If you made the trip or know someone who did, or even if you just saw the freeway shots from Houston, then you know what it was: 50 miles in 5 hours before we were able to break onto a minor road and off the main freeways. We left at 11:15 pm and were bumper to bumper the main part of 5 hours to Livingston TX. Then we cut off and went to Onalaska and turned towards Trinity, Palestine and Athens. By 10 AM we were in the Dallas environs. The whole experience gave me some compassion for the whole refugee experience world-wide and more recently out of Katrina's wake.
It was like the Runaway Scrape all over again.
As I drove into Oklahoma today I had the music of Rogers and Hammerstein in my head - but more authentically, the music of Woody Guthrie (as I learned it from a Michael Parks LP called "Closing the Gap" in the late 60s or early 70s:
Many years have come and gone
Since I wandered from my home
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born.
Many a page of life I've turned,
Many a lesson I have learned;
And I find that in those hills I do belong.
'Way down yonder in the Indian Nation
Ridin' my pony on the reservation,
Oklahoma hills where I was born.
'Way down yonder in the Indian Nation,
A cowboy's life is my occupation,
Oklahoma hills where I was born.
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