The Drive Part 2

“The west is the best

get here, and we’ll do the rest”

-The Doors

Oooooh-klahoma.  

When I was in the military, they flew us from Camp Pendleton, California to Somalia, Africa.  The flight took over twenty-four hours.  Straight.  With the exception of a couple of interesting stops for refueling, the whole thing was so long and so uneventful that it is just a blur that I don’t really even remember.  

That’s how it is driving through Oklahoma on highway 60.  There are huge expanses of nothingness.  Boring for a drive, however, I tried to take some time to appreciate that. There is a special kind of nobility in that the land is unspoiled.   There are signs posted across the entire state that mark the beginning of the land set aside for specific Native American tribes.  From Choctaw to Osage to Cherokee to Pawnee.  Perhaps the kind of place I might like to settle in a later chapter of life.

A few years ago I went hiking with my daughter’s girl scout troop through a section of a wilderness preserve that marked the path of the trail of tears through Kentucky.  The next few days were miserable thanks to chiggers, but that’s beside the point for now.  Although as I reflect back, it was miserable then, too.  Sections of the trail were just a narrow path on its way to overgrown, but that’s due to the visitors and lack thereof, over the last hundred years.  The original trail had to be much wider.  The natives were moved in groups of up to a thousand people.

At one point, the path curved around a giant boulder cliff, which to the delight of some of the scouts , I simply had to climb.  They all joined me in time after finding a much simpler route.  But before they did I stood at the top and looked down upon the path.  

The light shimmered through leafy branches and I could see them.  Hundreds of them. They were dusty from the road, worn and tattered, and even the children dragged their feet.  Some wore very little clothing, and some wore thick skins and long heavy robes because they had too much else to carry.   Poles stretched between the some of the men where bundles were suspended for transport.  Many were sick with open wounds and all were hungry.   The men tried to stay brave, but not too brave, for the bravest among them had already been shot.  One woman fell.  Her black and grey hair was tied back revealing deep leathery wrinkles.  Her age may have been impossible and she was gaunt.  With her knees busted on the ground she reached up her hands and threw back her head.  Everything went black-and-white except the beads of every color around her neck, a gift made by a great granddaughter.  The cry of anguish she cast to the heavens stopped the entire movement for a mile and even the birds went mute.  The sound of the drawn out cry was melodic yet dying.  Even as the vision wavered and vanished the sound lingered.  It had a sharpness that pierced me so that I gasped, and I hurt inside with a suddenness that launched a bout of shoulder shuddering sobbing.  My eyes were closed.

The top of Texas was even less interesting with one notable exception: some eccentric millionaire had buried a row of Cadillacs  with their backs sticking up out of the sand.  Sadly, they were covered in amateur graffiti.  

Texas marked what was supposed to be the end of this leg of the journey.  With my route mapped out days earlier, hotel reservations were already in place, and I was scheduled to stop my days’ travels and check in at the-hotel-whatever in Amarillo.  The morning had come and gone and the afternoon was waning, but the sun was still bright and hot.  My left arm was noticeably more red and tender than the other thanks to its place along the driver-side window ledge.  

So I weighed my options:  I could check into the hotel in Amarillo, late afternoon, find some food, take the chance that the pool was outside and closed, flick through 40 channels of nothing to watch before ending up staring at “The Princess Bride” on HBO Family, crash early, and head out again in the morning.

Or I keep going.  Next scheduled stop-Flagstaff, Arizona.  If I made decent time, I could be there just after midnight, local time.  That would make it a sixteen hour day, but…with the time I save, I could take a small detour to the Grand Canyon tomorrow.

I knew I had made my choice when that familiar GPS-lady voice, which had been silent for so long, said “Recalculating…”

There goes my exit.  So I kept on riding the highway west.