The Road to Oklahoma
We are heading Northwest out of Midland on I-20 to visit friends in Oklahoma City, a little over six hours away. We’ve discovered a new podcast, Boomtown, a glimpse at the history and current landscape of the Permian Basin as told through oil and gas. Our car disappears between big rigs, coming and going from service companies, drill sites, and wells that flank the interstate. An endless train filled with sand runs parallel to us on the tracks.
Sand for fracking, my husband tells me, as the podcast’s narrator speaks of pumpjacks and politics. Commerce. Miles of it. Booming.
Photo by Marie Puddu/iStock / Getty Images
The road continues like this for almost two hours before the interstate dies off. The horizon flattens, save the soaring wind turbines that form an industrial forest in the emptiness. The residual pumpjacks are dwarfed in their shadows. A metaphor? Perhaps.
As we head North, abandoned buildings outnumber the occupied. I find this part of Texas lonely and beautiful. Old homes and closed businesses lean towards the earth, succumbing to gravity. I think about the life that used to hold them up. Someone dining there. A first paycheck. Couples making love to keep warm. Each frayed beam building towards a dream. Now it feels like even the ghosts are gone.
We plan to stop at the next town for gas, relief and snacks. A sign on the highway warns us not to pick up hitchhikers – they might be escaped convicts. Their words, not mine. I search for nearby prisons, a habit I have developed on road trips through Texas. We pass a few on our way, all low security. One has housed a few ‘notable’ convicts – a PI to the stars accused of wiretapping and money laundering. A cartel weapons dealer. The Toxic Pharmacist from a CNBC special. Another is an ICE facility. It has 13 reviews on Google. I read them.
I was held Prisoner here for 2 years, the government of the united states took my sanity, freedom, i lost my 19th and 20th years here, all for nothing, now i have lost my family....all for not even choosing to live in this country, eventually i was deported from here. Greetings to all those i met here and may you all have prosperous lives.
Red clay turns over into farmland. A longhorn lifts its head with a mouth full of grass as our motor hums by. The other hundred cattle lounge, undeterred.
http://pitchertaker.blogspot.com/2011/05/
I think about how far we are from New York, how unfamiliar I remain with my own country, and how this must be what people in New York picture when I tell them where I live. I think about the man in the modified track home we pass with broken car parts spilling in all directions from his front porch. I bet he went to school here. I bet his father built that house. I bet everyone in this 203 population town knows each other by name and kin. I bet that man doesn’t want to give up his guns to anyone. I am certain he doesn’t give a lick what I think.
We slip back onto the interstate at the border of Texas and Oklahoma in Wichita Falls. Traffic manifests again, alongside us and overhead. My husband picks up where our podcast left off, telling me stories about the rise of Oklahoma City as an oil and gas economy, the nebulous work and life of Aubrey McClendon, all of it sounding like the plot of some long-lost Steinbeck novella. As downtown comes into view, I think about the thread that connects this skyline to ours, these tall cities that serve as monuments to pioneers and visionaries, and the spaces in between, the ones we pass over and through, filled with buildings and people history forgets.
But who would we be without them?
