Gas Station Burger

 I scarfed down a gas station burger in Bandera, Texas. It was the kind of place you wouldn’t think you’d want to get a burger from, with sticky floors and questionable bathrooms. This cowboy watched from across the booth. “Shoot, it’s not often I meet someone who eats faster than I do.”

“That’s what every girl wants to hear.”

Maybe I am shameless. Maybe I was especially shameless because I figured I’d never see him again. 

Regardless, I normally do eat fast, and I was hungry. It was an alright burger for a gas station. It also helped that I had somewhere to be about 5 hours north of there, a gig at a dive bar in Lubbock, Texas. I needed to get going.

I’d spent a few hours in Bandera. I didn’t know much about it other than the instrumental Willie Nelson named after it. It’s on the “Red Headed Stranger” album, and it sounds like the place felt, with live oaks, tall yellow grass, and cowboys.

 I’d missed riding horses, and I have this tendency to want to go to places I’ve heard songs about. I made a stop there and paid to go ride through the hills. 

The cowboy that sat across from me had been my guide. His name was Nick. Beneath the Stetson was hair that went down to his shoulders and a long beard. His sleeves of tattoos  contrasted with the plaid of his pearl-snap shirt, and his tendency towards sarcasm was suppressed beneath the need to be polite on the job.

“I like my stirrups down 4 notches usually,” I told him as he tightened the cinch.

“Well, alright then.” I felt him roll his eyes.

 He put me on a bay mustang named Buster. “He’s an ass,” he warned me, though I liked that little gelding.

It was my first time ever paying to ride a horse. Afterall, having worked at a stable, I basically did his job for a living. 

Nonetheless, it was something to see the Hill Country from the saddle. We rode for an hour, then it was back to the red barn to unsaddle and grain the horses. “You know,” he snickered, watching me slide the elaborately flowered saddle onto the peg. “You paid us, you don’t have to haul that thing.”

He went on to introduce me to all eight of their horses, which were mostly mustangs. He made sure to tell me which ones were the biggest “asses”. 

“Geronimo’s my baby though,” he patted the dun horse he’d ridden on the forehead.

Afterwards, I tipped him and headed towards the car.

“Hold up,” he hollered from the porch, hopping down the steps.

“I’m gonna go get lunch from the gas station,” he said, “And they really do have the best burgers in Bandera. Can I please buy you one, since you’re traveling through?”

“Hmmm.” I looked at the time. I figured I could swing an hour, but I really didn’t want him to spend his tip money on me. I felt for the cash in my pocket. “Ok, but I’ll have to leave soon.”

I followed his rusty Ford down the cactus-lined road for a couple of miles to get my first ever gas station burger.

We ordered, and I tried my darndest to pay. “Nope,” he shook his head definitively. “Put it in the tank.”

I ate like a hippo while he talked about his daughter in Florida and his love of heavy metal. “People just assume I like the country ‘cuz of the cowboy gig.” he said begrudgingly. 

“Ah.” I looked at the time.

“Hey, I’m sorry, it was nice talking with you, man, thanks for the burger, but I’ve got to get to Lubbock,” I said, sliding out of the booth.

“Lubbock? Shoot,” he said, eyebrows raised, as if I’d just announced I’d hitchhike to Canada. ”You’ve got a ways to go for a whole lotta nothin’.”

“Yeah, I reckon so. Bye!”

I bolted out the door.

One of my favorite parts of life on the road is getting to meet all these strangers. For some reason, some of them talk to me. They might become my friend for a few hours, maybe even a day. They often offer kindness that leaves me dumbstruck. I get to listen to their stories, getting to know the Cliffnotes version of the novels that they are.

And then I’m gone. 

But it’ll happen again, with the next person in the next town.

Maybe they’ll become my friend on Facebook, and I’ll be a curious onlooker as they go on with their lives. Maybe they’ll be a silhouette of a character, like Nick. They’re like poems in a book; maybe not long or detailed, just little pieces of stories I’ll hold onto (and sometimes write songs about).

Sometimes I feel as though God puts me in someone’s path for a reason, and vise versa. Maybe I’ll get to share the gospel with them, or pray for them, or make them laugh or smile somehow. 

Maybe I was meant to park at that truck stop in Idaho at 4 a.m., to groggily wake up midmorning and tumble out of my car to greet a couple of the cashiers in the parking lot on their smoke break. 

“You are so beautiful! You look like a mermaid,” I told the one with green and blue hair. I wasn’t lying, but I’m sure she was confused. Why is this homeless-looking girl bothering me?

“Thanks…”

I shuffled through a box of stuff and found a starfish I’d bought for a quarter at this thrift store in Utah.

“This is for you!”

“Oh my gosh, this is so weird, thank you so much!”

We talked for a while before I headed south. I can’t be certain it made her day, but having something to give her made me so happy.

 Now I make a point to carry trinkets with me for such occasions. You never know when someone might need the stones I found on the Northern Pacific coast, or feathers from the desert, or postcards from any antique store. 

It’s fun. Maybe you should try it if you want to rebel against what your parents told you and start talking to more strangers.

“You know, you do actually need to sell CDs,” my Mom laughs at me a lot. I do bring my CDs on the road to sell when I play in the bars, and they do help fund my gas tank, but from a business perspective I probably do hand out my CDs too much. Or do I?

Like with the dreadlocked man in Oregon who noticed that we were both living out of our cars, so he gave me a little bag he knitted with lavender in it to hang on my mirror, or the rapper in Oklahoma who gave me his CD for one of mine, or the sweetest girl I met on a hike in Big Bend, who told me about being a wildland firefighter, who encouraged me to cancel my plans and stay in the desert longer, who I just wanted to give a CD to…

If someone shares a piece of their heart with you, don’t you want to share some of yours, too? 

And strangers on the road do share their hearts. It’s taken me a long time to understand why, and It’s taken me longer to learn to accept these gestures.

 For one,  it has taken me a long time to learn to accept things like compliments, gifts, and offers of help in my day-to-day life. I still struggle. 

Because if I feel that someone is going out of their way on my behalf, I tend to assume they don’t actually want to, that I am being an inconvenience. I hate the thought of taking up precious space in someone’s life, space they might not want me in. I like to feel that I am being self-sufficient, that I am bringing something to the table.

So if I have a hard time accepting compliments, how much harder is it to accept a hand with carrying my PA, or food, or a place to sleep?

Food tends to be a popular offer, like the gas station burger. It was probably the first thing I became comfortable taking from strangers (of course its food, right?).

Like last year, when I wound up spending a couple of days in Centennial, Wyoming. 

“This is where people come to disappear,” the lady outside of the one all-purpose store, known as the “Friendly Store,” told me. It made sense. It’s in the middle of the Medicine Bow National Forest, the population is 308, and there’s one gas pump and 2 bars. I initially went there to play some songs for some food in one of the bars, but I fell in love with the place. Who doesn’t want to disappear amongst rocky mountains and evergreens for a bit?

The bar I played in featured Bill, the old drunk with long, wispy white hair, who had a lot to say about my music career. Apparently I needed to stop being a folk singer and start singing rock’n roll. “Men wanna hear rock’n roll, sweetie,” he blabbered in an English accent. I prayed for the patience to not slap him.

Then there was Josh, a middle-aged good ol’ boy from Kansas with a heart of gold and a love of alcohol. He was a buck farmer. His wife was taking care of their 9 kids, and he was very excited about that. “Don’t let ‘em fool ya, now!” he hollered. “There are hills in Kansas, they just don’t talk about it!” I raised my eyebrows. “Ok, Josh.”

And then there was Mason. Mason was from Arkansas, and like me, he was rambling around, living out of his van, seeking adventure. It made sense; that’s probably the main reason anyone who wasn’t running from the law would end up in Centennial, WY. He was headed towards Jackson.

 “Her name’s Pearl,” he said later, referring to his van, which wasn’t just a van. The inside was complete wooden cabinets, a bed, a fridge, and a stove that popped out of the trunk! 

Pearl was really something, which was a good thing, because Mason said he had a long road ahead of him. As far as I know he’s still rambling around the country right now.

Josh was also really something. Mason and I both thought so, so after the one bar closed down we followed Josh to the next one, leaving Bill to blabber to himself. 

We soon found that we couldn’t keep up with Josh as he chugged his Miller Lights and raged into the night, so Mason and I walked around the town (which was basically 1 block). We swapped traveling stories, and we found out we both loved Jesus. I don’t meet a lot of strangers who love Jesus, so to be around another believer filled my heart with this peace. We wound up staying up till about 3 a.m. watching mule deer run across the road, and we parked our “homes” behind this bed and breakfast.

“I’m gonna make you breakfast,” he told me in the morning. 

“No! You’re good, you’ve got a long way to go.” I knew from experience how much you have to think about food and how much it costs when you’re trying to fill your tank. The thought of eating his gas money made me sad.

“I want to bless you, let me make you breakfast.” He popped out the stove from the back of the van and cracked some eggs. At least I made the coffee. 

Since then I’ve accepted food and beverages from strangers all over the place. From bacon and eggs on a front porch in Washington State, to a shot of whiskey from a biker at a biker bar in Utah, to waffles from this family I stayed with in Idaho... 

More recently, one of the best free foods I got was from the back of this guy Kyle’s truck. We were parked at this overlook in Big Bend National Park, both cooking dinner from our vehicles. He looked about as scraggly as I did, and he saw me boiling my boxed Velveeta. 

“You want some steak?” he called from the stove on the back of his truck. Admittedly, that was a hard one to turn down after having hiked 15 miles through the desert.

“You want some crappy Mac n’ Cheese?” I offered.

“Sounds like a trade.” Not a fair one, but he went for it, and there was another night of swapping traveling stories and laughter. He told me about surfing in California, I taught him the B7 chord on my guitar, and we wound up going hiking in the Santa Elena Canyon the next day.

Alright, you’re probably thinking, Gees, we get it Alma. You go places, you do stuff, people look at you, think you’re homeless, and say, ‘That girl needs food, let me feed her’, and you’re shameless and stupid enough to just up and take it.

Yeah, maybe. That’s not the point, though.

I have often found that by not accepting what people have to give, you are, in a sense, rejecting a piece of them. “No, thanks, that’s ok,” I’ve often said to kind gestures. The response is often downcast eyes or an insistence upon them doing the gesture anyways. 

For instance, once in Mississippi, I slept in my car in someone’s driveway after a gig. The next morning I left a CD and a note on their windshield and headed out. A couple of weeks later they found my contact information online and expressed that they had really hoped I’d stayed and had coffee with them the next morning. “Aw,” I replied. “Maybe next time!”

Because that gesture is what they had to offer. That is what they wanted to share. 

I love this quote by MFK Fisher: “Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.” 

To share is to build friendship, whether that’s me giving the gas station cashier my starfish or someone making me breakfast. In my case, maybe they’re long distance friendships, or maybe they’re friends that take the shape of a fond memory, but the sharing has led to stories, laughter, and kinships that I wouldn’t trade for anything, and it's made traveling alone not so lonely.

But in order to properly share, you learn how to accept what is shared with you.

Even if it is a gas station burger.

Ode to the White Shoe Box

 I walked down the dirt road. The open fields sprawled around me, dotted with live oaks, hay bales, and cattle. The Florida winter was mild.

At the end of the road was a plot littered with tires, chunks of fencing, scrap metal, and broken Christmas lights. Pieces of plastic confettied the grass. A plywood shed leaned like a feeble old woman. Pieces of the treehouse where we once played hung in the oldest live oak. The younger oaks had grown since I was a kid.

In the middle of the junk was a dirt patch that marked where the single wide I grew up in once stood; a white trailer that looked like a shoe box on the edge of the family farm.

Even though we’ve lived in North Carolina for nearly a decade, all of my dreams still take place in that childhood home.

My parents moved into the trailer when they first got married. It was where they brought my sister and I home from the hospital. It was where they’d lived for 17 years. 

It was home. And it was gone.

In its place was this scrapyard. 

So I closed my eyes and imagined it as it once was, as to not let the current scene infringe on my memories. 

The base of the home was covered with grey lattice. We’d sometimes hear the 2 stray cats that took shelter under the trailer sounding like they were trying to kill each other. Evidence of what they were actually doing came a few weeks later when random kittens would crawl out of the lattice to surprise my sister and I.

Holly bushes lined the porch. In December, my sister and I would decorate them with half-hazardly strewn gobs of tinsel and lights. While our friends had houses dotted with evenly aligned lights, blown up snowmen and santas, dazzling stars and classy wreaths, our trailer looked as though we’d sprayed it with a can of silly string. But we thought it was grand.

One thing that our friends also had were Christmas cards that looked like they came from Hallmark; the family in coordinated outfits in front of a picturesque background, dolled up and smiling sweetly like they liked each other. They’d have them developed at Walmart with a cutesy holiday message and font.

My family had never been into that.  “Look at them bein’ cute,'' we'd say as we hung up our friend’s cards. Our holiday reciprocation was usually home squeezed orange juice from our citrus trees. 

But there is a picture of my sister and I that, while it wouldn’t make Hallmark, could have a shot at Awkward Family Photos. We’re standing in front of the messily decorated trailer. We probably could've brushed our blonde heads, but who’s nitpicking here? 

Chloe is in nothing but her underwear, as she usually was around age 5, and she’s wearing a CSX trucker hat that our train-working grandpa got us. Beside her, I’m clad in camouflage sweatpants and a tie-dye shirt, which is something I would have coordinated myself around age 8. I’m proudly holding a styrofoam plate of cookies, and my stately blue Crocs round out the picture. 

One year, after getting all of our friends’ fancy cards, my Mom thought it would be funny to send this picture out as a Christmas greeting. 

I didn’t see the humor at the time. It was just us doing our thing. But it is a classic picture that still hangs on some folk’s refrigerators today, and I will forever love my mom for it.

The inside of the trailer was a hoot. Walls of celery green, Christmas lights strung year-round, tomato-red furniture and beanbag chairs, a neon-green alien statue that my Dad found in the dump, two pugs, board games, books, a karaoke machine, all the evidences of a homeschooling family, a whole lot of character, a whole lot of of love...

Chloe and I shared the room at the end of the place. I got the top bunk. The square room was crowded with legos and stuffed animals, but the yellow walls were happy. I’d open the window and let my pony stick his head in (the pony that our Grandpa brought home when I was 5, without my parent’s permission, but so it goes). 

I still remember the peace of falling asleep to the sound of the freight train chugging and whistling across the field, dreaming about where it was going.

“I’m gonna be an arter,” I’d tell my parents when they asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I meant to say “artist,” but they knew what I meant. With this came an endless stream of doodles and paintings of horses, mountains, and mermaids, and Mama hung them all up in the kitchen like they were Picasso’s.

Chloe was all about pirates. Whether it was Captain Hook or the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Barbies that well-intentioned family members mistakenly bought her always ended up walking the plank of her toy pirate ships.

With this, Mom had the bright idea of redecorating the bathroom on our end of the trailer and making it “pirate themed.” Pirate gold and seashells decorated the mirror and the little dimly-lit chandelier, a model of the Black Pearl graced the top of the medicine cabinet, and sea creatures were littered about. It was every little girl’s dream.

If the inside of the shoe box wasn’t cool enough, we had the most wondrous yard.

Of course, there was the entirety of the family farm, with fields to run in, hay bales to jump on, and cows wandering around. There was the nursery my grandparents owned with potted shrubs clustered together that doubled as imaginary jungles, the pile of mulch that we’d climb like it was Everest, the green house where’d we’d go to find snail friends, grapefruit trees perfect for climbing.

But our yard was magic for us and our friends, a place for imagination and dirty bare feet.

My Dad and uncles took plastic pallets and wood scraps and built a 3-story treehouse in the ancient-looking oak in the corner of the yard. It was Swiss-Family-grade; roofless, so the spanish moss could tickle our heads, and at the very top was a zipline that ran across the lawn that was just scary enough to be fun. 

We decorated the place with rocks, shells, broken glass, mason jars, and paint. It’s where I first learned to play fiddle, because the first year of fiddling sounded like a dying cat and I wasn’t allowed to play in the trailer. We’d climb up to look across the sprawling fields and daydream. We were princesses and it was our castle.

There was a tire swing that swung so rapidly it made some people motion-sick, a trampoline where we’d play “dead-man,” where I probably laid down to read books more than I actually jumped. 

There was a large patch of thickets and wildflowers that we referred to as the “butterfly garden,” and a giant metal flower that my uncle welded out of old oil drums.

There were places to shoot our pink BB guns, places for Leela the lab to dig holes, places to hide for the most epic games of hide-and-seek, places to be loud and rambunctious or quiet and thoughtful.

While our yard was as magical as it was, we took advantage of what space that little shoe box had to offer. On Friday nights we’d invite over everyone we knew, young and old, family and friends. We’d play games, eat my Mom’s cooking, and fill the place with laughter. Some nights it was so crowded you could barely walk around. 

Those were my favorite nights. I think they still are.

“Why can’t I have my own room like all my friends do?” I’d asked my parents a few times, a question I now regret because we were (and are) so blessed.

Sure, my Dad worked a good job. We probably could have swung at least a double-wide (that was my dream, a double-wide), or maybe an actual house. 

But why? For more space to put more crap to gather more dust? For a nicer house to take composed family pictures in front of? So we could invite people over without feeling like sardines in the kitchen? So my Mom would have to work full-time instead of homeschool Chloe and I and help us become weird individuals we are, or so we’d have a bigger bill to pay and less funds to spend on trips to Disney, or to see the country, or to help a neighbor? 

There’s nothing wrong with having a nice house.

But one thing I took from my parents is that maybe it’s not the wisest to buy into a lifestyle just because you can technically afford it, or because it’s what the people around you are doing, or because it would look nicer in a Christmas card. 

Maybe there's something better.

And I’ve had my own room for a while now. 

But, oh, how I’ll always love and miss that little white shoe box in the middle of the field.