Elk City, Oklahoma — Day 10

Odometer: 1885–2158 (273) miles

Listen to: “Elk City” — Samantha Crain

There’s something at once both incredible and very odd about taking the Vespa down roads I’ve traveled over and over again by car. It’s the intersection of two worlds: the one here in Oklahoma, where I spent the summer after high school driving up and down Route 66, and the one in California, where I spent two years having the Vespa as my only means of transport around San Francisco. Logically, those two worlds should never go together, but there I was, at the end of the day, crossing the Texas-Oklahoma border on a scooter.

The day started in the Texas panhandle, which is a whole lot of nothing, save for cows. There are many, many cows. The drive was permeated by the smell of rotten grain, cow excrement, and the diesel fumes of trucks and tractors. The other irritating thing, almost more so than that cocktail of smells, was the speed limit: 75 miles per hour. My Vespa, when loaded down, does a maximum of about 71 or 72 on a flat surface. I spent almost all of my time on those roads being passed by anyone and everyone, from tiny Toyotas, to massive semis.

On approaching Amarillo, I drove by what was probably the single most Texas thing I can imagine existing. Words can’t do justice to its incredible Texan-ness, so here’s a photo:

Now, I don’t want to get too political in this newsletter, given I have friends and family reading this that don’t quite share my appreciation for Obamacare, but I think we can all agree: this is hilarious. When a complex and nuanced political issue gets boiled down to a haunted house for children, enough gets lost in that particular translation that you have to laugh at the result.

Depending on how you look at it, I had a very late lunch or very early dinner at a restaurant in Pampa, Texas around 5:30. Given the weird not-quite-dinner time I arrived, the restaurant was nearly empty; when I pulled up, I could see some of the servers staring at my Vespa as I parked. My waiter asked me a few questions about the scooter after I had ordered my meal. He was the sort of person who you’d expect to see in Pampa: Stocky, a slight beard, a strong southern accent. Very curious about how you could potentially modify the scooter to make it do upwards of 100mph (suggestions included: remove the governor, replace the engine with a sport bike’s).

He told me he and another waiter were talking about the scoot when I pulled in, and waved the other waiter to the table. This man was tall and skinny, and wore a pink lace headband; not quite the icon of rural-America that was my waiter. He was a bit reserved, but introduced himself, and told me he was trying to save money to buy an orange scooter like mine. Someone in Pampa had one, and was looking to trade it for some sort of ploughing tool; he was hoping to get about $700 or $800 to buy the tool and then trade it in. I told him I was crossing the country in mine, and he said he had hitchhiked to LA the previous summer.

“You hitchhiked across the country?” I asked. “That’s sort of gone out of style these days; folks think it’s dangerous. Did you make it alright?”

“Yeah, everybody wants to pick you up,” he responded. “Everyone wants to run away.”

Given I had just quit my job and left my home of four years to ride a Vespa across the country, it was hard to argue with that.

I finished my meal, and headed back on the road, looking to cross the Oklahoma border while I still had light. As I rode into Texola, the first town in Oklahoma, I pulled up next to a sign I had taken photos of nearly a decade before. The sign is painted onto a small bar, immediately across the state line, and it just reads: “There’s no other place like this place anywhere near this place, so this must be the place.” My heart swelled; it felt good to be back.

There was still plenty of time before dark, so I decided to push on to Elk City, rather than stay in Erick. The Oklahoma sunset was behind me, and in typical Oklahoma style, it was a dramatic swirl of clouds, color, and light, with the silhouettes of birds flying back and forth across it. It lit up storm clouds in the distance. It was showing off, clearly, as if to say “this is what you’ve missed out on since you left.”

My personal history with Route 66 in Oklahoma is long and complicated; I could write a book on that subject alone. But the short version goes like this: before leaving Oklahoma to move to Missouri for college, my girlfriend at the time and I drove down all of Oklahoma’s segments of the highway, as a sort of farewell to the place where I had spent 18 years of my life. Naturally, being a goodbye, this was sort of a bittersweet trip, and I still associate the road with leaving home. The song I wrote about Sayre (which I linked to yesterday) was almost certainly inspired by that trip and the feeling it provoked.

Speaking of that, when I pulled into Sayre, not much had changed since I first saw it nearly 10 years ago. The city still smelled like cut lawns in summer. Main Street still looked like it had been transplanted from the 1950s. The Mexican restaurant where I had stopped to eat an enchilada was still there, opposite the Western Motel where I took photos of the sign with my girlfriend’s Rolleiflex. Pulling out of the city, I saw the train tracks where I had stopped to fiddle with a circular polarizer on my camera, my first time using one. I crossed an old bridge on Route 66 where I marveled at a German tourist’s Leica M8 in 2007.

So much of the composite of memories and feelings and people and places that make up myself and my personality comes from here, in Oklahoma, especially along Route 66. I’m happy to be back, but this sense of nostalgia can become almost overbearing. Still, the me that was here 10 years ago was different; I’ve long since admitted to myself that I’m not the sort of person that can live here anymore, and being gone for almost a decade has only reinforced that.

Regardless, it’s a lovely place to visit.

A quick note on the song for today: “Elk City” is probably my favorite song to be released last year. If you listen to one song from all of these newsletters, let this one be it.

Today, I’m going to be in Oklahoma City! Any friends that are around there, or in Tulsa tomorrow: I’d love to see you all!

Till then,

-Esten