Movin' Right Along: The Oklahoma Hills

2019-08-23 Friday
On Thursday night when I fell sound asleep, it was just starting to rain a little bit. But it quickly began to pour cats and dogs, with a lot of lighting and thunder. The rain, as well as the sound effects, kept up all night--once a VERY loud crack of thunder immediately above us woke me up out of a sound sleep with a cry of alarm! Poor Cassie was miserably squashed between the bed and the wall all night, and the rain just kept coming and coming. The fact that there was what appeared to be a tornado shelter right behind the casino was not reassuring! However, we made it through the night, and it kept pouring through breakfast. Joe finally had to walk Cassie in the rain as well before we pulled out.

One very cute thing happened on the drive. We took a toll road for about 2/3 of the way, and as we went through one of the toll booths, the attendant asked us, “Do you need a receipt?” Joey said, “No thanks.” The attendant, who must have been looking into our RV, said, “How about a dog biscuit?” We laughed and said sure, and she handed over a dog biscuit for Cassie, who was sitting between Joe and I looking through the front window as she often does. We thought that was so sweet, and she of course loved her biscuit!

We drove for about two hours to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the weather app had reassured me that at noon the rain would stop. Amazingly, it did, right on the stroke of noon, which was when we arrived in downtown Tulsa, trying to find the Woody Guthrie Center, and a place to park a 44' long vehicle (us, including the Jeep.) It turned out that the Google directions were entirely wrong, which I found out by calling the center and talking to the nice young man at the front desk. He recommended we drive past the door, and he’d run out and point to the direction where he thought we could park (all the blocks immediately around the Center had metered parking.)

So that’s what we did, and we were able to park about 4 blocks away, on the other side of the interstate, where the metered parking left off. We left the RV in an empty gravel “lot”, with the only nearby establishment being the Salvation Army facilities. Our instincts told us that it should be okay, however, so we had some lunch and then walked to the Woody Guthrie Center. This is a small museum, but it contains a lot of information about Woody’s life. There is a lot of memorabilia, videos describing the Dustbowl experience (including a virtual reality headset to put on, where we listened to a description of the Black Sunday cloud in April of 1935 which was so intense that it felt as if the world was ending. That room included a display where you could listen to Woody’s Dustbowl Ballads while reading some of the information. There was a lot of information about his life, from when he was growing up through his decline due to Huntington’s Disease, and his life in the sanitorium in New Jersey. There was also a lot about his writing and art, including many examples of his sketches and what would now be considered political cartoons, I guess. The center of the museum includes the handwritten copy of Woody’s lyrics to “This Land is Your Land,” plus a touch-screen about the song, including examples of about a dozen other singers from Arlo Guthrie to Annette Funicello singing the song.

The museum also has a temporary gallery, and the special show in honor Arlo Guthrie’s 50th anniversary of singing at Woodstock was featured. That room was fun, too-- it shows movies and videos in one corner, with the sound of them playing throughout the room as a background to perusing the memorabilia. It includes Marjorie Guthrie’s personal scrapbook of Arlo’s accomplishments, Woody’s hand-written birth announcement to some friends when Arlo was born, the guitar he played at Woodstock, and lots of information about his own writing and social justice activities.

Pages from Marjorie Guthrie's scrapbook about Arlo

It took us about 2 hours to “do” the museum (i could have listened to a lot more music, yet again--these music museums can really make you want to keep listening). After a brief sojourn in the gift shop (we have GOT to stay away from these!), we walked back to the RV, which was still safely where we left it. We had a quick snack, then hit the road for Enid, Oklahoma.

We got to Enid a little before 6pm, and after filling up with gas and trying unsuccessfully to buy propane at both Pilot and Love’s, we stopped for the night at the local Walmart. About 15 minutes later, our godson Natan and his wife Ruby pulled up to our RV. Natan is stationed in Enid in the Air Force, taking his pilot’s training. The four of us went to dinner at a local Italian restaurant, where we got to catch up with their experiences in the fairly unexciting city of Enid. The city, while being fairly large by Oklahoma standards, is not very interesting for them, but they appear quite happy, and it was great to see them. It was only 5 minutes after they dropped us back at the RV, however, when I realized we’d forgotten to take a photo of them, or of the four of us together! What a stupid oversight... it was the one thing I meant to be sure and do.