copyright Celine Sparks, 2023
Am I the only one? I’ve been seeing Buc-ee's hoodies, t-shirts, and oversized mugs for five or ten years now. Every time someone goes to Texas, they bring back a stash of ridiculous beaver gear. The logo boy has a face only a mother baboon could love because she says, “Hooray, there IS someone uglier than my baby.”
Just making a prediction here, but I’m forecasting 2027 yard sales with an overabundance of the beaver merch. And a lot of people posting, “What were we thinking?” It’s going to be like mullet-shaming all over again. Did we really imagine that looked good?
So apparently the beaver did what the armadillos did fifteen years earlier. They loaded up in those culvert carrier trucks, and got outta Dodge. They came to Alabama, to check out outrageous football and the birthplace of Helen Keller.
When the general populace found out that a Buc-ee’s was opening here, their necks went from pale pink to flaming red in two shakes of a jerky tail. I haven’t seen this much excitement since Willie waved a Samurai sword on Duck Dynasty.
So I ask again, am I the only one? It was months before I got around to seeing what all the hype was about. I couldn’t get past the spelling for one thing. Only my friend Joel Torris from the third grade could have spelled it that wrong.
But I finally did it. After 92 miles of reading Buc-ee’s Billboards that rivaled Alexander Shunnarah in frequency on a return trip from a deep-south speaking engagement, I peeled off an exit that the ALDOT
had apparently made especially for people who say, “We’re here; we’re here; we’re ready to spend the week’s paycheck on plastic and sugar everything!”
Of course I failed to realize that everyone peeling off on the lane for Buc-ee’s - that being the entire population of planet earth and 60 percent of Jupiter - was supposed to be on the lane inside of the barrier created by ALDOT to keep people from weaving in and out in front of each other trying to claim the title of “I got to Buc-ee’s first even though you thought you passed me at mile marker 86.”
So there I was trying to signal and somehow legally squeeze in between cars once the barrier played out.
I lived.
I lived to tell.
My prayer of thankfulness was immediately interrupted by, “Whoa, I have never seen this many gas pumps!” And I’m a worldwide traveler! (Worldwide being defined by frequent Smith Laking and occasional Gatlinburg whims.) And that thought was quickly interrupted by emergency parking lot navigation in which people were jumping out of their cars and using colorful (mostly the ugly colors like burnt umber and dentist-office green) language at the drivers in other cars. I was having exiter’s regret at this point.
I finally found a parking place providing me the blessing of burning off loads of fat and one of my kidneys on the trek to the store. I was thinking of buying an XL shirt before parking, but by the time I walked to the entrance, I was pretty sure a medium would suffice.
I’m also pretty sure it was the opposite for some of the other customers, as they were exiting the store trying to balance 2 pounds of fudge, an oversized bag of beaver nuggets, and still hold on to their 44-ounce Icees. I haven’t seen this kind of depravity in adults since the Mississippi Mud craze of 1975.
I tried to be impressed. Truly I did. But, it’s just that – I don’t know how it is in Texas, but here in Alabama, we’ve always had ridiculous stores at Interstate exits. The closer you get to a state line, the more likely it will be your last chance to get fried pies, boiled peanuts, fireworks, and souvenirs. We usually called them truck stops, but little did we know, we shoulda called them Truc-ee's.
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