The Dog Went Over the Mountain

by Peter Zheutlin

  “When I was replacing the sidewalk a little while ago I drilled this piece out,” he explained.

  There, clear as day, was a name: “Woody.” It was as if we were looking at the fossil of a small dinosaur. It was thrilling to see it and hold it, this physical link connecting me to one of my heroes.

  Kurtis had wandered up and as we began walking back down Broadway toward the London House lot we ran into Kurtis’s father, William Earl Walker, Jr. The senior Mr. Walker was dressed as many men usually are in this part of the country—jeans, cowboy boots, cap, and a long-sleeve, button-down shirt—even though it was about ninety degrees. William Walker lives in Moore, which is sandwiched between Oklahoma City and Norman. Moore was familiar because the town was severely damaged with significant loss of life by two F-5 tornadoes, in 1999 and 2013, and both tragedies received national media attention.

  Kurtis said we were at the peak of tornado season in Oklahoma (it was late April). No one could remember there not being a tornado this late in the season but so far this year, nothing. I’ve had a morbid fascination with tornadoes since watching The Wizard of Oz as a kid and thought it would be awe-inspiring to see one from a distance, but Mr. Walker’s harrowing stories of the Moore tornadoes made me reconsider. Kurtis said goodbye to his dad, who was heading back to Moore, and told him he loved him.

  As we walked, Kurtis and Albie and I were alone for the first time all day, though we’d been chatting on and off for several hours. Almost immediately Kurtis said something that took me aback.

  “I’m like the gay black guy in this town,” he said to me in a conspiratorial whisper.

  Okay, I thought, what does that mean?

  “I’m a liberal,” he added immediately. I breathed a sigh of relief. Not because he was a liberal but because some of the other interpretations of his comment were too dark to contemplate. Kurtis had made an assumption about me, perhaps because I was from Massachusetts, just as I had about him. He’d told me earlier he’d been deployed to Iraq in 2004 as a member of the U.S. Army Reserve (Charlie Company, 120th Engineers), in which he has served for twenty years, and since we were deep in the heart of Trump country I assumed he was pretty conservative. My assumption was wrong. His was right.

  “What’s it like to be a liberal in such a conservative town?” I asked.

  “Well, people know me here. I grew up here, so they don’t judge me by my politics,” he said. “I have friends that I just avoid politics with; some are tolerant and some are kindred spirits.”

  We shared our dismay and disbelief over the current president, but the conversation quickly turned to other matters. Kurtis is the divorced father of two, raising the kids pretty much on his own. To make ends meet, in addition to his work in the army reserve, he works part-time for the post office and teaches some basic engineering classes at a local technical school. He’s working on opening a pizza place in town.

  The lot where the London House, Woody’s childhood home, once stood was overgrown and Kurtis said something about needing to come back and mow it. It’s not entirely vacant, however. There are remnants of the old stone foundation and some stone steps leading to what was once the front porch. Rising from the middle of the lot is the trunk of an old cedar tree, out of which someone very skillfully carved the words “This Land Is Your Land” on one side and beneath that a few notes on a musical staff. On the other side, from top to bottom, were carved a guitar, the initials “WG,” and the word “Okemah.”

  “Who did that?” I asked Kurtis, thinking it was something official.

  He pointed to the house across the street. “The guy who lives over there,” he said, referring to a sculptor named Justin Osborn.

  There’s a vacant lot next to the London House lot and Kurtis owns that, too. It slopes down toward the street Osborn lives on. He imagines building a small amphitheater on it someday where people can play and listen to music. Build it and they will come, I thought to myself.

  “What would you need to make that happen?” I asked.

  “Money,” he answered. “I don’t have the money.”

  As we started walking back toward town Kurtis said, “Come on, let me buy you a beer.”

  “Let me buy you a beer,” I said as we arrived at Lou’s Rocky Road Tavern. “You’ve been really generous with your time.”

  He refused. “That’s just not the way it works around here,” he said smiling.

  Out back of Lou’s there’s a large fenced outdoor space filled with tables and umbrellas, a bar, and a small stage for performers. I was surprised. It felt more like a hangout for young urban professionals than a place for ranchers, farmers, and dozens of Okemahns home for their high school reunion.

  We sat ourselves at the edge of the stage, which sits just a few inches above the ground. Kurtis came back with beers for us and, thoughtfully, a bowl of water for Albie. There were pictures hanging on the stage wall behind us, pictures of people who had performed here, including Jackson Browne and the late Jimmy LeFave. Kurtis pointed to one of the pictures and asked, “Know who that is?” It was a picture of another of my heroes, the folk singer Pete Seeger.

  The bar manager, Gary, came over and Kurtis introduced us. He and his partner are openly gay in this very conservative town.

  “It’s not an issue at all for people here,” said Kurtis later. “But it’s an evolution and Gary had a lot to do with it. People got to know him for the quality of person he is, not his sexual preference.”

  Okemah was challenging a lot of my preconceptions.

  Sitting closest to us was a table of four, but it was hard to figure out how they were connected, if at all. There was a big guy—a very big guy—tall, solidly built, wearing a sleeveless T and sporting a dark growth of beard and a full Fu-Man-Chu moustache, and a woman next to him who seemed to be his companion. Across the table was a very wiry, silent man of indeterminate age. His face was deeply lined and weathered and the beer he was drinking and the cigarette he was smoking appeared to be the millionth in a lifetime of hard living. He had no teeth. When he got up to go to the bar, jeans tucked into his cowboy boots, he wobbled to the point where it appeared he was simply going to topple over. The fourth at the table looked a little less worse for wear than his friend, but like everyone else at the table he was smoking. A cell phone, decorated with a Confederate flag, protruded from his shirt pocket.

  When I asked Kurtis if this part of Oklahoma was the South or the West, he didn’t hesitate. “The South,” he said.

  The couple turned in their seats to have a look at Albie. As usual Albie was the conversation starter. They wanted to know his name, how old he was and where we were from. They were boisterous, but well meaning. I doubt I’d have felt that way had I not been with Kurtis who seemed to know everyone here though I only learned later he didn’t know them.

  Somehow the talk came around to my being a writer and the woman, clearly inebriated, said, “It’s nice to hear someone who sounds intelligent around here,” which certainly didn’t reflect well on her immediate company. “We don’t get much of that.” That brought forth a roar of laughter from her companion whom she’d just insulted, though perhaps unintentionally.

  “Yep, we’re just a bunch of dumb Okies!” he roared.

  “Yup, just bunch of dumb Okies!” she said laughing.

  Had I been there alone I would have assumed this was their way of mocking me for what they thought was running through my head, and it might have been a signal they were spoiling for a fight. But they weren’t.

  I muttered something feckless about there being many types of intelligence. It was the best I could come up with on the spot.

  “That’s true!” said the woman. “There’s common sense!”

  Though said as a joke, the “dumb Okie” remark seemed to reveal something deeply disturbing. It betrayed a sense of inferiority, of smallness, and it troubled me. I would be up half the night that night turning this brief interaction over and over in my head. Though said in jest, it had made me uncomfo
rtable nonetheless. Just by being there, my presence had elicited a harsh self-assessment on their part. Is this what they really believed people like me thought of people like them? And, if so, were they wrong? So much has been written and said about the rise of a con man like Trump being a backlash against the coastal elites condescending to Middle America. Maybe Trump, for all his narcissism and gratuitous cruelty, was their voice, even as he shamelessly exploited all their fears and resentments. By giving the middle finger to everyone who ever turned up their nose at a “dumb Okie,” perhaps he was, in his perverse way, validating their existence.

  Like so many other towns we’d already seen, and others we would see as our journey continued, Okemah is a poor place, a shell of its former self, a town largely left behind and forgotten. I wondered if there wasn’t something condescending about my mere presence here, as if these people were just raw material for my book.

  Though these thoughts nagged at me, no one we met in Okemah seemed to feel that way or respond to me other than with genuine warmth. Many, like Mary, the elderly guitar player in the purple cowboy hat, conveyed a sense of gratitude that we’d taken the time and made the effort to come to their town, even for a day, to see the place they called home, and to value their stories.

  Nothing learned on this trip would be more profound than this: people, no matter where they live, no matter how small or remote their hometown, just want someone to know them, to appreciate who they are and where they come from. To be known is to not be forgotten or overlooked. It is to be somebody. And in towns like Okemah, fallen on hard times, the desire to be known, to not be invisible, may be especially keen.

  Ed Stokes had urged me to stay that evening, to come to the class reunion barbeque being held at the end of Broadway. But this was not my town, and these were not my classmates, and it was only right that we not overstay our welcome. The people of Okemah, in just eight hours, had already showered us with all kinds of generosity. There was much to think about as we continued westward to Norman for the night.

  When we arrived at our motel that evening, I had an e-mail from Kurtis. “Stay with us (visiting us and getting to know us) and you’ll be an honorary member of the community,” he wrote. “It just works that way around here.”

  * The Dust Bowl Ballads included “The Great Dust Storm,” “Talkin’ Dust Bowl Blues,” “Dust Pneumonia Blues,” and “Dusty Old Dust,” among others. It would be Guthrie’s most commercially successful album ever.

  † Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1980).

  ‡ Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory, is one of my most treasured books, not least because during a backpacking trip out west in the early 1970s a bear got hold of my backpack one night and left deep claw prints in my paperback copy. Guthrie’s novel, House of Earth, was finished in 1947, but first published, posthumously, in 2013.

  § The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan (Mariner Books, 2006) is an outstanding natural and human history of the Dust Bowl. The book was honored with the prestigious National Book Award.

  ¶ There is also a Pampa, Texas.

  # I knew the house had fallen into disrepair by the 1970s. It was being used by local teens as a clandestine gathering place and was ordered torn down by the town.

  ** You really can’t make this up. As I was revising this manuscript for the umpteenth time sitting in my local Starbucks, a rendition of Woody’s “This Land Is Your Land” started playing over the sound system right at this point in my review of the manuscript. The music endures.

  †† There is now a mural and a statue in town that memorialize Woody, as well.

  ‡‡ Actually, it was more than a thousand.

  ELEVEN

  Get Your Kicks on Route 66

  That night in Norman I dreamt of tornadoes. We were in the heart of tornado alley at the height of tornado season but the only tornado to strike was, fortunately, in my dreams.

  In the morning, Okemah was still on my mind. The people there had been so hospitable and friendly and fundamentally decent. Our national politics have become so bitter and so contentious it sometimes feels like we are headed for a civil war. But one-on-one, most people, whatever their politics, are civil toward one another, even welcoming. In just one day I had developed a real soft spot for Woody’s hometown.

  Though we’d been gone just two weeks, it seemed like ages since we’d left home. Dinner with Noah that first night in Connecticut, the horse-drawn carriages in Pennsylvania’s Amish country, the evening we spent being charmed by Voz Vanelli in Tupelo, all may as well have been years ago. Travel can do that—distort time in peculiar ways.

  Few states are more closely associated with the fossil fuel industry as Oklahoma, and the controversial practice of fracking—using water and chemicals under high pressure to fracture rock to access hard-to-reach oil deposits—has destabilized the state, literally. Oklahoma has been shaken by thousands of small quakes caused by fracking in recent years, so many that in Okemah Wayland Bishop told me he had trouble keeping the pictures on his walls level. But Oklahoma isn’t just about fossil fuels and the energy sources of the past. Between Tuttle and Minco we saw enormous wind farms that stretched as far as the eye could see, thousands of turbines staked like giant pinwheels across the landscape. In Oklahoma you can see the energy past and the energy future in one sweep of the eyes; fracking wells to your right and wind turbines to your left.*

  Just west of Cogar there were subtle changes to the landscape that hinted that the South was gradually becoming the West. The vegetation was scrubbier, there were modest red rock formations, maybe seventy to eighty feet high, and the land opened up a bit and felt more expansive.

  Beyond Binger, Oklahoma (“home of Johnny Bench”),† it really opened up. Trees were few and far between. Where there were copses, they were hard by a creek or riverbed. So sparsely populated was this stretch that the telephone poles, which ran in straight lines for miles, carried so few wires that cross beams were unnecessary; just vertical posts with a couple of phone lines strung between them. This farming and ranching country was dotted with water towers, silos, grain elevators, large corrugated tin sheds, and mobile irrigation systems that looked like fragile truss-style bridges. Other than another wind farm off to the south, it probably didn’t look much different back in the days before sustained drought turned this land into a dust bowl. Even now, there seemed to be little vegetation to hold the topsoil in place. One could imagine that with another drought this entire part of Oklahoma could again turn to dust and blow away.

  In Sweetwater, we hit our first tumbleweed as it blew across the highway, and when we stopped for gas the wind was so strong it pinned Albie’s ears to the sides of his head. No wonder energy entrepreneurs are trying to catch the wind here.

  The empty landscape turned flat again, especially as we crossed into the Texas panhandle. To say something, a person or a landscape, is nondescript is, for a writer, a cop-out, for what is the writer’s job if not to describe? Yet, as we drove I struggled to find the words to describe this barren, featureless place. It’s almost devoid of trees and as flat as a sheet of ice.

  East of Pampa I saw in the distance what seemed like a small rise in the land (a feature!), mottled in color, an odd mix of brown, black, and white. It was a good mile or two before the reason for this peculiar coloring was discernible. We were approaching a massive cattle operation and what we were seeing were thousands of heads of cattle—brown, black, and white—crowded into huge pens. The “rise” was nothing more than a wall of cattle that, from a distance, gave the illusion of a solid, slightly elevated land formation.

  Never have I seen a town as forlorn and desolate as Pampa. Countless buildings were abandoned and gone to seed. Vacant motels and gas stations sat rusting among weed-covered lots and abandoned cars and RVs, and rusty metal barrels were strewn along the roadside.

  As we traveled down Highway 60 a freight train, easily a mile long, passe
d us going in the opposite direction on tracks that paralleled the highway. Out here you get a better sense of how freight moves around the country on massive trains and a never-ending stream of tractor trailers.

  An hour later we were in Amarillo. With apologies to the good people there, Amarillo is, to put it mildly, one of the most hideously ugly places I’ve ever seen, and my hometown is just thirty minutes from Newark, New Jersey, a place not known for its natural wonders. It’s your classic, tacky commercial sprawl on a pancake-flat, nearly treeless plain. Amarillo: such a pretty name, though.

  But Amarillo did have the virtue of being the place where we would pick up the world famous and historic Route 66, “the Mother Road,” as Steinbeck dubbed it in The Grapes of Wrath, which runs (or, more precisely, ran) from Chicago to Los Angeles. Though Route 66 has mostly been abandoned and replaced by Interstate 40 in these parts, there are short sections of the original blacktop you can still drive. And many of the main streets in towns along the way still bear the designation “Historic Route 66.” As in Okemah, the new interstate diverted traffic—the lifeblood of many towns along Route 66—away from downtowns that could then only be reached by exiting the new highway.

  A couple of years ago the Amarillo Public Library invited me to give a talk about Rescue Road. During that visit I’d been downtown and was astonished by how deadly quiet it was, even in the middle of the week. My hosts took me to lunch along a thirteen-block stretch of the old Route 66, and it was there that Albie and I returned for an early dinner.

  You would think that since this old section of Route 66 is just about the only real point of interest in Amarillo (something local folks would surely take issue with), the city would have made some effort to make it an appealing place to spend some time and some money, but you’d be wrong. The streets were strewn with litter, there were several empty storefronts among the souvenir shops and low-end restaurants, and enough motorcycles roaring up and down the main drag to make you want to stick your head in a meat grinder for relief.