The fuel light came on in the flat part of the afternoon, and the exit I took was not the one I had planned on. It was the one before it, because I did not trust the gauge to give me another eleven miles. The ramp curled down into a town of maybe nine hundred people and I pulled into a station with two pumps and a hand-lettered sign saying the ice machine had been broken since June. I expected to be there six minutes. I left four hours later with a sunburn and a paper sack of tomatoes somebody sold me out of a cooler.
That has happened often enough that I stopped calling it luck. Somewhere in the fifteen or so years I have spent driving the long middle of trips, I built a rough system for deciding whether a town gets twenty minutes or a whole afternoon. It is not a good system. It is wrong about a third of the time. But it beats the thing most people do, which is glance at the exit sign, see no logos they recognize, and keep the cruise control set.
The gas station tells you more than the welcome sign
Every town puts its best sentence on the sign at the edge of it. Population, founding year, whatever the high school won in 1997. None of that is current information. The gas station is current.
I look at three things while the pump runs. First, whether the hot case has anything in it at two in the afternoon, and whether that anything looks like it was made this morning by a person who works here. A rotating cabinet of taquitos means the town is a fuel stop. A tray of foil-wrapped burritos with masking tape labels means somebody’s aunt has an arrangement with the owner, which means the owner is embedded in the place.
Second, whether the person at the register is talking to anyone. Not to me. To someone else. If there is a conversation happening across the counter that started before I walked in and continues after I pay, that is a town where people run into each other on purpose.
Third, whether there is a bulletin board, which I will get to.
Count the cars, not the buildings
A main street can look completely full and be completely dead. Facades survive longer than the businesses behind them. Brick lasts a century, a bookkeeping office lasts eight years.
So I stopped counting storefronts and started counting vehicles. At two on a weekday, how many are parked along the main block? What kind? Work trucks with ladder racks and tool boxes mean people are employed within driving distance and come into town during the day. Out-of-state plates in a cluster mean a tourist economy, which is fine but tells me something different. An entire block of beautifully restored buildings with four empty diagonal spaces in front of them means somebody spent money on this street and the street has not spent any back.
The worst sign is a main street where every parked car belongs to someone who works on that street. You can tell after twenty minutes because nothing moves. Same six vehicles at 2:10 and at 2:40.
The bulletin board is the honest version
Whatever board exists, at the station, outside the post office, in the entryway of the grocery, is the most reliable document in town. Nobody curates it. Nobody is trying to attract me.
I read the dates before I read the content. A board where the newest flyer is from two summers ago tells me the town has stopped producing events. A board with something happening next Saturday, even something small, even a pancake breakfast at a fire hall, tells me there are people here who still organize things and expect other people to show up.
Tear-off tabs matter too. A flyer with all its tabs still attached has been ignored. A flyer with four gone has interested four households. That is a real number, and it is a number nobody was performing for me.
The read I keep getting wrong
Here is my most reliable mistake, and I made it again last spring.
I came off the highway into a place where the first street I hit had three vacant storefronts, a bank building with plywood in the transom, and a laundromat. I gave it four minutes and got back on. Sixty miles later, at another station, a guy filling a work van heard where I had come through and told me the highway got rerouted in the seventies and everything real is two blocks north on the old road. The whole town I had judged was the part the town itself had abandoned.
I had done that at least twice before and forgotten the lesson both times. Now I drive two blocks in and one block over before I decide anything. It costs ninety seconds.
The opposite error is easier to make and harder to admit. I have over-trusted a good-looking main street more than once. There was one with a full block of restored storefronts, flower baskets on the light poles, the whole picture. It was five antique malls, all of which closed at three, and a coffee place that only took exact change and was out of coffee. I had built my afternoon around that street from the highway. I got forty minutes out of it.
Three questions, in order
When I want a fast answer I ask myself these, standing on the sidewalk.
Can I buy something here that is not packaged food? A hardware store, a feed store, a bakery, anywhere goods move because people need them, means the town still supplies itself instead of driving forty minutes to supply itself.
Is there anywhere people are sitting down? Not a bench. A table, a counter, a booth. Sitting down means staying, and staying means talking.
Is anyone under forty on the street? This one is blunt and I feel bad about it, but it is the strongest single predictor I have found of whether the town will look like this in ten years.
Two out of three, I stay for the afternoon. One out of three, I get lunch and go. Zero, I usually leave.
And then sometimes I stay anyway
Usually because of light. Late afternoon in September does something to a street of two-story brick that I have never gotten tired of, and I will burn an hour on a town that failed all three questions just to sit on a curb while it happens.
Sometimes because I am tired and the alternative is another two hours of interstate. Sometimes because a place is so plainly at the end of something that leaving quickly feels like a small rudeness.
I try to remember that none of these towns owe me a reason to stop. They are not attractions. They are where a few hundred people keep their stuff and raise their kids and eventually get buried, and my system for grading them in five minutes is a convenience I invented for myself. It helps me spend my time. It does not tell me what a place is. Twice now I have gone back to a town my own system rejected and found out I was reading a street the residents had stopped caring about years ago.