Ponca City

Woke up and packed before 9 this morning, and then woke up Chuck to go meet Freda for breakfast at Kayak’s. I’m not sure why I suggested we all meet up for breakfast. Chuck is a late riser, Freda has a design review for DP monday morning, and she was at school all night. She actually texted me this morning, from studio, at 6:30 asking for a little extra time to shower and take a nap.


I will miss Kayak. It’s overpriced, usually kind of crowded, but there was an earnest quirkiness to it, and it was the cafe closest to school. If you didn’t want to buy the burned swill they sold as “coffee” at ‘Etta’s Cafe’ in the architecture building, Kayak was happy to swindle you. But it was a good place to meet people, and actually, it was my first base in St. Louis. When I flew out three April’s ago, I started my days apartment hunting with a cup of coffee, a road atlas of St. Louis, and my netbook opened to Craigslist, perched at the bar overlooking the intersection.


Freda did finally show up, and we had breakfast and coffee together before I had to say goodbye to them outside. I hope I will see them again soon when I come back for graduation. Given that it was 11, I hit the road without filling my tank. I left St. Louis on a beautiful, sunny day.


The drive was long, but not nearly as bad as I was expecting. I did stop every few hours: to fill the tank, to drain my own, to check email. I stopped at the first Braum’s I came to in Missouri, out in Springfield. Braum’s is kind of a dairy based fast food restaurant/ice cream store. Braum’s : Dairy Queen :: Jimmy Johns : Subway. They have one big farm outside of Oklahoma city and they have excellent meat and dairy from the farm. They only have stores within a certain radius of the farm, creating a circle which encompasses most of Oklahoma, and parts of Texas and Missouri. The radius is defined by the distance a truck driver can travel to and from the store from the dairy farm. The management of Braum’s insists that this is so the driver’s never have to be apart from their families/spouses. If I were a highly cynical person, I might guess that they do it to save on motel costs and ‘wasted’ paid time. At any rate, it’s good. Best cherry limades in the US.


It made me sad to go there though: usually there’s someone with me- my lovely partner Saori, my brother Taylor, or my friend Sal, or even unwilling Suki waiting in the car for me. It was a place we would always stop on the drive between St. Louis and Oklahoma, and it was a poignant reminder of missed company.

I did finally make it to Ponca. Once you turn off the interstate at Vinita and head west, you enter the back roads of northeastern Oklahoma. There’s a few old forgotten towns with shuttered main streets, swamps, lakes, forests, back there. Also, for some reason, the headquarters of ConocoPhilips66, one of the largest oil companies in the world, in these backwoods, only accessible by a two lane country highway.


There’s something kind of spectacular, speeding along the vast, empty stretches of road, a few dark trees in endless fields and the rolling hills, with the late dusk sky marked by a slashes of red amid gray at the western horizon. I was trying to describe for Taylor why I liked the landscape of Oklahoma, and I used the word “relentless.” Tay thought it was a highly appropriate word, but seemed appalled I was using it in a positive sense. I guess I really meant that the landscape of this part of the US is kind of like the sea- but more interesting and varied- the scale of the sweeping panorama is mind-bendingly large, which meets an even larger, more vivid sky. Whatever gets foregrounded in this epic vista gets vastly magnified in weight by the comparison.


Grandma was happy to see me. She cooked me a beef stew “with flat beer in it.” It was pretty good, actually. We set a fire, visited, watched the end of “Enchanted” and went to get ready for bed. She’s really happy I came, but not so happy that I’m only spending the night.