Judith and Linda's Excellent Adventure, Episode 10: No Pants in the High Chaparral

It's 5:30 a.m. at Sumner Lake State Park in eastern New Mexico. A thousand miles from nowhere. Made it through Texas stockyard row, vowing never to eat another Steak & Shake burger, the smell of death still clinging to our nostrils even as we slowly awake the next morning. Sun not up, although light is seeping over the edges of the plateaus. 40 degrees, high chaparral chill.

Gotta pee.

Both of us. Well, three of us, actually. Tosca jumps out, too, as JJ and I fall out of the van in our PJs: hers a full suit, mine -- well, mine just the top. I slide the van door shut behind us so the puppy can't escape into the dark.

We all pee into the creosote scrub. We come back to the van. JJ looks at me.

You closed the door.

Yeah, well, I didn't want the puppy . . .

We're in big trouble.

What JJ means is that the sliding door of the van has a broken handle. We can only open it by opening one of the other doors first.

And, because we're afraid of rattlesnakes, we locked all the other doors for the night.

I look at Jack, who is sitting looking sleepy and curly in the passenger seat.

I point toward the door lock. Open the door, I tell Jack.

Jack looks at me. We are locked out in the high chaparral, without clothes, in the 40 degree morning . . .



This is Yeso, where Judith's grandparents homesteaded before moving to Oklahoma City. "Homesteading" being a very loose term for what was possible in this desert environment, beautiful as it is. We passed through Yeso later that same morning, en route to Albuqueque, the roar of the dry wind in our ears through the garbage bags ducked taped across the broken van window.

We tried to get JJ's skinny arm inside the van to unlock it, but to prevent her from becoming stuck I pried the window a little too hard, and it shattered. We're gonna be delayed but . . . at least we have our pants on.

Despite the most recent episode in our excellent adventure, I tell JJ what I've thought a million times before: if I was ever forced to leave my beloved ocean and move into the desert, this would be the desert for me. Yellow and vermillion, the New Mexican high plains, ghostly Spanish land grants and abandoned missions, and native culture sing out to me.

Red Dirt

Red powder, really. Under our nails, coating our feet, dusting our hair and making all four of us, black dogs included, into strawberry blondes. We dust off each time before stepping into the van. The wind has worn Oklahoma sandstone--as illustrated by one of the famous rose rocks, above, given to us by Judith's cousin Judy--into such a fine powder it is difficult to believe anyone ever tried to farm here. But they did: they famously busted open the land with the plow, trying to plant as many fields of wheat as they could, even as the economic cycles and over supply forced wheat prices down. As prices went down, they . . . planted more. Not dissimilarly from corn today, which is another whole story and one told best by Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. And the more they busted open the red powder land, the more it blew, resulting in a red dirt dustball the likes of which my generation is lucky to have never seen.

But Judith's family did: they were homesteaders and sheep herders and her mother remembered moving around in a wagon until they landed finally in Oklahoma City. Shown to the right are JJ and her cousin Rodger, seconds before he jets off to Germany.
I didn't have time in my last post to talk about Rodger's wife, Judy (Oklahoma is populated by Ralph's and Judy's); she has been a journalist with the Tulsa Globe for almost 40 years, and is currently their book editor. Despite its empty downtown, Tulsa--called by Rodger and others an "eastern city" for the way it was developed by eastern oil men--Tulsa is a thriving intellectual center in OK, and Judy, proud of her city, is a great example of that. I'm always awed and proud to meet anyone who has been a daily journalist for 40 years . . .

Oklahoma City, the state capital and unlike Tulsa, is what is known as a "cow town." Populated and run by cowboys, it has a "western spirit" and design unlike Tulsa. This is where JJ grew up, in a small neighborhood just outside downtown with her mother's parents, whom she called Nanny and Dada.

Oklahoma is celebrating its centennial: it is very nearly the youngest state in the nation. Centennial sounds funny to my eastern ears, educated as they were at a college founded in 1796 . . . to prepare, the Oklahoma legislature raised the money to finish building the capital building, completing its rotunda in 2002! We use it as a landmark as we drive downtown. Downtown to the Oklahoma City National Monument: other than the World Trade Centers, this is the only other place in the U.S. where a bomb has killed significant numbers of U.S. citizens: and this bomb was created and detonated by a U.S. citizen himself.


The memorial, designed by a German artist, is eerily beautiful: the street that used to run past the Alfred J. Murragh Federal Building, the block used by Timothy McVeigh to drive his van into, transformed into a reflecting pool. Chairs for each of the 168 killed in the bombing. McVeigh did not like the way in which federal agents handled David Koresh's radical Christian sect at Waco, TX (and who did, since federal agents ended up firebombing the place) and decided to seek retribution. It's really a shame the Bible has that line in there about "an eye for an eye." The Christianity with which I was raised was one of forgiveness, not vengeance: the Christianity I know doesn't support putting more of our citizens in jail than does any other nation, nor does it support the death penalty. But that's just the point: everyone has their own reading of the Bible, and so many of these readings are not about love and compassion, grace and forgiveness; so many of them are simply deadly.

So we travel on, toward Texas and New Mexico, asking: what is the "western spirit?"

Oklahoma Deco, and the Blair ** Project

The further we drive, the more apparent it becomes that landscape is etched into our bodies and souls. What else could explain JJ's connection to this barren land of short scrubby trees, flat horizons, and endless dust?! But she loves it, the way I love the gentle salt marshes of southern New England and the rocky shores of northern. She basks in the heat, I wilt. We're in her country now.

The picture above is the Blair, an apartment building where Judith's father's sister, Marie, and her husband Ray, lived; and where Judith and her cousin Rodger (both shown as specks here in front of the building) spent much beloved time. The Blair used to be surrounded by lots of other apartment buildings and stores and activity; now it is surrounded by parking lots (I'm trying not to sustain a despairing theme here, about the abandonment of america, but it ain't easy). Downtown Tulsa is a ghost town, its gorgeous Art Deco buildings, built during the oil boom of the 1920s, largely deserted now, especially on weekends. It reminds me of downtown Houston: all the life is in the suburbs and the malls to the south. To use these incredibly beautifully ornamented structures for modern business or life requires rewiring and retrofitting that apparently few are willing to take on. So here we are, in the city where Judith and Rodger ran wild as kids, eating free cake and sitting in at courthouse trials: and it is largely an empty parking lot.

Rodger went on to be a long term state representative, and speaker pro tem of the house here in Oklahoma; and then major of Tulsa, pop. app. 330,000. He speaks Portuguese and Spanish fluently and is, how we say in our country, an interesting character. He is off this Sunday morning for Germany, where he is teaching a class in human relations. Currently he heads a department at the University of Oklahoma he self titled as Democracy and Culture in Human Relations. A good reminder that we all need to create our own dream jobs!

We head down to Oklahoma City later today. I am curious about the heartland location where a federal building was bombed: it is so abstract to me, I am eager to place it. Eager, too, to visit Judith's father's grave. More family pictures to come --

Inspiring Theater Tales, Part 2

We promised all our beloved family members back in Maine we wouldn't stop at every Opera House along our route, but this one, in Van Buren, Arkansas, at the Oklahoma state line, we could not resist. Above, Stonington Opera House meets King Opera House; at right, the interior of the lobby.
Built and converted into an Opera House in the late 19th century, around the same time as ours and for the same purposes: vaudeville and film. Van Buren has a historic, active Main Street! Yeah!

Tomorrowland

We're excited to arrive in Nashville. I can see Loretta Lynn as she comes onto the Grand Ol' Opry stage for the first time. And Johnny Cash. The Carter Family. Minnie Pearl! Howww - dy! Buck Owens and his stars-n-stripes guitar. These were the icons of my growing up years; and my mother to this day, at 84, is glued in front of Country Music TV (OK, which to me sounds like pop radio, but who's to say??).

Not to mention, we are on the Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant trail. Our pals (see post below) came out here last spring to perform at the Frist Center for the Arts, in coordination with a Picasso-Matisse exhibit.

Like any visitor by car, we first get caught in the concentric swirling circles of highways, looped around the city like multiple strands of wooden beads (can't really say pearls, much as one might like to!). Working our way in, and in, and in: is there a there there?! Signs for Opryland and the Grand Ol' Opry and Opry Mills Drive; the city towers are still far off, but we careen off the exit as directed.

What we've got here is a mall; actually, more than a mall, a Disneyland. It turns out that the staggering number of visitors to the opry has caused them to rebuild it as a theme park, well outside the city itself. ! who knew?! I feel as if I have not been paying attention. Surely my aunt and uncle have visited, have told me this.

We drive by the ginormous Outdoor World building (irony not lost); the multiplex; the Grinch Ice Show; the box that is now the Grand Ol' Opry itself. We drive through the parking lot and out without stopping.

We need a downtown. Please. Somewhere. Anywhere. But first, for JJ, a Steak 'n Shake.

It turns out we have to go 30 miles south of the city for lunch at the latter, but we do. There is nothing so good as memory food. Hopefully we will naturally run into others along the route: thick shakes, shoe string fries, black and white tiles with gleaming stainless steel fixtures, thin thin thin steakburgers, no ketchup in sight this is the south they don't use it, JJ tells me. The waitress's voice is so preternaturally high we can barely have her talk to us, but we persevere and eat our steakburgers, me while reading Rick Moody on the Bible.

Now into Nashville. I am convinced there is an "old music" section of the city; I know for sure Loretta Lynn did not make her historic teen age debut at the mall we just visited. And sure enough, we find a beautiful historic train depot (now turned into a hotel); a grand classical post office (now become the Frist Center for the Visual Arts); and then a series of glass towers and boxes with rocket-shaped accoutrements atop them . . . we seem to have entered the Tomorrowland section of Disneyland. We enter one of the rocket ships, a glass paneled, triangular pod attached to a huge box that is the performing art center. Rows upon rows of self-serve electronic ticketing agents--maybe this IS the train station?? No, Stevie Wonder will be here in December . . . we talk to a nice blonde young man (we are definitively in blonde country now, and when I point this out to JJ she says yes, she was amazed when she came east, everyone was small and dark, the sky was small and dark, the people small and dark) who points across the street. Sure enough, at the foot of all the glass towers, we see a bulky brick building with cream trim. This, now renamed as some auditorium, was first built as a gospel house and was then for many years Music City: the place to which the legendary country stars pulled up in their black Cadillacs and two-toned rusted sedans and made their debuts. "They bring the Opry back here in the winter," the young man says, smiling. He then points out the Country Music Hall of Fame: another giant cement and glass box, this one adorned by cement artifice to suggest, maybe?, a piano, down the opposite block.

We go take a picture of the old Music City (above). Then we leave Tomorrowland behind us.