Scenes from rural Oklahoma

Due to the holiday weekend (and my own laziness) I didn't update the last Thursday or Monday. To make up for it, here's a huge post of cool stuff. I got a new 35mm camera that can use all of my Canon lenses (an EOS 3), so I shot a few rolls of slide film (Provia 100f) through it.

Over the weekend, Caitlin and I went up to meet my family at the lake. Our house is near a town called Zena... the town itself consists of a church, an abandoned store and a similarly vacant gas station. There's literally nothing there. There are, however, plenty of trees.



This was just the first part of the most eventful walk I've ever had up at the lake. People pretty much just throw their trash everywhere... there's even a large pile of various random trash right next to a "No Dumping" sign.



This puppy craves attention. She belongs to a local farmer who used to raise fighting cocks before the State banned cockfighting. Now, they raise goats (I think?). Anyway. This and another dog followed Caitlin and me throughout our walk. After getting about halfway back to my house, we saw that the puppy had raw, nearly bleeding skin on its paws from the hot pavement. Seeing as this alarmed both of us, I ran back to the house and grabbed our ATV while Caitlin stayed with the dog. We eventually took them back to their house and drove off.



These were everywhere. The vibrant yellows really drive home the point that this is finally summer.



If you were ever curious what 90% of the midwest looks like, here you go. This was taken on a highway between Grove and Miami (pronounced My-am-uh). As boring as it looks, this is often my absolute favorite scenery, if only because of its familiarity.



After going down highway 59, we intersected Route 66 outside of Afton. This car was part of a huge lot of classic cars in various states of disarray and rust just on the side of 66. Some of them looked recoverable, but most looked like the typical Oklahoma classic car: outside on blocks and rusted over. Kind of a shame.



This was one of the ones in better shape.



When we got to Afton, I stumbled around the downtown area's many burnt and abandoned buildings. This place was likely some kind of school in the past. The building looked like a disaster scene, but with elements of the surreal. This random overturned desk wasn't the only odd part of the two-story wreck; in the next room over there was a huge swastika spray-painted on the wall. Scary, for a town with only 1,100 residents.



I found the single most interesting place in the town after climbing through a broken window into what used to be a TV repair shop. Old, broken TVs and electronics were scattered across the entire shop... or at least what was left of it. The ground was covered in broken glass, pieces of wood and other debris.





Apparently, a bunch of the buildings in the town burned down and were left abandoned. I can't say when or how, but the burn marks on the files here make it apparent that this TV shop was a victim of the blaze.

As we left, a man sat in front of one of the buildings downtown, smoked and played with his dog. His building was connected to the destroyed TV shop, so I would guess he lost some of his business in the fire as well. Regardless, we petted his dog for a bit then left the town, headed back home to Tulsa.

Everything Reminds Me Of Summer

I've been going over photos of my Route 66 trips taken about 8 months ago for an art photography magazine I'm working with, and I've come to the conclusion that last summer may have been the best time of my life.



It started with music, both my band's first show at a coffee shop in Broken Arrow and the Riverfield band's annual show. It was something I could show up to with a group of friends and just relax the whole time. Nothing hugely stressful, just songs I liked to play and sing. Of course, I thought it was stressful at the time; anytime I get on stage, I tense up. But now, I look back on it and realize I got stress confused with excitement.



Those friends I spent time with have grown distant over the last few months. I simply don't have time to call and talk to as many people from home as I'd like, and as a result, some of those relationships suffer. In my eyes, this is a terrible shame. Those people from the city I spent almost the entirety of my life in essentially created my personality. I owe them absolutely everything, and some days, it's hard to cope with the fact that I no longer see them every day, that when I go to class or meet someone at a coffee shop, I see different faces. Friendly, nonetheless, but not the same.







Then there was the road. Most people wouldn't understand how waking up at 7AM and driving for close to 15 hours just to come back to the place where you left could be something that was remotely desirable, much less one of the most enjoyable ways to spend time I have ever found. In Erick, OK, right on the Texas border, we waited on our food for what seemed like an eternity, both of us deathly exhausted, falling asleep on each other at the table. Yet, even starving, tired, and a few hundred miles from home, I found that moment to be something more infinitely memorable than any of the times I have eaten after sleeping for 8 hours here at school. And this is only one example from this trip, probably one of the least potent. There's the abandoned house, the beach outside of Oklahoma City with soft-drinks and a small lake, the museums that all had SX-70s, every little bit I've put together in a photographic collage in my head.







It seems strange that I just decided to reminisce now, considering it has been so long since the summer ended. But really, I think I'm only stopping to type this all out because I have finally allowed myself to look back again. This summer will probably be spent at home, with the same people in the same places. The only difference is the wider gulf that opened when I went to Columbia and everyone else stayed in Oklahoma. What this means for me remains to be seen; I just hope that I can find half of the unexpected experiences this year as I did the last.