There wasn’t much happening in town. Actually, there was nothing happening in town. Empty and forlorn storefronts lined the streets; the only eatery in sight was a Subway sandwich shop on a corner in the main square. There was a lovely fountain in the square, and we took a seat on a nearby bench, but once again we were subjected to the bizarre practice, now firmly fixed in my head as a feature of southern towns, of being forced to listen to a radio station selected by persons unknown being played through loudspeakers mounted on lamp posts. At least the music was good: an all Beatles radio station. But between songs we had to listen to a fast-talking AM deejay prattle on about the weather and the discounts being offered at various car, RV, and motorcycle shops around town. Peace and quiet doesn’t seem to be much in fashion in these towns. Once again, as in Tupelo and many other towns we’d passed through in the southland, there was the intolerable ear-splitting sounds of pickup trucks and aging muscle cars either without mufflers or modified to make the maximum racket, and drivers intent on burning as much rubber as humanly possible. This cacophony was quickly becoming the official soundtrack of East Texas, too: cars, pickups, and motorcycles competing to see who could be more disruptive of the civic peace and, once they had passed, the return of music being blared through public loudspeakers. It’s a wonder anyone in these towns can hear anything anymore. Then again, maybe that’s why they have to keep cranking up the volume, on the motor vehicles and the music; because no one can hear anymore. It’s a vicious cycle.
What were people trying to say with all this noise? I recalled something Voz Vanelli, the restaurateur and raconteur I met in Tupelo, had told me. We were talking about how one bad review on social media can really hurt a business like his and how business owners can ill-afford to ignore such reviews. The few negative reviews he’s had, he told me, were all written by men.
“For many of them,” Voz told me, “writing a bad Yelp review is as much power as they have in their lives.”
Maybe Voz was onto something, something that may explain the gnawing resentments and sense of displacement so manifest in our politics, especially among men in economically struggling towns, men who feel powerless, maybe even emasculated by their diminished circumstances. They are drawn to politicians who give voice to their anger, resentment, and grievances, especially someone who is willing, figuratively (or in our current circumstances, almost literally), to say “fuck you” to everyone they think is responsible for their plight. Maybe all this noise coming from their cars, pickups, and motorcycles is a primal scream of sorts that says, “Look at me; pay attention to me.”
When we’d had our fill of the Beatles, after Ringo had wrapped up his stirring rendition of “You’re Sixteen,” we went off in search of an afternoon treat. Among the shuttered and worn-out storefronts we found an open shop with a sandwich board out front that said, “Candy and Ice Cream.” Perfect. Ice cream was what we were looking for.
The place was huge, about the size of a small banquet hall, and mostly empty save for a glass case housing some weary-looking pastries. We were the only customers (maybe not just at that moment but for several months or more), and it took a minute for a man, the proprietor I assumed, to make his way to the front from somewhere in back. He seemed indifferent to find customers in his store and greeted us with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
“Hi,” I said, “we’d like some ice cream, please,” even though there was no ice cream anywhere in sight.
“Sorry, we don’t have ice cream,” he replied. Rather than point out that the big sign in front of his shop said, “Ice Cream,” which he probably knew, I just thanked him, and we left. It certainly didn’t seem like a busy place, and I had a pretty good idea of why his business might not be booming, but it seemed so pathetically sad that even with plenty of time on his hands to make a couple of minor changes he hadn’t bothered to get a different sign, one that didn’t promise “Ice Cream” to unsuspecting tourists in search of a frozen treat.
As we continued our walk it seemed, though maybe we just missed a lot, that all Paris really had going for it was that it shared a name with a city in France. Everywhere we looked, from the masthead of the local newspaper to the city logo, the word “Paris” was spelled with an image of the Eiffel Tower (the local one with the red cowboy hat on top) where the “A” would normally be. The city’s bus system, comprised as best I could tell of a few small shuttle-type buses, was called “Paris Metro,” again with the “A” in Paris denoted by the tower with the red cowboy hat. Like the “ice cream” shop, it all seemed kind of sad. Paris, Texas, bears as much resemblance to Paris, France, as I do to the late musician formerly known as Prince. But you go with what you’ve got and if sharing a name with the French capital is the best thing Paris has going for it then, by all means, they should make the most of it.
Now, we had only one restaurant recommendation for Paris and it came from the same young waiter we’d met the night before in Natchitoches who recommended a visit to the Eiffel Tower. There was ample reason now to question his judgment, but I figured with nothing else to go on we’d give the Mexican restaurant he told us about, the best in Paris he assured us, a shot. I did not write a negative Yelp review, but the takeout burrito was the consistency of soup and it sloshed about in the Styrofoam container I’d been given to convey it back to our hotel room.
It would be a fair criticism of my judgments about Paris that we were there for less than twenty-four hours, and that we no doubt just missed whatever it is that makes people proud to be from Paris. But unless the traveler lingers for many days, perhaps even longer, in every place he or she visits, the same critique can be made. The best he can hope for is a glimpse of a place, and some charm us and some do not. Some beckon us to return for more, some make us ready to move on. So far, Paris was squarely in the second group.
By early evening we’d only been in Paris a few hours, but we seemed to have already exhausted its possibilities. I bought Albie a soft serve vanilla ice cream cone at the Dairy Queen next to our hotel on the ring road that circles Paris, but then decided we should give the town one more shot. Surely if we drove around we’d find a nice park or another place to take an evening walk, something, anything, that might give us reason to fall, if not in love with Paris, but “in like” with it. Half an hour of driving later and we couldn’t find a single place where I even wanted to get out of the car. Maybe it was my irrational fear of dilapidated, vacant buildings and overgrown empty lots. Whatever it was, we called it an early night and headed back to the hotel where I left Judy another voice mail message. She’s a hard woman to reach.
In the morning we’d be leaving for Okemah, Oklahoma, and it turned out, happily, to be one of those places that beckons us to come back.
TEN
This Land Is Your Land
Broadway, the main street that runs through the center of Okemah, lives up to its name. It seems about as wide as the westbound half of the Santa Monica Freeway. Downtown Okemah would certainly feel more intimate if the street were narrower. Maybe there’s a historical reason it’s so wide—to accommodate cattle drives or large farm equipment—I don’t know. On an ordinary day this too-big-for-its-britches stretch of pavement would have added to the town’s sense of emptiness and desolation, but we had, by sheer luck, arrived in Okemah on no ordinary day.
This farming and ranching town of 3,200 sits right off Interstate 40, about an hour east of Oklahoma City and a little more than an hour west of Sallisaw. Sallisaw is where the Joad family, fleeing the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression for California, begin their journey, one that would have taken them right through Okemah, in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath.
We came here to pay my respects to Okemah’s most famous son, America’s greatest folk singer and folk-song writer, Woody Guthrie.
John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie were both extraordinary chroniclers of the Dust Bowl, Steinbeck in prose and Guthrie in song. When The Grapes of Wrath was made into a film by John Ford in 1940, Guthrie wa
s in New York City and on the cusp of major celebrity, making his first commercial recording for Victor Records, The Dust Bowl Ballads.* According to Guthrie biographer Joe Klein, Victor asked Guthrie to write a song that would capitalize on the film’s popularity and thus the song Tom Joad, named for Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath protagonist, was written.† Guthrie had lived the Dust Bowl experience and was, therefore, the perfect balladeer to write such a song.
Steinbeck and Guthrie met several times and were kindred spirits and mutual admirers of each other’s work. In a 2008 interview, Steinbeck’s son Thom told The Fog City Journal, a San Francisco-based publication, there was a “spiritual oneness” in the two, especially in their shared concern for the plight of common people, the downtrodden and the marginalized, a theme that defined the works of both men. Anyone who reads Steinbeck’s dialogue in his many novels and listens to Guthrie’s lyrics or reads his prose (Guthrie authored two books himself, an autobiography and a novel) will also be struck by similarities in the vernacular.‡
Routing ourselves through Guthrie’s hometown of Okemah also meant that we would be traveling clear to the California line on roughly the same route as the Joad family and hundreds of thousands of others who escaped the Dust Bowl for what they hoped would be a land of milk and honey. The Joads followed the famed Route 66 all the way from Oklahoma to California, but that’s impossible these days. Only remnants of the old Route 66 remain. Much of it, though still formally designated “66,” is one and the same road as Interstate 40. Once we got to Amarillo, just a day’s drive from Okemah, we’d also be back on Steinbeck’s trail, for he and Charley also paralleled the Joad’s route between California and Amarillo, though they did so from west to east.
The Dust Bowl was a staggering disaster wrought by the hand of man and the whimsy of nature. As the Great Plains were settled, farmers stripped the rich topsoil of the natural grasses that literally held the land in place. More than one hundred million acres were affected by over-farming and overgrazing. When a crushing multiyear drought hit, a drought that coincided with the Great Depression, the exposed topsoil turned to dust.
Great clouds of dust, “black blizzards” blown up and carried by prairie winds over hundreds of miles billowed, sometimes nearly two miles high, and rolled over towns, driving fine particles of dirt into every nook and cranny of even the most tightly secured homes. Some of the dust settled as far east as New York City. Nothing grew. Money dried up with the soil and untold human misery ensued. As hundreds of thousands fled in search, literally, of greener pastures, most headed west in overloaded jalopies for California, a land that took root in the popular imagination as so fertile, and so rich, as to be beyond imagining.§
As Albie and I made our way from Oklahoma to California we would be traveling in the footsteps, or more precisely the tire tracks, of countless desperate migrants who passed this way in the 1930s. We were traveling in comfort and style, however, and with none of the worries that weighed them down like the household belongings that made their jalopy springs sag under the weight. In no meaningful way would our journey across this part of the United States be remotely similar to theirs except for the rough outlines of the scenery. But one could, at least, appreciate the immense sadness, hopefulness, and eventual heartbreaking disappointment of their odysseys.
Spirits lifted by rumors that jobs in the rich fields of California awaited any man or woman who wanted to work were crushed by the reality that there were far more people making their way west in hope of finding work than could possibly be employed. This was a deliberate strategy by growers and middlemen with contracts to harvest the fields to ensure that a massive labor pool of people would work backbreaking hours under a hot sun for next to nothing. And as the destitute “Okies” (a derogatory epithet) would discover, they were looked down upon as barely human, and ruthlessly exploited. They gathered in makeshift encampments of shared misery called Hoovervilles, after the president presiding over the Great Depression. To keep these “undesirables” moving down the road, sheriff’s deputies often torched the camps at night.
When Steinbeck’s Joad family reached Needles, California, on the Arizona border, they encountered a stranger as they basked in the cool water of a stream near the highway. They assumed he was, like them, escaping the Dust Bowl. But he was headed in the opposite direction, back home to Pampa, Oklahoma.¶
“S’pose a fella got work an’ saved, couldn’ he get a little lan’?” Tom Joad asks the stranger.
“You ain’t gonna get no steady work,” the stranger replies. “Gonna scrabble for your dinner ever’ day. An’ you gonna do her with people lookin’ mean at you.”
Hundreds of thousands found out the hard way that the promise of California was just a mirage. To keep migrants out, the state of California started turning people away at the border, a storyline memorialized by Woody Guthrie in the song “Do Re Mi,” one of his Dust Bowl Ballads. (The “do re mi,” refers, of course, to money.) The song was a warning to migrants that California might not be the answer to their dreams.
Lots of folks back East, they say, is leavin' home every day,
Beatin' the hot old dusty way to the California line.
'Cross the desert sands they roll, gettin' out of that old dust bowl,
They think they're goin' to a sugar bowl, but here's what they find
Now, the police at the port of entry say,
"You're number fourteen thousand for today."
Oh, if you ain't got the do re mi, folks, you ain't got the do re mi,
Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.
California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see;
But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot
If you ain't got the do re mi.
According to Thom Steinbeck, his father once joked to Guthrie in a letter that if only he’d written “Do Re Mi” earlier, it would have saved Steinbeck the trouble of writing The Grapes of Wrath. Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck captured the struggles and the merciless exploitation of these decent, hardworking Americans as few others ever have, and that, in large part, is at the root of my admiration for both of them.
About six weeks before we started our trip, I e-mailed the Okemah Historical Society to see if they could suggest someone knowledgable about the Guthrie family history in town who might be willing to meet Albie and me and show us around. After a week or so there’d been no reply. I tried a second time, but again no response. So, I called, and a nice, older woman told me I should talk to a society volunteer named Wayland Bishop. I scribbled the name down on a scrap of paper. She took my number and promised to have him call me. More than a week passed and no call, so I called again, and spoke with the same woman. She had given my name and number to Wayland and promised to give him another message. We were about to leave in a week but there was still no word from Wayland Bishop. Indeed, I never did hear from him. I didn’t want to make a pest of myself so I dropped it and figured when we got to Okemah I’d just show myself around. Using my fifty-year-old copy of Woody’s autobiography, Bound for Glory, I’d try to identify some of the spots where Guthrie spent his youth. Before we left home, however, I searched all over for the scrap of paper with Wayland’s name on it because I figured I’d ask around for him while we were there, but it was nowhere to be found and for the life of me I could not remember his name.
I’d never set foot in Oklahoma, one of only four states I’d never visited, and all of which we would pass through on this trip. (The others being North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.) Paris, Texas, where we’d spent the previous night, is only about twenty miles from the Oklahoma border, and we were in the Sooner State before we knew it.
The Indian Nation Turnpike is a pleasant toll road that runs from the Texas border, through lands that once belonged to the Choctaw and Creek Indians, and up to I-40 across broad, gentle, tree-covered hills. Once on I-40, Okemah was just another ten miles or so west.
Frankly, I w
asn’t expecting to spend much more than an hour or two in Okemah. Wayland’s name continued to elude me, and it was a Saturday, when the Historical Society was almost sure to be closed. It would probably be dead quiet in this small town. Woody had grown up in a house known as the London House, as the previous owners were the Londons, and I thought it would be a victory of sorts if we could just locate the place where the house once stood.#
We parked just before we hit Broadway because the street was blocked off with sawhorses and police tape. Something was going on in town; we could see a lot of people milling about. Albie and I walked the block and a half to Broadway and saw that we had, just as we had the day before in Hughes Springs, stumbled onto a carnival with rides and food stands and various businesses and civic groups with their tables and awnings set up along the street. Albie woofed at the ponies walking in small circles with little children perched on their backs.
The action was concentrated at the east end of Broadway; the westerly end, near the fire station, was practically deserted save for a lone woman sitting at a table in front of Warn’s, a furniture store, and another woman across the street in front of a business called “Faith (family owned and operated), Fitness (group fitness and self-defense) and Firearms (guns and ammo, gun range).” Many storefronts were empty and the buildings vacant, some apparently for years.
We passed a table staffed by a local school group and asked the kids if they knew where the London House used to be, “You know, the house where Woody Guthrie grew up.” They had no idea. It wasn’t even clear if they knew who Woody Guthrie was. I thanked them, and Albie and I continued walking down Broadway.
A miniature schnauzer pulled on his leash, eager to meet Albie. As the two dogs got acquainted the way dogs do, by sniffing one another’s private parts, I got acquainted with the couple at the other end of the leash the way humans do, by introducing myself. The man was wearing a badge on his shirt bearing the name of his real estate business and his name: Carl Alls. I told Carl and his wife we’d come to Okemah from Boston to pay tribute to Woody Guthrie.**
The Dog Went Over the Mountain Page 13
