On Monday at 6:30 p.m. my good friend Zena and I returned from a whirlwind of a roadtrip around portions of the Great Plains. Both of us poets and writers thirsty for life’s many flavors, we had the kooky idea to do arrange a reading for the night of our return, and to only share pieces we would write on the road. The following essay is one of those, started in a tent and fleshed out from the passenger’s seat on I-70. I’m happy with how it turned out, all things considered. Hope you enjoy!
Wakita, Oklahoma
The glow of the sun through the tent’s sage green papery walls can no longer be resisted. I sit up just to see it come at me full force from above the bluff. People act like fly-over country is bland and monotonous, but the view I have of the Arkansas River’s Salt Fork actually reminds me of the West. Not at all of the same style as the tall grass prairies we came from yesterday, just a couple hours north. It’s wide-ish and dry, with clay-red banks and coniferous trees poking out twenty feet above the river. Just outside of the tent is a carpet of low-growing weeds with violently sharp burs that now coat the soles of our cheap sandals.
“This campground is like the Australian Outback,” I tell Zena later that morning as we trek across dry grass absolutely saturated with red fire ants in order to get to the bathrooms.
Sitting at a concrete picnic table that scratches the backs of my thighs, I notice that this river is a high-traffic area—not for boats or people, but for birds. Flocks of them in all varieties rush by every few minutes sounding like a great swish of wind cutting through the still quiet. Could they use the river to navigate? Could they hope for fish from its dirty, shallow depths? Yesterday we were in Wakita, a town of about 900 known for its appearance in Twister, and a man named Dale—or was it Dick? Or Dwight?—told us that things have been dry in northern Oklahoma of late. I suppose this tributary proves he wasn’t lying.
We were in Wakita to attend their annual settlers festival, which the town’s Twister Movie Museum uses as an opportunity to gather fans (mostly storm chasers and a few freaks like me) for some Twister-specific sight seeing. Dale-Dick-Dwight is one of a few men we speak to in Wakita. Zena points out that the only people “with the balls,” she says, to approach a couple of tattooed outsiders in prairie boots are some of the older men, which sounds icky but I don’t think it is—not like it would be if we were in a city. Out here we’re as much a novelty as we are two pairs of legs. We’re pretty and young, and that could have something to do with it, but more than that I get the impression that these men are just accustomed to saying hello to someone new. We’re curious looking strangers in a town with not a lot of paved roads leading to it, a place so isolated that it’s an hour an a half from the nearest highway. They probably ran out of audiences for their jokes a long time ago.
We hear our first joke not long after we’ve arrived, on our first pass of the main (and only) drag. A cattle auctioneer in a tall cowboy hat and belted Wrangler jeans calls us over to the back of his red pickup.
“I have what you’re looking for,” he says.
He’s parked between a snow cone truck and a pizza truck, and since there’s probably not much in the way of drug trafficking in Wakita his offerings are assumed to be safe so we follow his weird instructions. His son is standing in wait at the tailgate, a miniature version of his pops in dusty boots, boot cut jeans, and a stiff cowboy hat. The cattle auctioneer, whose name is Lance, reaches into a giant cooler and hands us both a bottle of cold water.
“See, I told you I had something you’d want. Donations are accepted,” he says, muttering about a cause I’m unacquainted with. I hand him a dollar.
Miniature Lance is observing us quietly, and when Lance asks where we’re from—“Ohio,” we say smiling behind sunglasses—he squints up at us from beneath the brim of his hat to say “That place is known for being weird.”
I’d like to know more about anyone else’s perception of Ohio. I’d like to escape the trap of my own normalcies and feel freer, less assuming. But Lance has things to say about Oklahoma. He launches into an impromptu history lesson about the Oklahoma land runs, tells us that no one wants land out here, that no one ever has.
Throughout the day we get nods and hellos from a series of old men, proving Zena’s theory correct. Most of them wear overalls, all of them I assume are farmers of some kind—cattle or wheat, most likely, according to Lance. They might live in town, in one of the tattered houses on Pawnee or Apache, or they might live way out in the quiet empty fields gridded with red dirt roads, like Lance, who says in order to find his place “You’d have to be lost or drunk, helps if you’re both.”
The farmers and their wives sit on benches along Main Street, their backs against old, unoccupied buildings with faded, painted signs—a funeral home with curtains half fallen in the windows, an antique store that looks like an antique of its own. They look on as kids zoom around the roped off street on bikes and scooters, crushing egg shells left behind from an egg toss earlier in the day. The festival has been happening since eight in the morning when the Lion’s Club kicked things off with their pancake breakfast which we missed because we were looking for bison in Kansas. It’s well into the afternoon now, but there’s still a packed schedule of sweetly mundane activities—a cakewalk, bingo, an award ceremony for the storm chaser car show, and the magnum opus: the town’s annual parade.
We find seats at a folding table in the shade, and wait for the parade to begin. I think I hear the ghost of a drum lines in the distance, but Zena disagrees. We sit drinking our water from Lance and watch the people mill about. It’s over 90 degrees but I’m feeling too childlike to mind, so I leave Zena at the table to take one of many open bench seats on the sunny side of the street. A man in neon green is emceeing the entire day, occasionally speaking into a wireless microphone to announce the start of each new event through crackling, broken speakers. It’s time for the parade to start and it is the longest, most eventfully uneventful parade I have ever seen. Neon green man introduces every single participant as though they’re royalty entering a ballroom. There are the locals—which he seems to adore—and the storm chasers—which he seems to politely tolerate. A small marching band of about 20 kids in mismatched red and white outfits follows three sheriff types carrying flags on horseback.
“This is a very special occasion,” says Neon Green as the band approaches.
I can barely make out his elaborate introduction of the band as he explains their background into the broken speaker—something about a father and a daughter making their first collaborative appearance together. Everyone on the street seems to know who they are. Finally, he waves them into the street, saying “I don’t care what you play, as long as it’s good.” Their sloppy, heartfelt performance is wildly photographed by a nimble woman who walks backwards in front of them.
Next a golf cart inches into the street. Two frail elderlies sit side by side on its bench seat—a woman in a red cardigan and a man in head-to-toe denim.
“Folks, you’re never going to see anything like this again,” says Neon Green, and we all watch as the man drives them along, the woman’s white cottony hair blowing behind her in the wind. Neon Green tells us Florence has just turned 103, and her husband—whose name is lost in the speaker’s crackles—is 102. Slowly they roll by, waving their papier-mâché arms at the sweating onlookers.
“These two have a date tonight,” Neon Green says, a tone of gossipy scandal in his voice. “You won’t see anything like this outside of Wakita.”
The parade goes on for ages. Drivers in unmarked cars toss forceful handfuls of cheap candy onto the pavement while kids scurry after it, their fingers sometimes dangerously close to the moving tires. I snatch up a strawberry Dum-Dum and feel a little bad about it.
As much as she adores small town America, Zena is really just there for me, so as soon as the Twister replica vehicles pass we get up and walk against the parading stream of storm chasers in search of snow cones. I get something called Lava Flow, a swirled soft serve on top of tropically flavored shaved ice. The pineapple Dole Whip is delicious, but not something unique to Wakita, although Neon Green would probably try to convince you otherwise.
The parade is over and the crowd has dispersed, so we can eat our treats on the shady side of the street. The kids are back to scooting and biking down the main street, while adults set up for bingo. We’re waiting to end our day with plates of barbecue dished out by the booster club, one of the final events of the festival, but have 15 minutes to burn. To bridge the gap between sweet and savory, we mill about some more, Zena smoking a cigarette by a congregation of storm chasers while I visit the Twister museum a second time hoping to get a look at a particular prop that was on loan for the parade.
Gruff men are unloading it into the museum just as I arrive—Dorothy, the made-up measurement devices they carted around in the movie hoping to get its sensors sucked up into a tornado. I follow them as they wheel it back to its proper place inside, and then I stare like it’s a Monet.
“Let me turn that on for you” says a thin woman in capris, and she flips a switch in the back. Its red lights begin flashing, and I stare at its illuminated glory. A man in a ponytail beside me does the same, then poses as his seemingly sweet but disinterested wife takes some photos.
“Want me to take some of the both of you?” I ask. He looks at her. She’s wearing a Twister Movie Museum hat, so I wonder if she’s into it too, but she shakes her head and smiles politely, the way someone would if you offered them some of your gross lunch.
Zena has been patient, but I know the day is winding down, so after we swing through the old firehouse for paper plates of mediocre barbecue and baked beans, I request one more walk about and promise we’ll head to our campsite after. I’m taking what I declare to be the final photo of the day when I hear a man’s voice.
“You’ve heard of this movie they shot here?”
I, a desperate chameleon, say excitedly in exaggerated country twang, “I reckon I have!” and spin around to see who I’m addressing. He’s old, clean-shaven, dressed in a creamsicle orange plaid shirt and a hat with an embroidered gun that reads “Safety Rule #1: Always Carry.”
This, we learn, is Dale-Dick-Dwight, another man ready for a fresh audience. He tells us he was the area location scout for Twister, that he scoped the state for the perfect bridges, the right houses, the best fields. He tells us that Bill (that is Bill Paxton—he refers to him by just his first name) felt a little haunted inside the Wakita house they filmed in, and that this had something to do with Gene Lupe, the fellow who lived there before it became a dilapidated mess. Gene Lupe had worked for a top secret government agency that did what Dale-Dick-Dwight called “deep science,” something akin to Star Wars, he said. Weird deep science things happened to Gene Lupe, leaving him—and his house—quite haunted.
Dale-Dick-Dwight has a lot to tell us. Every comment we make prompts another monologue. We eventually manage to wrap things up before dusk draws too near. He shakes our hands a second time and tries to recall our names. I do the same, pointing at him and saying “Dick, right?”
Zena laughs and says it’s Dwight.
“At home, I just go by ‘hey!’” he shouts at us as we walk away.
The storm chasers are still staring into each other’s chase mobile when we get in the car to drive south. Sun burnt and pleased, we leave them and the ongoing bingo game behind us in the rearview mirror as we make our way to the Salt Fork Arkansas River.
I love this so much!!!