Dispatches from Little America

Little America sits in the middle of the high plains of Wyoming, just off I-80. It's one of those places that has billboards for miles leading up to the approach, all featuring a smiling penguin and promises of clean bathrooms, a sit-down restaurant, a playground, and a hotel and RV parking lot for weary travelers. The gas is about 30 cents more expensive than the regular stations 20 miles before and after it, and I always tell myself I'm going to skip it this time, but I always end up going anyway.

Little America has been here since 1934, before Buccee's was a twinkle in anybody's eye. The entire complex -- the gas station, the gift shop, the hotel and playground and all of it—was built around the station's mascot: a real emperor penguin, brought back from the South Pole by a member of Admiral Byrd's expedition. They wanted to bring it back alive but the poor beast succumbed to the elements enroute and so they taxidermied it and brought it to Wyoming instead. Here he is, in a display case at the end of an aisle with games and keychains and penguin plushies: noble and strange in his somewhat faded plumage. The penguin always makes me a bit sad: for the obvious reason, but also because he is a relic from a time I have never and will never know. He was a marvel from a faraway land, a piece of the wild unknown, an attraction in itself. I will never experience this penguin with the same excitement and wonder he must have generated upon his arrival. But I spend time with him anyway, every time, and imagine how much joy he gave children when they saw him 90 years ago. The stories they perhaps told of him when they reached their destination.

Little America has many things. You can buy a dreamcatcher with a skin drum where the string usually is, painted with a wolf or a horse or some other creature of this land. You can buy a children's chapter book about an indigenous boy and his adventures, or a painted cattle skull. You can buy a card game --the kind that are good for road trips, from an age before iPads were a thing. You can buy a tiger puzzle in the shape of an actual tiger. You can buy a T-shirt with the penguin cartoon character next to a "Straight Outta Wyoming" graphic and the words "Little America" below it all, which I bought for $24. How could I not? It's pure, uncut Americana, and my love of this particular genre of kitsch exists in that horseshoe area where irony wraps around into earnestness.

You can buy every kind of junk food at Little America, including flavors of popcorn that are an affront to God himself: rootbeer float, strawberry-banana, blueberry. You can buy turquoise jewelry, because it is a law that every store in the Western states must sell turquoise. You can buy an Alice in Wonderland clockwork house that allegedly makes a sound when you press on the first stair. I did not press the stair. It is 1:30 AM, and I do not want to terrorize the poor, lonely overnight clerk.

I am at Little America because I am driving from Portland, Oregon to Geneva, Ohio to watch Trump’s Patriot Games finale live. It calls to me with a siren wail that I tried and failed to ignore. I do not have time to waste looking at penguins and clockwork houses. I need to be sleeping or moving. I am barely going to make it as it is.

But of course I look. I look at all of this, every time I drive through here. It's this strange little oasis that time can't touch, a place the zeitgeist overlooked. With the sole exception of two small chud stickers, nothing in this sprawling gift shop/restaurant/convenience store is at all political. Yes, yes, I know: everything is political, the dubious indigenous souvenirs and books are political, I know. I know. But I also know that you know what I mean. You'd never know there was a culture war brewing. That's rare in Wyoming. Frankly, it's rare everywhere.

This Emperor Penguin stands guard over a tiny slice of a country also rapidly succumbing to the elements: preserved here, like the penguin, against all odds. A world of nice things, pure things, corny kitschy things that exist for no other reason than to make someone happy for a little while. Earnest Hemingway wrote a short story entitled "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and things don't work out so well for people in that story and yet this is what they wanted. This is what they hoped to find. A clean, well-lighted place.

I should not be writing this in the parking lot of Little America. I should be catching the hour of sleep I intended to grab before hitting the road and resuming my journey to the Hunger Games. Really, it's an excuse to stay here a little longer. A few extra minutes under the protection of this animal spirit. This lingering reflection of something gone forever.

Note: the original version of this post stated that Flannery O’Connor wrote “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” except thanks to phone autocorrect it was “Flannery O'Connell” for that illusive double-blunder. The extremely tired author regrets these errors and thanks the people in the comments who pointed them out with such gentle politeness.