Hadley Bodell
Editor in Chief
“Want the bacon or sausage?” he would ask on our way up to go snowboarding early Sunday mornings.
“Bacon,” I’d say.
“Is anyone up for sodas?” some variation of a tall, broad cowboy would ask the group at swing dancing on Wednesday nights.
“I’m on my way home, Dad. Just stopping to get gas,” I’d say over the phone on the Friday we were let out for Christmas break.
It’s just a gas station.
A regular, every day Maverik.
But to some, including me, it’s more than that. It’s been the gathering place, the quick stop, and the beginning of adventures (just like their tagline suggests) for the past three years at college.
It may seem irrelevant, after all, the purpose of a Maverik is to fill gas tanks and satisfy snack cravings on road trips. Until I came to college, that was all I saw any gas station as.
But in college towns like Pocatello, Maverik becomes something else entirely. It’s a chain with hundreds of locations, but the ones nearby feel like ours.
I remember walking into a Maverik past 11 p.m. one Wednesday night after swing dancing with my best friend. Her blue Jeep sat motionless at the pump while we ran inside for sodas. Two lanky cowboys were standing in the candy aisle.
After we bought our drinks, I was sitting in the car when one of them walked up to my friend printing her receipt at the pump.
“Can I have your number?” he asked.
“I’m engaged,” she replied and we laughed and felt sorry for him the whole way home.
The one off the Fifth Avenue exit off Interstate 15 was also the beginning of nearly every day of snowboarding last season. It’s perfectly situated as the last stop before heading toward Pebble Creek, and a friend got me addicted to Maverik’s breakfast burritos.
We would blast our country music and eat bacon and sausage burritos on our way up to the mountain. Now, every time I taste one, I think of those drives and of snowboarding at Pebble in college.
I once asked a worker at the closest Maverik whose nametag read “Brandy” if we annoyed her, all twelve of us college freshmen piling into a gas station convenience store at nearly midnight.
“I love it,” she replied. And when I asked why, Brandy said, “It’s too quiet in here until y’all show up.” She smiled, the lines in her face noticeably formed, but covered by a layer of makeup.
We got pulled over one night driving back from swing dancing in Rexburg. The country road had no shoulder, so we pulled into the nearby Maverik parking lot.
Car after car piled into the Maverik behind us, filled with other college kids stopping by to get a soda or late-night snacks. They stared into the windows of the SUV. All of them rubbernecking, just trying to get a glimpse of who had gotten caught.
He let us off with a sub-$200 ticket and a “get home safely.”
The friend driving sat quietly for a moment and called his mom before we pulled away.
Another Maverik memory.
College happens on campus and in classrooms.
But some of what I’ll remember most didn’t happen there. It happened at Maverik — Adventure’s First Stop.