Leaving Oklahoma
Well you go through St. Louis,
Joplin, Missouri
And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty
Bobby Troup, (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66
December, 1973
I gave a whoop as my U-Haul truck crossed the border from Oklahoma into the Texas Panhandle. Oklahoma City looks even prettier in the rear-view mirror and here I come Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico.
It was less than a week before Christmas when I left Midwest City, driving Interstate 40 between Oklahoma and California for the third and final time, my whole life jammed into the truck, neatly at first and not-so-neatly toward the end. What my wife and I couldn’t pack we sold at bargain prices. Washer and dryer, $50. Oldsmobile, $100. We considered the sales a good deal for all concerned.
The two families muttered, made doom-filled predictions and found their only comfort in the fact that “the two of them have always been a little strange.”
“Shouldn’t you have a job lined up first?” my mother, Mildred, asked accusingly. “Can’t you at least stay until after Christmas? Aren’t you going to miss your little old gray-haired mother?”
No, no and no.
No, I’ll wash dishes in California if I have to.
No, there’s a storm predicted in a couple of days and the last thing I want is to be stuck in a snowstorm in Cline’s Corners, New Mexico, a hundred miles from anywhere and surrounded by Elvis paintings on velvet.
And no. I won’t.
I didn’t say this last out loud.
*
We had saved for nearly three years, planning our escape, starting within six months of my triumphant arrival back in Midwest City after leaving the army. Being entertainment editor of a minor daily newspaper in a minor town in a minor state wasn’t at all what I envisioned when I accepted the job. Big fish, little pond and all that.
It was more like being a little fish in a mud puddle, struggling for breath. It was more like going backward in time to the stifling mid-century that spawned me. Probably because the town and state had never left mid-century. And in my less generous moments I sometimes wondered just which century that would be.
So we eventually quit our jobs, bummed around Europe for three months, swooped into Midwest City, packed our things and were gone in less than a week. And as we crossed each successive state line, running just ahead of the snowstorm that really did nearly trap us in Cline’s Corners, our whoops grew louder and more numerous. Oklahoma to Texas: Whoop! Texas to New Mexico: Whoop, WHOOP! New Mexico to Arizona, Arizona to “Cal-i-for-nia, open your Golden Gate!”
We were determined to be free. Free from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Free from the cowboys and Indians and Oklahoma outlaws and the oil derrick on the Capitol lawn. Free from the suspicion and the bigotry, the anti-intellectualism and the perennial suspicion of education. Free from the iron rule of the fundamentalist churches’ self-appointed morality police, always sniffing around for sin. Free from the parents who gave me life and then tried to suck it out of me.
Free, in short, of my entire past, which – if such a thing were at all possible – would have left a 26-year void and would not have produced a person sentient enough to try to escape it.
Ironic, I think now. Isn’t “free” what my mother, brother and I thought we would be when we first moved to Midwest City 17 years earlier?
It hadn’t worked then, either.
But if “free” wasn’t the word we wanted as we followed thousands of Midwestern refugees along what had once been the great U.S. Highway 66 – Steinbeck’s “mother road” – if “free” wasn’t the word, what was?