There’s something strangely beautiful about the landscape that surrounds Interstate 20 near Odessa, Texas. It’s not that it’s particularly scenic. The views aren’t much different than much of the the American West, with arid plains and low hills stretching away in all directions, eventually meeting the unbroken dome of sky that towers overhead. Furthermore, in the case of Odessa those plains are crowded with buildings, road and oil wells, which put Odessa way down the natural beauty list.

But that, surprisingly, doesn’t really make it ugly.  When I drove through — at sunset — the darkening sky lit the buildings and power-lines up with oranges, reds, and purples. The landscape, man-made and natural alike, wore the colors well, in a way that a truly heinous stretch of country, like the I-5 south of Sacramento where it abuts a gigantic feedlot, couldn’t.

No. It took me a while to figure it out, but that stretch of I-20 bisects a celebration of petroleum. Every business along the road was an oil field services company, or a pump maker, or an earthmoving equipment rental firm. (Ironically, the business I would have thought would be the biggest, the infamous Halliburton, had the smallest office on the whole stretch). I passed at least one refinery, and a company that manufactures the giant ICBM carrier-looking derrick trucks used to drill wells.

The traffic on the road yelled oil, as well. The derrick trucks rumbled too and fro, as did flatbeds carrying bulldozers and graders. At one stage the procession was joined by a chain of trucks carrying wind turbine parts. They looked sadly out of place.

When I focused my eyes on the distance, I saw the oil pumps themselves, smoothly rocking up and down. Even so late in the day, trucks plied the dirt roads that connected them, raising rooster-tails of dust in the fading light.

The houses were different, too. Cinder blocks and corrugated metal were the norm, and often times the attached carports were as big as the house itself, crammed to overflowing with massive Chevys, Fords, and the occasional Toyota Tundra.

So why wasn’t it ugly? The evidence of industry cut a gaping gash on what should have been a lonely, majestic Texas plain.

But the scene had an unexpected appeal. Partially, I think it’s due to the town’s singularity of purpose; every person and every business has as it’s goal to wrest as much oil from the ground as possible. But I was also surprised by the names of the businesses I saw on the buildings– with the exception of Halliburton, none of which I knew. Nowhere did I see an Exxon logo, or even a Texaco– nothing that I can point to as “big oil.”

I’m sure that some of the businesses I saw were multinationals that I simply didn’t recognize, and to be fair, owning a refinery sort of makes a company “big oil” by default. But it seemed to me that much of the town was dedicated to “small oil.” A building emblazoned with “Rick’s (may have been Bob’s or Steve’s) Petroleum” looked to me like nothing more than two guys and an oil well. I just hadn’t thought that such mom and pop oil companies existed.

The small, rough and ready businesses gave town a feel of honest work and a sense of authenticity. For better or for worse,  I felt like I was watching the American experience play itself out in front of me, and though I know  the industry that supports the landscape is both irresponsible and unsustainable (hypocrisy note: I was driving my car through it), at the time that seemed irrelevent. It was kind of pretty.

Look, this isn’t a brilliant post. Neither was the experience that led me to write it very unusual. So don’t read on if you’re expecting some sort of pent-up greatness because I never update this blog. I’m only writing this because I’m happy; I was able to validate a hypothesis quite elegantly. Namely, that under certain circumstances, it is possible to derive the nature of a coffee shop from nothing more than its name and location.

I sit now in Golden Roast, a coffee shop in Knoxville, Tennessee. As I was coming up to Knoxville on I-40, I decided I wanted to do a bit of surfing “the tubes,” as Mr. Stevens so oddly called them.  So naturally, I pulled out my iPhone, and googled coffeeshop in Knoxville. I was presented by a plethora of options, from gas stations, to Starbucks, to Denny’s.

Where to go? I do not have T-Mobile, so Starbucks and its Hot Spots are out. Anyway, they burn their coffee and their  pastries leave something to be desired. However, there was another option. Knoxville is home to the University of Tennessee, and where there are college students, there will be places for them to study. Today, that means either a library or a coffeeshop with internet. Being who they are, college students will also avoid Starbucks, and instead gravitate toward independent coffeeshops near their university. And since so much of college now depends on going online, to encourage their patronage such independent coffeeshops will probably provide free WiFi to customers.

I therefore picked the coffeeshop closest to the university that was not named Starbucks or Peet’s, hoping that it would have both WiFi and good pastries. And here I sit at the Golden Roast, self-evidently online (and also fully pastried).