Ri

In Texas they told me to stop at Buc-ee's for gas. I have been to shrines. I have stood in temples that took two hundred years to build. I was not prepared for the gas station. There were one hundred and twenty fuel pumps. I counted them because I did not believe them. A man beside me was filling a truck the size of my first apartment, and he was not filling it because it was empty. He was filling it because he was here, and here is where a man fills things. Inside was a hall so vast I lost the horizon. A wall of jerky. A wall of fudge I did not know the country produced. A brisket sandwich handed to me by a man in a beaver costume. And I want to be clear, the beaver is not a mascot. The beaver is a saint. The people speak of him the way my grandmother spoke of the mountain behind her house. And the bathrooms. I had been warned about the bathrooms and I had dismissed the warning as the pride of a loud people. I was wrong to dismiss it. The bathrooms are famous across the whole state and they have earned it. I have slept in worse hotels. I nearly bowed upon entering. A janitor was polishing the floor with the devotion of a man tending a garden he loved, and when I thanked him he said "welcome in," which I have since learned is what Texas says instead of hello, and also instead of I am glad you exist. I went in for gas. I was inside for ninety minutes. I came out with fudge, a shirt printed with a joke I do not fully understand, forty dollars of jerky, and a feeling I can only describe as having been to church. I did not need any of it. I needed all of it. I have walked through the great cathedrals of the old world. I lit no candle there. I lit no candle at Buc-ee's either. But I did fill the truck. And I understand now that in Texas, this is the same thing.

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