Shoestring Sisters: A Travel Memoir of Sorts
(the story of how my sister and I drove from Chicago to LA and back on less than $300 apiece)
by Emily Mills (copyright 21 December, 2002)
"Girls Just Wanna Have Fun": A Day of R&R In Ardmore
Day 2.
I have mixed feelings about Ardmore, Oklahoma. Let me give you some background: I had, to put it bluntly, a very shitty sophomore year of high school. First, after a rather lengthy illness, my mother passed away on the 29th of September, 1997. That was only just the beginning of my first semester. As a result of many factors, that included, my grades that semester were, shall we say, less than exemplary. Because of that, the school decided it might be a good idea to ban me from all extracurriculars for the second semester of that year. Yes, good way to cheer me up. No softball, no theatre, no jazz band, nada. I should also mention that, just two weeks before mom died, my father's church had a vote and asked him to leave. Why? Because a few whiney bastards didn't feel he was paying the church enough attention while he was driving 45 minutes back and forth into Chicago every day for two months to visit my mother in ICU. Me, bitter? Nah. It's bygones.
Anyway, so dad had begun the search for a new church, and the first one to reply that dad seemed interested in was, of all places, in Ardmore. Oklahoma? Wind behind the rain? I didn't know much about the place, other than the fact that I really had no desire to live there.
But to make two and a half years brief, I met some very lovely people there, just barely managed to salvage my sanity, fought heated battles with the school administration and the swarms of religious bigots, and eventually got the hell out. So now, when I go to visit my father (who's now remarried to a really nice woman who also happens to be a minister), I get a mix of pride at having been able to get away from such a black hole and a sort of creeping dread.
We spent the whole of the 31st of July in Ardmore, and I made a point not to let myself think about all the nasty baggage that usually accompanied a visit. Heather and I went along with my father out to Lake Murray, a man-made lake built during the Depression Era by the CCC. Dad's got a little speed boat that we took out and Heather managed to reacclimatize herself to water skiing while I just did some good old fashioned swimming.
That night I had the opportunity to hang out with a friend of mine from the Ardmore days who also happened to be back in town for a visit. So, overall, and due in no small part to the enormous portions of food we were given, the visit was a good one.
"Them Bones, Them Bones": the Desolate Texas Panhandle and Into New Mexico's Oil Fields
Day 3.
With mushy goodbyes and a good stock of foodstuffs, we set out of Oklahoma to traverse the rangelands and savannahs of the Texas Panhandle. On the map, this drive doesn't look so long, but we would soon learn how deceiving a map of Texas can be.
Early on, it reaffirmed my belief that landscape has immense influence over the type of music that a particular region produces. Seeing the vast, mostly flat wilderness, not having to look up to see the endless sky, made country and cowboy songs more understandable. I think you could find yourself in any given part of this area and by looking in any given direction, you'd be seeing more land area than makes up entire small European countries. So much breathing space.
But, after waxing philosophical for a while, probably around 250 miles in, I realized what an incredibly dull drive it truly was. The remaining 90 miles to the New Mexico border seemed awfully far.
Somewhere between Snyder and Gail, Texas, an area with some interesting mesas, we see what both of us first believe to be a massive downpour over the lake off to our left. There were a great many lightning strikes and a big white swath of what looked like rain pouring down. But as we drove on and our angle shifted, the same thought seemed to cross our minds at the very same moment. I turned to Heather and asked, nervously,
"Is that…a giant funnel cloud?"
Indeed, as rain tends to be dark gray when it falls, and a tornado that forms over a lake (a water spout, as us Midwesterners tend to call them) tends to be white in appearance, and from the fact that it was shaped like a funnel and had a debris cloud at the bottom, we made the very informed decision that it was, in fact, a huge fucking tornado.
"Heather, keep driving, gogogogo!" was my informed command. She made no protest and dutifully pressed down on the gas pedal a little more firmly. Thankfully, the immense funnel cloud decided to hang out over the lake, and we cruised off into the multi-colored sunset, happily unmolested.
We crossed into New Mexico just as dusk was setting in, and the first thing we noticed was the abundance of oil rigs that dotted the countryside. As my sister noted, they looked like sad creatures, enslaved en masse to plumb the earth of oil. The size differences from rig to rig even give the impression that some are adults and others mere children, tirelessly bobbing up and down. They're everywhere out here. I even remember seeing a small one, seemingly out of place in the middle of a mall parking lot in central Oklahoma.
These oil fields, needless to say perhaps, also cause the air to smell rather rank. And little "towns" pop up on the horizon from time to time, presumably outposts where the workingmen and women live to tend these fields. It should be noted that, regardless of town size, there is always a Sonic Drive-In restaurant. And a bar.
At one point, we came up over a low ridge and the land seemed to just drop out before us, revealing a breath-taking view of the scrub land that seemed to go on forever. Bubbly storm clouds were gathered on the horizon in almost every direction, and we watched the sun set behind one anvil cloud that poured curtains of rain and spectacular lightning strikes down onto the dry earth.
I had nearly dozed off at one point when Heather, in her best Hunter S. Thompson/Johnny Depp impersonation, suddenly proclaimed, "We can't stop here! It's bat country!" I giggled in response, of course, because were were in the desert and the quote seemed all to appropriate. But a split second later, and I kid you not, some crazy mixed up flying creature dive bombed the windshield and just barely missed gory death by catching an updraft and shooting up and away. Heather and I dissolved into laughter and nearly ran off the road and into a cactus.
Miraculously still in one piece, we drove into Roswell, New Mexico later that evening. We decided to spend the night in a motel, our one luxury for the trip, and ended up at your standard travel lodge with the slogan "Come Crash With Us" up on their sign. This was not unique, however, as the whole of Roswell seems to gleefully embrace its kitschy alien charm. Every street lamp in the down town area is painted to look like an alien "Gray", and nearly every store front window has some sort of alien theme, regardless of whether it's a souvenir shop or merely a place that sells carpeting.
And so we bedded down for the night, in the last actual beds we'd see for some time, and I flipped on the television to watch the weather. Mister Meteorologist mentioned something about "monsoons", and I merely guffawed, thinking that surely monsoons were a strictly Southeast Asia/Africa/tropical rain forest phenomenon. But we'd sure learn otherwise soon enough.
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