ODESSA, TEXAS — Crude has spent the week hovering above $100 a barrel as tanker attacks and strike rumors out of Iran keep the market on edge, and the drivers of America have responded the way they always do: by filling up, complaining for exactly one minute, and treating the whole thing as a character test.
At the Buc-ee’s off Exit 4 in Odessa, pump prices have climbed toward five dollars, and locals describe the number with the complicated respect a rancher reserves for a difficult bull.
“$4.99,” said Dale Kuhlwein, 61, a pipeline inspector who has watched oil do this eleven times in his career. “You know what I tell my grandkids? I tell them the price ain’t the problem. The problem is thinking the price was ever anything else. My first fill-up in 1974 was thirty-two cents and I still thought it was robbery.”
The Energy Information Administration raised its price forecasts again this month as the Iran conflict drains global stockpiles, and markets have done markets things in response: Nasdaq fell 1.3 percent on the news, which is the stock market’s way of saying it, too, has to buy gas, though it buys it in futures.
What the numbers have not produced is the political panic the consultants keep predicting. That’s because high gas prices in America have never actually been an outrage. They’re a ritual. The pump is where the country goes to complain about the government in a place the government can literally see, which is why the price board is the most effective town hall in American democracy.
Economists, to their credit, mostly agree, they just say it worse. A jobs report last month added just 29,000 jobs and nudged unemployment to 4.2 percent, and wage growth has slipped below inflation, which means the average worker is technically falling behind while emotionally refusing to acknowledge the scoreboard.
THE $100 BARREL: WHAT IT BUYS YOU
- Pride: Every $1 at the pump funds roughly 18.4 cents of federal tax and one full conversation about infrastructure.
- Clarity: At $4.99, drivers report dramatically simplified worldviews. Polls unconfirmed.
- Tradition: Americans have been angry at gas prices since 1973, making it the longest-running bipartisan activity in the republic.
- Geometry: The price board is the only American billboard that gets bigger every year and nobody sues over.
Refineries, meanwhile, are running hard, tanker rates are at multi-year highs, and traders describe the mood in the pit as “annoyed the way you’re annoyed at weather.” Nobody expects the oil market to be fair. They expect it to be there.
At press time, Dale Kuhlwein had upgraded to the full-size truck, “for the torque,” he said, in the specific, which is the word a man uses for the word “the price is already paid.”