Last week, while driving southwest from Montana to Utah, I spotted a metal green sign off the highway. It resembled those used to direct traffic into exit lanes, but smaller, and lower to the ground. “New trees,” it read. “1993.” How kind, I thought to myself. Whoever stuck the sign there wanted us to know that these pine trees (par for the course in this stretch of Idaho) were not that much older than we are.
I began to notice other signs, which, once out of the woods, became billboards. After three months in rural Montana—in which most of my exposure to the outside world was primarily through the medium of a screen—I had come to consider all advertising as uniquely geared toward my personal motivations and insecurities: things like (if you were wondering) readymade smoothie companies, online classes on Donna Haraway’s entire oeuvre, a grocery subscription that will ship imperfect produce to my doorstep each month. Even fixed ads on podcasts are self-selecting, too, in a way. Health and wellness shows beget ads on the same; narrative-driven shows advertise other narrative-driven shows.
But out in the real world, old-school ads were alive and well. Near the northern edge of Utah, there were several for DuckDuckGo, the privacy protection browser that reminded me that the government is probably still keeping tabs on my increasingly banal quarantine activity. In Salt Lake, the freeway was dotted with ads from Young Living, the multilevel essential oil marketing scheme that’s apparently been capitalizing on COVID to recruit brand ambassadors. The selling point of this recurring ad was thieves oil, the supposed cure-all for the common cold, dirty homes, stress. I imagined many Utah mothers under lockdown in their homes, rubbing thieves oil on their children’s feet, and then felt shame in my judgement over something to which I did not even bear witness.
The through line, of course, was Cracker Barrel, whose ads speckled the drive from start to finish. There is something comforting about the ubiquity of the Cracker Barrel billboards, which are always the same: a brown pop-art image of an old man leaning upon a barrel, or a rocking chair. Good food and good company. Good deals, too. I wondered how many people dining at Cracker Barrel were wearing masks, and pictured all the crystallized rock candy and knick-knacks near the cash register.
At a time when my mood flips like an on-off switch between Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia and Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher (which is to say, the way I feel about the world can be very black and white, and distilled through my particular worldview), bearing witness to billboards that weren’t specifically curated for me was… nice. Of course it’s depressing, too, in that sick-to-your-stomach way all advertising is. I wish all roadside signs could be remarks on trees. But to be sold something you actually know you do not want, or once wanted, but no longer do—it’s liberating, in some tiny and perhaps American way.
As always, thank you for reading. ‘Til next time!
Surya