No village in America can aspire to greatness in the 21st century without a dollar store. Parowan got its first in January: A Family Dollar with a creepy logo, like something out of Slaughterhouse Five. A place to purchase the plastic packaged rubbish of American life. Buy it, use it up, throw it on the ground. Trash now everywhere you look. Every scrap of real estate covered not with sage-brush, rabbit-brush, or even cheat grass, but with Styrofoam cups and candy wrappers, degraded by the sun into a million shards of petroleum-based detritus.
But I digress. This post is not about dollar stores. This post is about convenience stores. A whole different animal. Along with selling fuel, the convenience store is where America goes for hydration: Beer and soda pop have made us what we are. When J.C. Fremont arrived in the Parowan Valley
—long before the Civil War
—he identified the above location as a good place for a convenience store. We cannot, he intoned, defeat both the Mexicans and the British, let alone the Modoc, without a place to refill our tankards of Pepsi. At long last the developers have responded: With Parowan's third convenience store. Move over Vegas and San Berdew, we'll imitate you yet.
