Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,13

largely of air, soft serve can’t survive a freezer. You can’t buy soft serve in a carton. Every cone requires an excursion into the world.”

Something poignant churns here. In his Texas-themed semiautobiography, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, the writer Larry McMurtry of Lonesome Dove fame regards the arrival of Dairy Queen stores in the late 1960s as an antiserum for a West Texas desert climate that wasn’t just physically parched, but socially arid:

What I remember clearly is that before the Dairy Queens appeared the people of the small towns had no place to meet and talk; and so they didn’t meet or talk, which meant that much local lore or incident remained private and ceased to be exchanged, debated, and stored as local lore.…

The Dairy Queens, by providing a comfortable setting that made possible hundreds of small, informal local forums, revived, for a time, the potential for storytelling.

McMurtry recounts sitting with his Dr Pepper and lime and marveling as “all day the little groups in the Dairy Queen formed and re-formed, like drifting clouds.” There were cowboys and roughnecks, “men of all crafts and women of all dispositions,” the early-rising oilmen and the late-rising courthouse crowd, and the idle gossipers. “These Dairy Queens combined the functions of tavern, café, and general store; they were simple local roadhouses where both rambling men and stay-at-homes could meet.”

There’s a real and true romantic sentiment in the notion (or self-styled delusion) of America as rugged, unspoiled by pretentious wants, and unscarred by ugly history. As the railroads effaced the plains and cars brought more and more people out of isolation, the small town replaced the frontier as the avatar of down-home American virtue. Somewhere along the way, Dairy Queen became enmeshed in that Rockwellian tapestry. A humble pit stop founded in a small Midwestern town on Route 66 with ice cream and our cherished national values on the menu board.

Now if that all sounds a bit ridiculous, tune your radio dial to a country-music station, where DQ gets name-checked in song lyrics nearly as often as dusty roads, tailgates, starry nights, and dashboard lights. This is certainly helped by the fact that Dairy Queen offers some country-ready rhyming options. Here’s a sampling of how the chain has been paired in country songs over the years: front porch swing (George Strait, Craig Morgan), seventeen (Alan Jackson, Trace Adkins, Pat Green), Jean / Sara Jean (John Waite / Joey + Rory), Lake Lurlene (Michelle Malone), gasoline (Rick Trevino), I ever seen (Ty England), and state champs ’63 (Brett Eldredge). Of course, more than just its rhyming versatility, this also has to do with what Dairy Queen represents.

For example, Randy Travis’s toe-tapper “No Reason to Change” drops this jangly couplet: “Been a whole lot of times when times were lean / A big night out was the Dairy Queen.”* And though she’s never sung about it, Martina McBride, the so-called Celine Dion of Country, actually left the family farm at sixteen to work at a Dairy Queen in Hutchinson, Kansas, along her way to stardom. However, the brightest blue ribbon for the most hickory-smoked Dairy Queen tribute goes to Neal McCoy’s “Last of a Dying Breed,” a three-minute love letter to small-town goodness that unleashes several awe-inspiring fusillades of country clichés. In the money verse, McCoy mentions hay balers, overalls, farmer tans, and the VFW hall before shouting out “the fruit-stand sellers, town-square dwellers / Who gather at the Dairy Queen at dawn.”

The meaning behind these references fits seamlessly within a musical genre that’s obsessed with American mythology, defiant, relatable authenticity, and a bygone, sun-faded way of life. Country is beset by clichés because the clichés have the grit of ordinary truth. As the writer Leslie Jamison once argued, “Clichés lend structure and ritual and glue” and serve as “the subterranean passageways connecting one life to another. They obstruct alibis of complexity and exceptionality, various versions of the notion ‘It’s different for me.’” Indeed, McCoy’s image of small-town workers meeting up at a Dairy Queen at dawn is real and based on something true to life about the way people gather.*

This is at least partially why the backlash against fast food—the official, longest-lasting fuel of the American everyday—has such an elitist chill to it. In many places, fast-food restaurants serve as low-stakes venues for low-stakes congregation. It’s what Larry McMurtry saw. And it’s also what Warren Buffett saw when he decided to purchase Dairy Queen in 1998. “I’ve been running a quality check for decades,” Buffett