drove past me and onto a dirt road. I took my cue and sped away before the car could double back.

The road went under the highway and the moment I popped out from the underpass, a GIANT American flag blotted out the sky. I mean, I have never seen a bigger flag. I've lived in smaller buildings. The flag flew from the roof of the travel plaza, and I wondered if that roof was able to structurally support such a thing. What kind of wind testing did you need to do to make sure a flag of that size didn't rip off your roof? I decided to not dwell on it. I just needed the roof to stay on long enough to use the restroom.

At the gas station, I tried two pumps before figuring out that the pump credit card readers were down. The parking lot was huge, not Buc-ees huge, but this was no mom and pop operation either. Giant RVs, side-by-sides, motorcycles, buses, etc., wove in and out of the lot. I threaded my way through the chaos and went inside.

The doors dumped me into a coffee corner where a multi-racial group of obviously outdoorsy, twenty-somethings considered the menu. They wore Chaco sandals, had on Patagonia shorts, and were criss-crossed in tattoos. A layer of desert dust coated all of them, and they moved with the smug assuredness they were living their best lives.

The lines for the check out sat beyond the coffee corner. A large group of Mormons, complete with kids aged zero to eighteen, engulfed the check-out lane. The kids were destroying the candy displays. The women picked up after the kids while the men, their white undergarments visible at their collars, stood in wide legged stances laughing like they owned the world.

Once I got past them, I got to a checkout woman wearing bunny ears. She told me the credit card readers at the pumps were bad. I paid for my gas. Outside I put gas in my car and watched all the new arrivals at the pumps move their cars around like they were playing musical chairs in attempts to get a card reader that worked.

With gas in my tank, I went back inside. I opened the door and came face to face with a man in camo pants open carrying a pistol on his hip. His wife wore a shirt that said, We don't call 911. Behind them, the outdoorsy kids sipped lattes.

The bathrooms were at the back of the store and to get there I had to pass a case of Star Trek-looking daggers and swords. A group of pimply young men in T-shirts silk screened with statements I was too Internet-illiterate to understand huddled around the case. The pointed at the fantastical weapons and slurped on beverages in 30 ounce cups.

By the time I got to the bathroom, I was concerned I had fallen into some hijacked reality. The breadth people in this place was starting to wig me out, and I seemed to be the only person feeling like this. Everyone around me moved like this was just another weekend in the middle of nowhere.

I was washing my hands when a woman walked into the restroom. She wore a black, lace negligee with a big, teal bow strategically positioned over her nipples. She passed several people, looked me in the eyes, nodded and then slipped into a stall.

I stared at her stall door through the mirror. No one else in the bathroom batted an eye. I had to get out of there.

Back in my car, I made it out of the parking lot and back onto the highway. I passed by the town with the congestion problem, extremely happy that I had avoided trying to get gas there, but WTF was that place? All those people shouldn't have been in the same room as each other, and if they were, they should have been fighting each other. Yet, all of them were just doing whatever they wanted to do, under an American flag the size of Rhode Island, no less.

Screw poems, songs, films, and literature. Have we considered if the true American allegory is a fancy gas station in the middle of the desert?