Walking to the World's Largest Gas Station

Dragging Iain Sinclair to Buc-ees

Weirding Yer Neighborhood

Think back to the first walk taken in a new neighborhood, or exploring a city while on vacation. Every detail seems charged with depthless potential. This charge is not merely an illusion brought on by the excitement of a move or the freedom of vacation, but a brief glimpse into the place as it really is, and it can illuminate even the most mundane landscape, the cookie cutterest of neighborhoods. Thomas Pynchon captures this perfectly in an early scene in The Crying of Lot 49, as heroine Odepia Maas is entering the town of San Narcisco for the first time, and is struck by a vision:

She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.

That hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, so evident and alluring at first, over time, disappears as repetition obscures the glowing details. We see only what we expect to see and, all too often, we hardly even see that.

photo by me using a much-missed Kodak Instamatic that I dubbed my “magic box” because of its habit of unexpected double exposures.

Even under such an attitude, certain Events are capable of rupturing the malaise, whether they be purely aesthetic: the wildflowers and knee high grass bursting out of the drainage ditch might demand attention when the light settles upon them just so and the scene is understood as the vast bog in miniature that it really is, or perhaps a disturbing film at the theater lingers in the mind and transforms the familiar route home into a world that is just off-kilter enough as to be totally new. There are countless ways the world breaks through. The act of seeking them out is a good working definition of psychogeography.

The Guy (Debord) who coined the term also envisioned it as an almost revolutionary source of joy, as if any pleasure derived free of expense, and outside of the realm of the spectacle, could be considered practically stolen directly from the tyrants’ hoarded stash. He introduces his essay enticingly, citing the only remaining affair any of us participate in with any gusto is the “groping search for a new way of life”, and suggests psychogeography as an immediate entry into this alternative. It is as if the psychogeographer were a Loony Toon character capable of drawing a tunnel in midair and stepping through into a different world.

Getting at this underlayer requires a Weirding of surroundings. There are many ways to do this. Debord’s Situationists would use the of a map of one city to navigate a different city. As in, follow a map of Paris to reach the Eiffel Tower, but do so in London, see what ghost tower might vibrate invisibly over an unsuspecting fish ‘n’ chips shop. There is also the famous dérive of Walter Benjamin, or walking with no goal in mind, but allowing oneself to be guided by the city itself, going towards what attracts you and away from whatever in the environment repels you. There is the de-familiarization as exhibited by Iain Sinclair who set himself the task of walking the perimeter of his city, meaning to exorcize London of the malevolent energies birthed by the construction of the Millenium Dome as well as celebrate the city’s sprawl by walking the 117 mile loop of the M25.

I modeled my own method in Sinclair’s vein by arranging something of an anti-dérive, and set out to walk directly towards the most repellant thing I could imagine for any pedestrian: the largest gas station in the world, which just so happened to be in the town where I was living at the time I read London Orbital.

Just as the Paris of Walter Benjamin’s age was being redesigned by Georges-Eugène Haussmann to accommodate the rapid circulation of troops and the use of artillery against further insurrections, today’s urban areas are organized around the automobile. These priorities need not be stated outright, for they are encoded into the very structure, and felt inescapably. As Debord writes, “From any standpoint other than that of police control, Haussmann’s Paris is a city built by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Similarly, from any standpoint other than that of the driver, practically every American city is a city built by an idiot. What landmark could represent the priorities of the prevailing structure better than the largest gas station in the world which must necessarily be a nexus for the true American citizen, the automobile. While there are sidewalks in the surrounding development, proudly advertised as trails, they are purely aesthetic, meant to be gawked at from car windows. Powerful defensive spells against the pedestrian are woven into the very concrete. To approach on foot is heresy. To find joy in doing so is an act of civil disobedience.

Towards Buc-ee’s

Inspired by London Orbital, my friend Stephen and I made plans to walk the five and a half miles between my home in downtown New Braunfels and the Buc-ee’s out on the edge of town. Siding with Sinclair who elected to walk not directly along the shoulder of the M25, but to never exit its soundscape, we took somewhat of a roundabout route, but that did not mean our walk would be an easy stroll. The immediate crust around Buc-ee's is the inhospitable terrain of the Creekside development, but to even reach this meant first crossing a Texan town on foot in the dead of summer. The temperature would hang in the upper-90s until well after the sun went down, and any route we chose would offer scant sidewalks and little to no shade. That is not even to mention the dual moats of one of the nation’s largest interstate highways and the Guadalupe River that would both have to be crossed.

If we managed to succeed, reaching Buc-ee’s and pissing in one of its eighty-three toilets would do nothing to deflate the runaway growth of the All City, that disease grafted onto almost every American municipality, regardless of size, but it might just mean a secret victory stolen for ourselves. As Debord put it, we would have participated in “complete insubordination to habitual influences.”

It is the All City that makes any place like every place and every place like any place. In some towns, it is a thin strip relegated to grow along the interstate like a cypress grove along a river, but elsewhere it weaves through the very framework of the settlement, and in many of our smallest towns it has choked out the original completely, leaving downtown districts as abandoned husks and manifesting as corporate dollar stores and fast food establishments. It produces box stores, chain restaurants, and gas stations. These multinationals sprout tall signs to compete for the eye, each of them elbowing for space, advertising creature comforts for the tired traveler: a burger same as the one you get at home, a gas station guaranteed to have a familiar layout, and supermarkets jam-packed with everything you could ever want, but underneath each there is a pit funneling money away from the town, away from customer and worker alike, down to the tectonic depths of the financial titans.