Why I Love Oklahoma

I spent yesterday morning up in the Enid/Perry area in northern Oklahoma with a group of middle-school kids involved in the museum's week-long science camp. They were investigating a Permian-age site where hundreds of amphibian tracks have been preserved in a layer of dolomite in the middle of an oil field.

My job was just to be there, experience the program and shoot photos so I can write a story and press releases after the program is over. I shot lots of pictures of the kids, and a few of the wonderful prairie landscape where they were working.

The day was overcast and breezy. A perfect low, ominous Oklahoma sky. The rocking-horse oil pumps all around drummed rhythmically. The long grass all bending together under the wind. People put down Oklahoma for being flat, for failing to have oceans or mountains or the dead drama of the desert. But I love this land. I love the huge sky and the humble, secret life of the fields and scrub oak.

I kept trying to catch a photo of one of the redwing blackbirds at this pond, but of course they were far too wiley for me. I did take a photo of one of the tracks the kids were studying. This is a footprint left in a muddy lake-bottom by some sort of extinct amphibian more th 280 million years ago. You can see where three of its claws dug into the mud as it floated along in the water. Amazing, that something like that would be preserved for so long. The dolomite layer is breaking up now, though, exposed to the weather. The curator told me in another ten years the track bed will be broken up beyond recognition.

The whole area is surrounded by oil pumps and drilling rigs. Looks like most of the property is now owned by Chesapeake oil, one of the two big oil barrons based in Oklahoma City. I had begun to think oil was dead in Oklahoma until I drove out here and saw whole fields full of rocking horses. I hadn't heard them in a long time. They have a wonderful low drumming that can be heard through the earth for miles, especially at night when everything is still. I remember lying in bed at my uncle's farm in St. Louis, Oklahoma, when I was a kid, listening to the drumming of the rocking horses. A comforting sound to me. One I hadn't heard in a long time. I'm such a city girl now, commuting from my house in a manicured neighborhood on a six-lane road to my climate-controled museum every day.

I was glad to get to drive out there, even though I had to leave at 6 in the morning to get there on time. I loved seeing the flat prairie and the fields of corn and cotton and alfalfa. Little bunnies hopped out in front of my car and raced ahead of me for a few yards before bounding back into the grass. A long-tailed rodent scurried out into the road and quickly turned around and scurried back in. Hawks sat on fence posts or sailed overhead. Cows looked at me mildly, chewing. I was full of love for all of it, grateful for my big, under-appreciated, and often ridiculed state. Give me the big sky and the ocean of grass, stinging nettle and wild nightshade that grows those funny green-striped tomatoes that turtles like to eat. Give me the box turtles and the meadlowlarks and the horny toads and blister-beetles. Even those big ol' creepy green and yellow orb spiders that build webs between the stalks of johnson grass or in the barn doorway - their strands so thick and taught you can pluck them like a guitar string. All of that. I love it.

Nowhere else is the sky quite like this.