Someone comes to fill them

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Nine kilometres from the nearest shop, on a road that carries perhaps forty vehicles a day, at the point where the valley narrows and the phone signal goes, there is a vending machine. It is lit. It is stocked. The coin mechanism works and the hot drinks are hot.

I have walked past hundreds of these and I still cannot entirely get over them.

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The machine is not there for me. It is not there for tourists, of whom there are none, and it is not there for the two houses further up, whose occupants presumably have kettles. It is there because the network says there should be a machine there, and so there is a machine there, and someone drives out once a fortnight to fill it.

That is the part I keep turning over: someone comes to fill them. Not as a metaphor — as a job. There is a van, and a route, and a person who knows this road well enough to be bored by it, restocking a machine that on a good week sells eleven drinks.

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In most countries this machine would have been vandalised, emptied, or quietly removed on economic grounds within a year. Here it hums away at the edge of a cedar plantation, its light the only artificial thing for two kilometres in either direction, waiting for somebody who may not come today.

I have started to read them as a kind of statement. Not about efficiency, obviously — nothing about this is efficient. About coverage. About the idea that a place continues to be part of the country even when almost nobody lives there, and that being part of the country means the machine gets filled.

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I bought a hot corn soup I did not especially want, because it seemed rude not to, and sat on the guardrail to drink it. The valley did the thing valleys do in the late afternoon, where the light leaves the floor first and climbs the opposite slope while you watch.

Somewhere down the road, on a schedule I will never see, a van is coming.

Posted on: August 12, 2026