The Metaphysics of Gas Stations

The Hospice of the Order of Free Drivers

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus.” — Isaiah 35:1

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A few miles before I hit the dirt roads that wind up a gorge and mountainside to get to my family cabin, I pass by a gas station called “Kwik Shop”. It’s owned by a Punjabi Indian man called Bobby. I’m sure that’s not Bobby’s real name, but he’s been christened that as the owner of that gas station for the better part of 20 years by this 90% Republican voting precinct. I frequently enjoy stopping at that gas station before I bid the civilized world and cell service goodbye for the next 10 miles as I meander the forests roads towards the Sherpa Camp. Bobby is fair with his fuel prices; the gas is cheaper than what’s on the main 411 that goes through town and he sells not-for-resale cans Coke Zero for 60 cents. I’ve been watching this gas station over the years. Nothing much has changed other than the gas prices. It’s the final pit stop before people go up Fort Mountain into the highlands, and its hours are pretty unpredictable. I’ve seen them open near midnight, and I’ve seen them closed in the middle of the week.

There is an image of that gas station that has stayed seared in my imagination over the years. It was a very foggy summer night; it had been one of those rainy days where the precipitation simply saturated all of the land under the heavens with moisture. It was eleven something at night. I had forgot to pump gas in town, and I had to place bets with myself that Bobby would have his Caravanserais¹ open for weary travelers’ wayfaring into the misty mountains such as myself. The road has gone completely dark now, almost as if the county itself has drawn a curtain and retired. There are no public streetlights in rural Appalachia. I had been driving through this darkness with only my headlights and the faint green of the dash through the mist, with my thoughts loosening the way they do when there is nothing to look at but the road’s next curve and blind hill. Then, ahead and upon the dark silhouette horizon rising above the last foothill before the ascent, his gas station price sign shown bright, a glow in the fog, low and warm against the pine tree line, thrown upward from a canopy of light into weather that had no interest in me. The gas station appears out of the darkness like the medieval monasteries of Europe’s dark forests once appeared to a tired pilgrim when the woods had encroached on all sides, a small mercy for the weary traveler. The canopy light falls on the pumps and the wet unsymmetrical asphalt like a lantern hung over the door of an inn. Here is where you may stop and here is where the journey pauses for a moment and the traveler may be received.

To bring you into this Deep America scene, you pull in and park with courtesy, as there are no clearly defined parking spots. The pump island is empty. Bugs circle the canopy lights in halos. Somewhere a compressor hums the low drone of perpetual readiness. It’s one of those pumps that you either pay inside or hope to God the insert-your-card reader still works. It holds its vigil through the hours when every other business has gone dark and every other door has shut. In this it resembles the old religious houses more than it resembles any other commercial enterprise. You are expected, even now.

You step inside and the door chime sounds, and an older fluorescent yellow lighting illuminates the aisles. The staff behind the counter is on their phone watching a show, they don’t expect many visitors at this time. The air is different in here though, it is cooler, sweeter, tinged with the mingled scent of old coffee, processed beef jerky, and dip. The radio is playing “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” at a volume calibrated for no one in particular, which is exactly right. It is a song about a man who is bored with his life and answers a personal ad and discovers it was placed by his own wife. This is the kind of esoteric revelation the gas station provides at no extra charge. There is also a taxidermy mount of a buck that was killed in 2004 that seems to be observing as you contemplate which gas station slop you will consume and challenge your bowels to digest. You probably don’t want to use the restroom here if you’re a woman. It’s not so bad for the guys.

Of warmer items available for the hungry, the roller dogs are still turning. It is nearly midnight, and they are still turning somehow, for someone. You think about it, nobody will know, but they have been turning, you suspect, since late morning. They are beginning to look like relics of themselves, darkened and contracted, slowly mummifying under the heat lamp. In this moment, Bobby greets you with the warmth of someone who has been standing in fluorescent light for six hours and has not lost the habit of courtesy. Behind him, a small sign, handwritten in marker on a paper plate and taped to the Georgia Lottery glass case: HOT BISCUITS EVERY MORNING 5AM. He mentions this to you unprompted, as if transmitting a local lore of a feast. Bobby does not know your name. He does not need to. The gas station’s hospitality is structured around anonymity, which is a different thing than indifference. It receives the stranger as stranger. It asks nothing of you except that you pay for what you take.

At the counter, next to the register, a plastic tray of local brownies wrapped in cellophane, baked by someone local whose name is not on the label. Beside them, a small bowl of pennies so old and handled they have taken on a greenish film, offered freely to anyone who is three cents short. This is the gas station’s almsgiving. It is modest and unsentimental. You take two Coke Zeros to go. Thank you, come again.

Gas stations are fuel stops, but they are also for elixirs. That is the right word, because what the gas station refrigerator case offers potions. You open the glass door, and the cold breath rolls out across your hand and face. The bottles and cans stand ranked in their illuminated rows like votives in a side chapel. You are choosing between stimulants, sugars, electrolytes, and colors that do not occur in nature. You are choosing the thing that will carry you through the next sixty miles, the next hour, the next stretch of dark road before sleep. Every long drive has its sacramental pause at the refrigerator door, where the traveler selects his portion of potion and is, for a moment, restored to wakefulness, banishing the demon of lassitude.

This is the ancient function of the watering hole translated into the American modern consciousness. We are a nation of cowboys, and this has always been true even when the cowboys were Puritans, or rivermen, or truckers, or commuters on I-75. The American is the human being who keeps going. The gas station exists to make this possible. It waters the steed of metal. It is the hospice of the order of free drivers, and every man with a tank and a road is a knight of that order whether he knows it or not.

The way the fuel itself arrives is something people never witness, or at least never care to observe. At the larger stations, the RaceTracs, the QTs, the Pilot Flying J cathedrals—the tanker trucks pull in during off-hours and perform a ritual of industrial disgorgement. The hoses are connected. The underground tanks receive their portion. Thousands of gallons of refined fossil fuel pour down into the earth beneath the parking lot, disgorged from vessels that have traveled the arteries of the highway system like blood cells through a body. The fuel enters the station’s veins and from there it enters yours and from there it enters the wider capillary network of county roads and neighborhood streets and driveways. The entire highway system is alive in this way, and the gas station is its beating node, its pumping heart.

I have read, that there is a democracy at the gas station that does not exist anywhere else in American life. The billionaire and the man on his last twenty dollars stand at adjacent pumps holding the same nozzle, assuming the same posture, watching the same numbers climb. No one is exempt. The Tesla owner has opted out of this particular sacrament, but he has merely exchanged one dependency for another, one altar for a different one. The gas station does not sort you by class, by education, by taste. It sorts you only by octane grade, and even that is a distinction most people ignore. Everyone gets regular.

This is the great equalizer, and it operates through shared dependency rather than shared dignity. A church equalizes through worship. A courthouse equalizes through law. The gas station equalizes through need. You are all here because your machines are hungry and you cannot walk to where you are going. For a minute or two, while the pump runs, you stand in the open air with nothing to do. This may be the only pause in someone’s day. The only moment between the demands of the morning and the demands of the evening when a person stands still and does nothing and thinks, or does not think, or simply watches the numbers and breathes.

The gas station is also a symbol, and what it symbolizes is the American covenant with distance. Without the gas station, the frontier closes. Not metaphorically but literally. Every pump island is a renewal of that covenant: you may keep going. You may cross the county, the state, the time zone. You may leave. You may arrive. The gas station says nothing about whether you should, only that you can. It is the infrastructure of American restlessness. Though I will add it also has a similar function in other countries, which I observed recently on a trip to Ireland. If you didn’t know, Ireland is basically an American corporate vassal state. American gas station culture is alive and well there. Me and my friends arrived at this idyllic Barack Obama plaza, Circle K, to refuel in between our pilgrimages between sacred Celtic sites and Benedictine Abbeys through the green Irish countryside.

We stopped by accident to eat and reful, and I swear it’s called Barack Obama plaza! At first I thought it was due to all the American fast food chains in the food court…

And yet there is a comfort in these refueling stops, that should not be dismissed, even by those of us who are suspicious of what the highway has done to the American town and landscape in particular. The gas station is familiar in a way that almost nothing else in the transient American landscape is familiar. You have been in this gas station before even when you have never been in this gas station before. The layout is known. The coffee is in the same place. The restrooms are in the back. The candy is by the register. The maps, if they still sell maps, are by the door. In a country that tears down and rebuilds its environment every twenty years, the gas station endures as a fixed liturgical form. The rite does not change. Only the heraldry does.

Every gas station has heraldry. Texaco’s star. Shell’s scallop. Sinclair’s green brontosaurus (my favorite as a kid). The Chevron bars. The BP sunflower. Kwik Shop’s simple name. The great orange disc of Gulf, which no longer exists in most of the country, but whose color still means gasoline to anyone over fifty. These are sigils. They function the way coats of arms once functioned for noble houses and patron saints once functioned for parishes; they tell you whose protection you are under, whose territory you have entered, whose standard flies above the canopy. Americans have loyalties to gas station brands that they cannot fully explain, preferences inherited from fathers who had preferences inherited from their fathers, passed down like devotions. Some even swear by the fuel consistency between heralds, as if speaking of alchemic potency. My local RaceTrac rewards my loyalty with a free coffee every month.

Abandoned gas station haunts me for this reason. You know the one I mean. You have passed it likely. Everyone in the rural South has passed one. Mine is on Dews Pond Road in Gordon County, deep in the kind of country where the road narrows and the pines thicken and the last evidence of commerce falls away into food desert and Dollar General territory. The old station sits right on the road with the windows boarded or broken, the sign still facing the road with its fuel prices frozen at a number no one will ever pay. $1.04. $1.19. Whatever it was the last day someone turned the lights off and did not come back. That number hangs there like a stopped clock in a dead man’s house. It tells you not only that this place is gone, but exactly when it died. You can date the death of an American gas station by its last advertised price the way you can date a Roman ruin by its last inscription. The frozen price is the epitaph. And the building itself stands as a kind of anti-monastery, a place where the vigil has ceased, where the lantern has gone out, where the traveler now passes in the dark without being received. The covenant has been broken at this crossroads. You may not stop here. No one is expected. The wilderness and time are slowly reclaiming the threshold, and whatever small hospitality once lived under that canopy has withdrawn into the soil and the weeds and the silence that presses in where the compressor used to hum.

But the deeper metaphysics of the gas station is not about fuel or commerce or brand loyalty. It is about fundamentally about it’s liminality. The gas station sits at the edge, at the boundary between the home and destination. It marks the point where the known world gives way to the road, where the settled yields to the unsettled, where the domestic becomes the journey, even if it’s just for some quick errands. In the older American landscape this threshold was the town gate, the ferry landing, the last trading post before the territory. Now it is the Exxon at the edge of the county, the Shell on the highway ramp, the little no-name station at the crossroads where two state routes meet and a church stands opposite and a cemetery lies just behind the tree line.

The gas station also says two things at once, and both of them are true. It says: the wilderness is real, but you do not have to face it yet. And it says: you are leaving the known world, and we will help you do it. This is the double function of every threshold shrine in every culture that has ever maintained roads. The Romans had their lares compitales at the crossroads. The Japanese have their roadside Jizō. The medievals had their wayside chapels and monastery inns. We have our gas stations.

You stand under the canopy and the dark presses in from every direction, the trees, the fields, the sky without stars. But here, under this roof of light, you are held. The pump clicks off. The tank is full. Bobby has told you about the biscuits. The roller dogs continue their silent vigil of motion. And somewhere out there, down a road you have not yet driven, another canopy glows against another fog, waiting for the next traveler who has not yet arrived but who is already expected.

You get back in the truck. You pull out. The light recedes in the mirror and the dark returns and you are driving again through the old American night, which is the same night it has always been, vast and indifferent and full of distance, and you are sustained.

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1. Caravanserais were fortified roadside inns built along Silk Road trade routes and in the Middle East/Central Asia to provide secure lodging, food, and water for merchants, pilgrims, and travelers.