Because Google said this drive would take just under 6 hours, I assumed it'd take me at least 10. That thought got me out of bed by about 2:30 this morning - not able to stop my mind from thinking about the drive. As a result, we were on the road by 7:00.
I did my best to go as fast as the speed limits, knowing the projected driving time was based on that assumption, but almost the whole drive was across Oklahoma, and I discovered their roads are underfunded. I had to go at least 50 mph to make the bumps easier to take, but when I tried to go 70 mph we'd all get shaken to pieces.
Despite that, we still made the trip in 7 hours, including a 1-hour stop for lunch in a church parking lot in Atoka. That was our 2nd stop. The first was in Wagoner, just north of Muskogee, for about 20 minutes in another church parking lot to get a little exercise and relieve ourselves. Each stop was 2 hours from each other, so we never drove more than about 2 hours, which seemed to be the limit for all of us - at least on bumpy roads like these.
I heard someone on the radio say this all seemed like it was in a dream and that she can't believe all this is really happening. That echoed something Anna'd said to me yesterday when I told her how weird it felt not knowing whether anyone might be an unknowing carrier of this virus, or even a knowing but uncaring one. Anna said it made the world seem a little creepy to be in, and that pretty well sums it up for me. Fighting something none of us can see or has ever known; something that can kill almost before we know we've got it; something that you can have for even 2 weeks before you start showing symptoms of it - and spreading those germs that whole time. Very creepy, eerie.
I'm starting to realize how isolated I've been, living as I have. I have no concept of what the shelter-in-place order has actually meant to people in real life who've been living this way for weeks. Maybe I'm about to find out.
On the road
Google wanted me to go for nearly an hour on a toll road and, since I didn't want to do that, I found an alternate route on some lesser roads. This route first took me through the town of Seneca, pop. 2,239, which seemed to be a nice old town - one with an attractive downtown that was clearly built about 100 years ago or more and lots of houses from the same era.
Seneca sits right on the Missouri/Oklahoma border, and I was shortly in the Wyandotte Nation.
I passed several casino/hotel combos during today's drive, including the River Bend Casino right here. They were all completely empty and their enormous parking lots looked like ghost towns. Very strange look - a little Twilight Zone-ish.
I passed many fields with cows today, and the first one came here. I saw lots of young cows gathering at a gate, obviously expecting something, though I couldn't figure out what.
I was on US Route 60 most of the day, and most of that route is extremely bumpy. Combined with the very strong winds that hadn't abated from yesterday, it all gave me a very difficult drive all day long.
I heard a couple of stories on NPR about ventilators. One was an interview of the owner of a company that made one of the valves that's among the 70 parts in a ventilator. The small business owner hadn't had access to the supply chain necessary to get the parts to make his valve, and even when he didn't have work to give them was paying his employees out of his own pocket so they wouldn't be out of work. But when GM was retooling their plant to produce ventilators, they put out a call for these parts, which gave this small business owner access to GM's vast network of suppliers, which got him the supplies he needed to produce his valves. And his own plant retooled to produce these valves at far greater speed and numbers than they ever had before. He was proud of what his workers were able to accomplish.
The other story was about the shortage of respiratory therapists, who are the only ones trained to run the ventilators. The therapist they were interviewing said recent news stories frustrated him because you'd never know from those stories that it took a trained specialist to run the machines. Even if we could catch up on the backlog of machines that are needed but don't yet exist, there wouldn't be a qualified person to run them. They were encouraging folks to get the training needed to do the job.
I had no idea this was all so complicated, though since it's medical stuff, I guess that figures.
I passed the Miller Pecan Company. They advertise themselves as a family company that's produced farm-fresh pecans since 1988. We had so many pecan trees in our yard in Austin that the idea of "farm-fresh" in connection with pecans seems odd.
I passed a house with a small pasture right next to the house. What caught my eye was that one of the cows in the pasture was no longer in the pasture - it got loose as I watched. I was driving down the road past this scene and saw out of the corner of my eye that the farmer himself was coming out of his house onto his porch, but by then the cow was free and running - actually galloping along between the pasture fence and the road. I never saw a cow gallop, but that's what it was doing. I have no idea how that farmer's going to catch the cow. It was making tracks!
I heard Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition report that a semi had a one-vehicle accident just north of Dallas, that the driver and his dog had gotten out safely but that his cargo had burned. Steve said the tragic part was that the truck was loaded with toilet paper, and it got burned before it could get flushed.
OK has a town named Pensacola, and one named Pryor, "A Town For All Seasons," they proclaim. They have a museum in the Old Katy Depot. I connect the Katy railroad with Texas, probably because of the town of Katy near Houston, but I see it ran as far north as Kansas and Missouri and was originally called the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad (MKT - hence Katy).
There was a radio report that oil price drops had contributed to the virus-induced slowdown of the economy to produce a severe budget shortfall in OK this year. OK has a balanced budget requirement, so they'll have some hard decisions to make, once this is all over.
I saw a billboard warning folks against E. coli. My, how times change.
I heard an interview with the governor of Arkansas where he was justifying not issuing a statewide stay-at-home order by saying that people weren't following those orders anyway and there were too many loopholes in them to make them effective, ignoring he could issue whatever order he wanted including one with no loopholes and could order law enforcement to enforce his rule. As far as I can tell, those chief executives who are claiming they don't have authority to do things to combat this public health emergency are actually saying they don't believe there is an emergency. I feel confident they'd find the authority fast enough if they believed it was real.
Anyway. One of the things the AR governor said was that Arkansas state campgrounds are now closed, which surprised me because they weren't a few days ago. But I've looked it up and he's right - they are indeed closed now. I spent most of last month staying in Ark. state campgrounds and, except for a prevalent lack of wifi connectivity, they were great. Some people live in them full-time (despite rules saying they can't), and I wonder what they've had to do now.
We came through the city of Muskogee, and I will never hear that name for the rest of my life without thinking of that Merle Haggard song called Okie from Muskogee.
The road spent a lot of its miles crossing Lake Eufaula. OK's largest lake, it has 600 miles of shoreline, winding around and on and on. And the road kept crossing it for miles.
While we were doing that, we came to 2 signs: one announced the Muskogee (Creek) Nation and the other, about 3' from the first, announced the Choctaw Nation.
In McAlester, I passed an Exxon station (usually the most expensive) advertising gas for $1.19/gallon, and a Phillips 66 station with a $1.15/gallon price. I never thought I'd see it this low again in my lifetime.
I passed an entrance to the Indian Nation Turnpike (OK seems to love toll roads), which was also the exit for the US Army Ammunition Plant. This is apparently just what its name says: a weapons manufacturing facility for the US Dept. of Defense. McAlester didn't have a population sign, but online it says they've got around 18,000 folks. I'll bet that arms plant provides lots of jobs.
The countryside seems much more green down here than it did in the northern part of OK, which doesn't seem plausible, given that the state is only a little more than 200 miles from north to south. But the trees seemed much more thoroughly leafed out down here and there were more bushes and lawns that were green.
I saw a sign saying, "Hitchhikers may be escaping inmates." That's the first time I've seen it worded that way and it's much more graphic than the usual ones that just say it's a prison area and don't pick up hitchhikers.
Near Atoka I started seeing some flocks of sheep along with the continuing herds of cows.
At a church I saw a sign that said, "Be encouraged - God is in control." Given the number of people who might die before this ghastly nightmare is over, I'd hate to believe that all this is God's will. But I guess some people find comfort in that thought.
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| Indian paintbrush |
I started seeing a few Indian paintbrush along the roadside. I know different people call these wildflowers different names, but this online photo is what I mean with that name.
I've seen several iterations of Boggy Creek today. Earlier I crossed Muddy Boggy Creek. Here I crossed Clear Boggy Creek. It did look clearer than the muddy one did.
I came to the Caddo Indian Territory Museum and the town of Caddo - "The Antique Town on a Buffalo Trail." That nickname seemed odd to me - a buffalo trail? But when I looked it up to see what they meant, I found the website is no longer available.
A little farther down the road is Durant, "Magnolia Capital of Oklahoma."
At the Choctaw Nation Casino (another empty space), I saw a message on their electronic sign out front saying the COVID-19 OK Call Center could be reached toll free at a number they supplied. Seeing as how OK is another of the states where the governor has refused to issue a mandatory stay-at-home order, I'm surprised they've done as much as having a call center.
I saw lots of homemade signs along the road today saying one version or another of "Thank You Truckers."
Then I crossed the Red River and saw a sign: "Welcome to Texas - Drive Friendly - The Texas Way." Friendly driving isn't the way I remember Texas drivers, but maybe they've changed.
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| bluebonnets |
They also had electronic highway signs warning folks to keep a 6' distance from each other. What they said was, "No Close Encounters of Any Kind."
Down here I started seeing big patches of bluebonnets along the road. In that sense I'm a true Texan, and we love our bluebonnets. Enough to stir the soul.
I got a warm welcome from David and Anna, who found a nearby parking spot for the RV, plugged in several lengths of extension cord to give me electric power, helped me walk the dogs and let them into their back yard, fed me supper and were just generally very hospitable to this refugee. They wanted me to stay in their house, but I was too tired to try to figure out how to transplant Lily so decided we were better off in the RV as we were used to, at least for right now.
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