Leave It to Beaver | Forrest Wilder

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Forrest Wilder

no. 84

June 2026

Leave It to Beaver

Everything is bigger at Buc-ee’s

© James Marshall

Outbursts

The town that hosts the world’s largest convenience store smells like ass. For many decades, Luling, Texas, was regionally famous for its excellent barbecue, locally grown supersized watermelons, and the unpleasant rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide, the toxic and highly flammable byproduct of its abundant oil wells. Some locals swear they can’t detect the odor; others profess to love the smell of their own farts, bragging that it’s the “smell of money.” But today, Luling might be best known for a very, very large gas station. Four miles southeast of the town of about six thousand, rising out of the brush alongside Interstate 10, is the mother of all convenience stores—the flagship of Buc-ee’s, a Texas-based chain of “travel centers” that has become a cult phenomenon and one of the state’s most eminent brand ambassadors. The 75,593-square-foot travel center—with its 120 gas pumps, more than two hundred employees, fifty-one bathroom stalls, nineteen urinals attended 24/7 by workers who flit in and out of an “employees only” janitor’s closet, food court of cowboy-hat-wearing staff chopping brisket, clerks chirping “Welcome in” to every visitor, stacks of deer corn, $1,499 deer blinds, and racks of in-house gummy bears and jerky—has the distinct odor of caramel-coated Beaver Nuggets. But really, it smells like money.

For years, I’d assiduously avoided Buc-ee’s. My objections were part environmental, part aesthetic, part political. The bigness bothered me. The stores are monstrously large, a scourge on the Earth. At night they glow with the force of a spaceship. You know the tune “The stars at night / Are big and bright / Deep in the heart of Texas?” Well, no. The stars these days are actually pretty faint: Our once dark skies are washed out by the glow of a growth machine that pushes hideous sprawl in every direction. Buc-ee’s—previously a novelty, now an empire with fifty-four stores and counting, rapidly expanding across the South and beyond—seemed symbolic of a pave-the-planet transit policy, the crazy-making idea that evermore highways will fix congestion.

There was also my quaint Gen X attitude about the brand. Everywhere you turn in our blessed state, there’s the Buc-ee’s logo: a buck-toothed, wide-eyed, goofy-hat-wearing beaver whose idiotic, grinning likeness adorns trucks, T-shirts, tumblers, and ball caps. During Covid, the fascistic Boogaloo Boys militia masked up with Buc-ee’s bandanas. Like a prion disease, the rodent has wormed its way into the brains of grown-up men and women who go about in public wearing Buc-ee’s pajamas—demonstrating such a lack of sartorial self-respect that I almost find myself sympathetic to the Trump administration’s admonition to Americans to dress up when traveling.

Over the past three decades, Buc-ee’s founder, Arch “Beaver” Aplin III—an aw-shucks type who as a college student dreamed of building skyscrapers—has increasingly transmuted some of his fortune into campaign contributions to GOP politicians like Governor Greg Abbott, which in turn earned him a plum appointment as the chairman of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission. As Buc-ee’s has expanded outside Texas, it has sought massive tax breaks from local governments, many of them small towns desperate for any kind of economic development. But my views are not widely shared. A store in Gulfport, Mississippi, expects five million visitors a year—more than Yosemite National Park. Social media is filled with content creators posting about their Buc-ee’s visits with libidinal excitement. No less an authority than Austinite Joe Rogan has explained the appeal: “This is like if you were in the middle of a full-on cocaine binge, and...