You’ve heard of fly-over states, but what about drive-thru towns?

One morning this week, I drove home to handle a bit of business.

Home for me is technically LaFayette, Ala., the birthplace of Joe Louis and the place where Gene Hackman winked at my little sister while he was in town filming “Mississippi Burning.”

It’s also one of “10 Small Towns in Rural Alabama That are Downright Delightful,” according to a website called onlyinyourstate.com.

So it’s a great place to hail from, even if I never actually go there. My parents live in the woods off Highway 50, which has a LaFayette mailing address but is really about 5 miles away.

The most visible town on the trip between my home in Columbus and my childhood home in “LaFayette” is Valley, Ala., where, as the sign says, “People Care and Share.”

We exit there sometimes to grab fast food, or as my children like to say, “See Kashocka.”

Kashocka is the voice you hear at the Taco Bell drive-thru menu in Valley, and the face you see when you pull around to the window. We know her name is Kashocka because it is printed on her nametag and also tattooed on her neck.

Perhaps no six people on earth make the process of ordering tacos and burritos and nachos at a drive-thru more complicated than my family, and nobody handles it better than Kashocka, whom I believe could work at NASA.

But when I’m by myself I like to get out of the car to eat, usually at McDonald’s for breakfast and Burger King for lunch. I’m not opposed to eating and driving — I’m pretty good at it — but I always learn something when I sit and eat with the locals.

There’s been a lot of talk in the past month or so about “flyover” states, the places off the radar of the national consciousness where real people struggling with real problems don’t feel like the powerful people in big cities respect them and want to help them.

It seems like small towns such as Valley are full of these real people trying to catch a break. These are drive-thru towns, really, where people zooming down interstates between big cities take an exit ramp and grab a quick meal from a window, unaware of the people inside.

But like I said, you learn something when you choose a parking space over a drive-thru queue.

Back in late summer, I drove over to do some early morning bass fishing and then stopped at the McDonald’s in Valley for breakfast.

I ate my hotcakes and sausage and drank my coffee and watched a mostly elderly clientele eat their hotcakes and sausage and drink their coffee — and read their courtesy copies of the Ledger-Enquirer.

I noticed that nearly every man there was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” cap, and nearly everyone including their wives was carefully reading the newspaper as if it contained the secrets of the universe.

Insert your joke here.

But I learned a couple of things: First, we should keep printing the news on paper, and second, Donald J. Trump was going to, at the very least, win the popular vote in Valley, Ala.

This week, I was by myself and it was lunchtime, so I parked at Burger King, under a marquee that read, “Now interviewing.”

And they weren’t kidding. It was after 1 p.m., and the place was packed.

A manager sat at a table in the middle of the dining room, calling names from a clipboard. More than 20 people were waiting to talk to her.

I just sat and ate my Whopper and watched. They were black and white, young and old, thin and thick, robust and disabled, graduates and dropouts, veterans of the military or at the very least veterans of life.

And they all really wanted a job, which was encouraging. But there was no way they were all going to get one, which was not, especially so close to Christmas.

I just sat and ate and listened. I should do it more often.

This story was originally published December 8, 2016 at 8:32 PM with the headline "You’ve heard of fly-over states, but what about drive-thru towns?."