Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (38 page)

Those huge late-nineteenth-century land runs, repeated several times across the territory, might look benign compared to the immense giveaways of America to railroads, mining consortiums, and cattle barons. At least, as some Oklahomans point out, the people making the runs were predominantly landless and impoverished, although that meant once “landed,” they still lacked resources to turn their newly got soil into successful farms. “The ground is free,” somebody should have said, “but the plow will cost you sixty dollars. And then you gotta buy a mule. Don’t forget seed.” And so forth until you reach the tax man.

The aboriginal lands not “opened” by runs came onto the market in another, more furtive manner called
allotment,
whereby individual Indians were granted title to a parcel of their own tribal realty either to farm or dispose of as they wished. Growing up in a culture believing soil cannot rightly be owned by an individual, and having little knowledge of or interest in farming, many economically distressed Indians let go of their allotment, selling it to whites, so that four generations later a number of tribes began trying to reconstitute themselves by reassembling land once theirs by treaty.

A large segment of the people making the runs came out of the southern Appalachians and the Ozarks. Those citizens (Indians were not then citizens) brought along a fierce laissez-faire outlook that, to my eyes and ears, is still evident along the Oklahoma byways. There you can find both Mountain and Southern tinctures in the speech of residents who mix a penchant for the friendly conversation of Dixie with the openness of the West, their discourse touched by the relaxed attitude toward existence not uncommon among tribal Americans. A visitor who can smile, speak, and listen is not long a stranger in Oklahoma, a happy aspect of traveling the state.

But there’s another aspect, one I believe also related to the early history of the runs and the people who made them; it’s an attitude of disconnection, a notion that land is expendable, almost disposable, a thing you can use and walk away from. In such dislocation and displacement, I see ancient nomadic peoples intermixed with some make-a-quick-buck settlers. Washington Irving, in an unusual accommodation for an author, accompanied an 1832 military expedition sent into Indian Territory to cool a little native unrest. As he and the mounted rangers neared the end of their long journey, Irving, in his
A Tour on the Prairies,
wrote about breaking an overnight bivouac west of Fort Gibson:

I always felt disposed to linger until the last straggler disappeared among the trees and the distant note of the bugle died upon the ear, that I might behold the wilderness relapsing into silence and solitude. In the present instance, the deserted scene of our late bustling encampment had a forlorn and desolate appearance. The surrounding forest had been in many places trampled into a quagmire. Trees felled and partly hewn in pieces and scattered in huge fragments; tent-poles stripped of their covering; smoldering fires with great morsels of roasted venison and buffalo meat standing on wooden spits before them, hacked and slashed by the knives of hungry hunters; while around were strewed the hides, the horns, the antlers and bones of buffaloes and deer, with uncooked joints and unplucked turkeys left behind with that reckless improvidence and wastefulness which young hunters are apt to indulge when in a neighborhood where game abounds. In the meantime a score or two of turkey-buzzards, or vultures, were already on the wing, wheeling their magnificent flight high in the air, and preparing for a descent upon the camp as soon as it should be abandoned.

Lest an idealistic reader think the nomadic tribes conducted their stopovers with a greater prudence, here’s an 1840 description by Victor Tixier from
Travels on the Osage Prairies,
his superb account of Plains Indian life at the coming of the Euro-Americans. The hunting camp he describes was not far from the place Irving spoke of:

Day by day our encampment became more disagreeable. A dead horse lay only a few steps beyond the camp, and not far distant another had perished after a rattlesnake bite. An insufferable stink rose from the two carcasses and from the drying skin and the discarded meat. The Osages throw out meat the second day after butchering an animal; in our plenteous living, you can reckon how much we wasted. The grass had become quite scant thereabouts, and the camp was full of manure the horses left around their pickets. Our long sojourn allowed a frightening number of dreadful insects to multiply, and several dogs became rabid. The great heat dried up many of the springs, and the horses and boys turned the few remaining into flowing mud. It became imperative to carry our lodgings to another place.

The itinerary Q and I took across Oklahoma was through a land of conspicuous improvidence, despite the many and various exhortations to residents to place their lives into the hands of a Providence upon whom no human eyes have yet been laid. Perhaps it’s an imperfection in me that along the way I found it difficult to look beyond the roadsides to the far hills made lovely by distance because of what I kept seeing
between
the churches, with their warnings of eternal perdition: miles of abandoned buildings, of decaying house-trailers steadily vanishing under glomerations of cast-off appliances, toys, rusted vehicles (autos, busses, riding mowers, tractors, trucks, a bulldozer, a crane, a forklift), and a plethora of cheap things (shopping bags to wading pools) made from petroleum which the state pumped from beneath all that spent material. For a connoisseur of piles, stacks, and heaps, there were aggregations of broken-up asphalt pavement, chainsawed trees, used tires, raw red earth, oil-field pipes, galvanized ductwork, broken concrete blocks, aluminum siding, and one remarkable stack of refrigerators topped by a ragged American flag flapping a conqueror’s tired glory over the rummage.

Some of the scrap mounds, as if emblems of the hills the ancestors hailed from, were festively entwined with poison ivy, the Western answer to kudzu that has served to cover over derelictions in the South. More than one enterprising person had set up a sign near an accumulation of things and called it a flea market. Above the door to one shack were scythe blades crossed in a heraldic manner as if sabers from Shiloh. Those folk knew the American method of getting rid of what a thrifty Scot might call clamjamfry was not to try to give it away but to attach a price of eye-catching cheapness. Anybody can pass up a rusted scythe or a chromed hubcap if it’s free, but ask a dime for it, and it becomes irresistible.

One merchant had brought scatterings into an actual building called the Cheapo Depot, and indeed, the route looked like an open-air depot or an abandoned siding where the last train out of Land’s End had passed through to empty hopper cars hauling the dregs and dross, the clinkers and sinters of our time. From the gigantic mounts of tailings dug out of the exhausted mines near Picher and for miles on beyond were long stretches where the roadsides seemed worn out, used up, and depleted beyond recovery. Any home or farm pleasantly in order only made the surround of rubble and decay stand forth as does a gold tooth next to a rotten one ready for extraction.

Amidst it all were New Hope or New Life or New Hereafter “worship centers” built with the architectural lines of an auto-body shop, many of them topped by undersized, tacked-on, cheapo-depot steeples far too small; they had the appearance of a father at his kid’s fourth birthday party: befuddled dad under one of those little, shiny, conical hats with an elastic strap, he looking not so much a dunce in the corner as a fool on a stool.

Several metal-sided churches (once called by an uncharitable acquaintance “Tin-Can Temples of Ready Redemption,” which was only marginally gentler than her “Tin Temples of Tax-Exempt Bias”) announced the availability inside of
The
Truth, that very thing escaping all other temples. (Loathe thy neighbor — or at least his views.) Other New Hereafters recommended the desirability of life everlasting and noted its perquisite of salvation, although what the area needed was salvage.

The nation, the world, stands prepared with the Salvation Army, but where’s a Salvage Army? A quest for life eternal, contended Gus Kubitzki, who freely admitted his limitations in speculative metaphysics, was spiritual avarice. “Fourscore and ten,” claimed he, “ought to be enough for anybody.” He himself, however, did fudge a bit, dying in his ninety-second year, but his daughter denied him at least one everlasting existence — a second life not postulated, but as real and certain as earth — when she refused to fulfill Gus’s wish his ashes be added to the mulch of his rose garden.
^*
Today I’d like to have a blossom resurrected from some of his oxidized dust so I could imagine a few recycled atoms of his right arm which helped me at age eleven break in my new catcher’s mitt. There’s a clear possibility (he himself might say), until evidence appears to controvert it, a human’s best chance for something approximating life everlasting lies in the memory of others. There I go again, speaking of our tracks.

Q and I persevered on into a darkening morning until, not far from Sulphur, Oklahoma, I saw two signs of hope, one writ small and the other sculpted large. The first was
LAWN MOR£ BLADES SHARPEND.
Now there was a fellow aware of a time when a scythe didn’t need throwing away, because it got steadily used and sharpened out of existence. The second, a tall sculpture perhaps made of recast mower and scythe blades, was a colossal human-hand rising from the earth to reach toward the heavens. On the uplifted index-finger pointing skyward rested a tremendous, steel butterfly.

Sulphur was Sulphur Springs until the citizens lowered the water-table enough to dry up nearly all the artesian sources that had refreshed and restored Indians for centuries and whites for a generation; gone were springs like Medicine and Bromide. When the mineral flowings ceased and the spas depending on them vanished, Muskogee Avenue began a slow slide from the prosperous to the desperate, although one source, a drilled one, yet remained to leak a lightly sulfurous vapor over downtown. We followed the odor to Vendome Well, formerly the fount of a large swimming pool (long gone), where we came upon a woman filling plastic jugs. I tried the water. It tasted like Hell — that is, brimstone — and I asked how she was able to get it down. “I don’t drink it. My dogs drink it, and when they do they’re not bothered by ticks. But I know a power-company lineman who’s in the brush a lot, and he drinks it and says he’s tick-free.”

On the day we were in Sulphur, the Chickasaw tribe had recently finished clearing an entire town block, once the site of the old Artesian Hotel, to build a casino called Cash Springs. (A man said, “They want your brain to think
Cash-in-o,
but you know who does the cashing in.”) Since it was Indians themselves who deeded to white men for safekeeping the vale where most of the artesian springs used to rise, the Chickasaws are smart to recognize a new way to cash in on the hope of a life restored and resurrected by another outpouring, this one from a jackpot, a dream only slightly more certain than life everlasting.

West of Sulphur (the town that traded in its national park for a national recreation area) and not far from an enterprise called Junk City, USA, was the Treasure Valley Casino, another of a baker’s dozen owned by the Chickasaws who were happily fulfilling an Anglo urge to convert savings accounts into coins to drop into blinking, dinging machines that in return give a “player” a fleeting glance at little, electronic pictures. Indian slots are, possibly, a part of a Celestial Redemption Plan to take the territory back from usurpers for repatriation through realty purchases funded by small wheels going round and round as if they were land titles. Some Indians and whites alike believe the age-old mineral springs — briefly entrusted to no-deposit/no-return citizens who exhausted them in only a century — should now be given back to those who once knew how to keep them. Call it recycling.

12

A Quest for Querques

C
ROSSING THE RED RIVER
into Texas from Oklahoma is like stepping out a back door onto an avenue instead of an alley, and the difference has little to do with prosperity but much to do with definitions of self and our place in the scheme of things. While I enjoy Oklahomans, I’ve never crossed the Red River southward without a bit of relief and a renewed respect for Lone-Star stewardship. The Texas waysides and the structures and landscape along them all looked flat-out better taken care of. If the alleged Texan braggadocio wants to proclaim its land ethic — at least in comparative terms — only the dim-sighted would try to gainsay it. Dizzy Dean once spouted something along the lines of “It ain’t braggin if you done it.”

Our route toward southern New Mexico was through the lower end of the Great Plains, formerly called by Anglo-Americans the Great American Desert, a land underlain by the Ogallala Aquifer which — were it on the surface and open water — would cover a larger area than the Great Lakes. (It could fill Lake Erie nine times.) The rolling and fertile savannah atop the Ogallala is the thorax and abdomen of America: we breathe it, we digest it. The Osage and Pawnee and dozens of other tribes were unaware of the immense reservoir held in erosional outwash from the Rocky Mountains, as was also Zebulon Pike who wrote in 1810, “These vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time equally celebrated as the sandy desarts of Africa.” For many years, his view appeared to be remarkably shortsighted, but with contemporary agriculture having so significantly lowered the Ogallala and turned loose a conjugation of problems reaching well beyond it, Pike’s words now seem to be foresight.

From the Red River near Quanah, Texas, Q and I struck a staggered, forty-five-degree angle composed of numerous left turns followed twenty minutes later by a right turn and thirty minutes after that by another left turn, then a right again; in such a manner we “descended” southwesterly, always heading only due south or due west across the lower Panhandle of Texas. We were following back roads that rarely deviated from the Jeffersonian township-and-range system, staying within the grid as if it were a hog fence.