Porum, Oklahoma (Home of Belle Starr)

“Lucky for him he gave up thinking when he walked.  His recent thinking always arrived at a pile of the same old compromised shit wherein the mistakes of the past readily suffocated the present.  When he walked his level of attention was spread thinly but intensely over the entire landscape as it likely had been for walkers a million years before.”

                -Jim Harrison, from “The Great Leader” 

I went for a long walk last night as the sun reddened the horizon.  A weak cold front visited us on the plains over the weekend making it very pleasant indeed.  Usually the prodigious prairie wildflowers are gone by now, either dead or mowed over.  But they are still here in an abundance I haven’t seen in some time – black eyes Susan’s, Indian blankets, poppy mallows, Indian paintbrushes, white and yellow yarrow.  I guess the abnormally copious summer rains prolonged their beauty.  My walk would have otherwise been perfect but for the multiple pumping and shrieking oil wells along the path.  In any event, I wasn’t able to “give up thinking”.  Instead, memories flooded my mind.        

 . . . memories of New Mexico, which reminded me of this song by Ryan Bingham, whom I had the pleasure of seeing one cold night at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa (my all-time favorite live music venue . . . kind of like Oklahoma’s version of Gruene Hall in Texas). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHnSj9Ls6pU

This song has everything I’ll ever need (at least in my dreams) . . . freight trains, beat-up guitars, dusty bars, woebegone highways and cafes, motorcycles, the sweeping New Mexico sky, old cowboy boots and leather jackets, the rhythm of a train, a driving desert rain.   

 . . . memories of a trip I once took to see a friend in Portland.  As with many of my adventures, it’s one I’ll never forget.  I rode a Greyhound bus all the way from Oklahoma which was something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.  There is a certain greyhound bus aroma forever burned into my nostrils which I’ve only experienced one other time – in Navy bootcamp!  It is almost sickening to recall.  Anyway, after that wonderful journey (I only wish I was a poet back then), I needed to blow off some steam.  So we went to a bar where a Japanese grunge rock band was playing lousy Nirvana covers between gulps of cheap whiskey straight from the bottle.  I vaguely recollect “Smells like Teen Spirit” but with an inebriated Japanese accent.  You get the picture.  When they were through, they smashed and pulverized their electric guitars on the stage, no doubt pretending to be the ghost of Kurt Cobain.  After the lead guitarist used his Fender like an axe chopping the wooden stage, he threw it into the crowd which was just me, my friend and a couple of groupies.  As luck would have it I caught the thing.  I looked down at the beautiful guitar and then up at my friend.  And then we ran for the door with security giving chase down the sidewalk.  It was perhaps fortunate that I didn’t give the guitar back because 1) it wasn’t destroyed and 2) it was a vintage Fender Stratocaster which is worth about a grand or two.  The downside to this whole thing was that I’d had way too many strong brews causing me to puke embarrassingly while on hands and knees on the side of the interstate – middle of the night.  An Okie out of place.  Oh to be young . . .  

 . . . memories of a past weekend on my return from the lake.  As I topped off the tank at an old service station I heard a woman scream at her toothless, gas pumping husband, “you’re as fucked up as a soup sandwich!”  Shortly thereafter I waited for three hours in an Indian Casino parking lot waiting for the state troopers to open up the interstate.  Evidently a cattle truck driver got distracted (most likely updating social media), swerved mightily, and then turned his truck over, creating quite a scene of carnage.  Half of the poor bovines were killed upon impact while the other half wandered along the highway for miles, thoroughly befuddled.  I figured the cops would shoot the wandering cattle but instead they called for the local cowboys for a good old fashioned round-up.  Horses, spurs, lariats . . . that kind of thing.  When they finally opened the interstate I saw a two-story pile of dead bloated cows in the median (angus) and no less than three totaled-out vehicles (including a police cruiser), evidently a result of wandering cows at daybreak.  I thought of the horror of their one-way trip to the Auschwitz-like Texas feedlots.  If I were a cow, headed for the feedlots of Texas, I’d much rather die along the interstate at the hands of a mini-van.  Think of a cow version of the Civil War Andersonville POW camp.   One drive through Hereford, Texas when the wind is blowing just right is enough to convert the most diehard American beef eater into an eternal vegan.