Oklahoma!

Oklahoma.  Not the play.  Not the movie.  The state.

Oklahoma gets one brief mention in the New York Time's Best Seller, 1,000 Places to See Before Your Die.  Author Patricia Schultz describes Cattlemen's Steakhouse in the Oklahoma National Stockyards as "a paradise for lovers of good red meat (and with just as excellent fish dishes, though most never discover them)."  And the "Sooner State" (click here to learn facts, figures, and interesting tidbits of information about the state) wasn't on my "bucket list", since everything (except Chicago) between the Rockies and the Appalachians has been marked "Terra Incognita" on my map of future U.S. travel destinations.


But today I read Linda Watanabe McFerrin's story "Into the Bluestem Sea" (published by the San Francisco Chronicle on March 9, 2008) about her venture into a remnant of the once far more extensive tallgrass prairie. Linda, one of my travel writing mentors who runs the monthly Left Coast Writers "literary salon" at the Book Passage Book Store (in Corte Madera, just north of San Francisco), is diminutive in statute (but huge in intellectual capacity) and literally not "up" to playing center in the WNBA.  Here's what she said about wandering through this almost archaic natural environment that's led me to pencil Oklahoma in on the big, blank section of my Want-To-Go-There-Someday map; what caught my eye most is the part I've highlighted in bold:

"Early one fall I had fallen in love with this landscape when the grasses, which can grow to 8 feet or more, had reached a zenith. It was a deliciously hot day and silent. The clearing of every tiny bird and insect throat rang out like a great bell. Lured by the rustle of wind through the feathery leaves and seed heads, I stepped into the undulating ocean of grass.

Big bluestem, little bluestem, Indian grass, switchgrass, compass plant - they all surrounded me in susurrant curtains. I was quickly hemmed in, my path into the bluestem sea erased with each new footfall. Grass has a sweet, delicate smell that was inebriating. The voices of my travel companions receded, and I was lulled into a false feeling of safety. Many things hide in the tallgrass. Snakes, stinging insects, ticks and a host of other creatures like me find its cover irresistible. Very quickly I caught myself losing all sense of time, distance and direction. I waded back to the road where the others stood talking, little realizing how the encounter would haunt me."

In 1955, when I was eight or nine years old, I saw the movie version of  Rodger's and Hammerstein's 1943 play, Oklahoma.  And I've seen the play performed at the annual Mountain Play in Mount Tamalpais State Park which juts up into the sky between my home and the Golden Gate Bridge.  A couple of years ago, I even participated in an Oklahoma! sing-along party at a friend's home, belting out songs, karaoke-style, which watching the movie on his big-screen TV.  I'm sure I've flown over Oklahoma at least once or twice.  But I've never been there.  Now I must go.  One day soon.