Bring back that old-time inconvienence
August 2021
Pulling in to the little Shell gas station at South Main and Maple, your tires would run over a long rubber tube stretched across the cracked concrete. There’d be a loud “DING!” and soon Louie would emerge from the service bay, wiping his hands on an oily rag.
“What’ll it be?”
“Regular,” I’d say. “Fill-up, please. We’re going to the lake tomorrow.”
Louie smiled a lot, and never complained when he was called away from the brake job, tune-up or whatever else he was doing as customers stopped for gas, interrupting his work time after time. He had a part-time helper now and then, when he really got behind, but he was usually a one-man show.
He’d take time to chat a little, too, as he filled your tank and cleaned your windshield with a greasy spray bottle and a wad of blue paper towels. “Bugs, bugs,” he’d observe. “August nights.”
Those nights are long gone. No bugs anymore, and no corner gas stations either. No dings. Worst of all, no Louies.
Today we have service plazas for fuel, service centers for repairs. We have better, more efficient and reliable cars, for sure, and we have more time – I guess – for important things like cleaning out the wrappers and cups and straws in the back seat as we pump our own fuel and wait for the final click and last whiff of gas.
We have more snack choices than Louie’s squat time-worn station offered, with its bashed-in vending machine and big, peeling-red Coke cooler. In fact, we can order hot food, get hot Misty Morning blend coffee, and pick out a pair of cool sunglasses or a clever key ring and procure all sorts of other vital aids when we stop at a modern plaza. Instead of passing the time talking about weather, we can watch the other 17 people getting gas, too, as they watch the numbers roll by on their pumps or watch the little shows on the pumps’ postcard video screens.
The best news yet: we’re getting more and more of these service plazas, wherever you travel, whenever you need to stop. Right here in my slot in the traffic jam, in the six-mile highway stretch between I-81 and Hedgesville, we’re getting two new plazas to supplement an existing plaza and two bare-bones “convenience” stations with a mere eight pumps each and only off-the-shelf snacks and three or four aisles of essential doodads. (One of them does sell beer, though, which makes it a very popular spot on weekends).
Way out on the far, outside edge of town, there is a station that still has a service bay – actually, two bays, but one is sometimes stacked full of supplies for the snack side of the enterprise. It’s a busy station, too, because the folks who own it are locals and have been around long enough to know their customers’ names, or at least recognize their faces.
In addition to getting gas and a friendly smile, you can get a flat fixed, a state vehicle inspection and off-road diesel fuel, important for people with farm tractors. I go there a good bit, because it’s close to the post office, too.
So I don’t think I’m going to frequent the new service plazas when they open. I’m sure they’re going to be sparkling clean, unlike Louie’s neglected old Shell, with nice-smelling restrooms and big-letter signs showing me which line to get in for food and which line to join for fuel and coffee. They’ll probably have more kinds of pour-your-own beverages than I could sample in a year, and more sizes of cups than any mouth needs.
(But will you be able to find the lids? Will they have lids that fit? And why do some lids have domes and some have slots and some have little crossed slits? Which one am I supposed to use?)
At my advancing age, I don’t have time to waste making decisions I don’t have to make, much less time to look for lids to keep them in mind and memory. And I surely don’t have time to wait at all the traffic signals they’re going to have to hang so we can enjoy all this convenience.
I’ll probably pass the time waiting for the light to change by thinking back to Louie, and the bugs, and the dings. Even the not-so-sparkling restroom, with its lone toilet and empty towel dispenser. And how wonderfully, happily inconvenient it was.