Animals

I’ve been having a rough few weeks. House stuff, horse stuff, family stuff, work stuff. Nothing insurmountable, taken individually, but collectively it all felt like the universe just woke up one day and chose violence.

In the middle of all that, I realized that I really wanted to see the solar eclipse. I started looking into reservations at hotels, motels and campgrounds in the path of totality, and of course there was nothing still available in my price range.

I came up with some plans and alternate plans. Elizabeth had booked a flight to Austin for the eclipse, and Luke couldn’t get the time off work, so it would just be me this time. My first solo road trip!

Plan A was a remote little campground in the southeast corner of Oklahoma, a little over 12 hours from home if I drove nonstop. No electricity, no water, no reservations, strictly first come first served. Inside the path of totality, but far enough from the center line to maybe not be in huge demand. I figured if I hit the road Friday night, I had a decent shot at snagging a campsite.

Luke, a seasoned veteran of the solo road trip, solicitously monitored my packing process as I loaded up the car after work. “Take a couple more blankets,” he advised.

“I’m driving to Oklahoma, not into a Wyoming blizzard,” I said. “It’s going to be in the 80s down there.” (I know, I was supposed to buy a real sleeping bag for this sort of thing. I will, I’ve just been busy with other stuff.)

“Take extra blankets anyway,” he urged. “You never know.”

I rolled my eyes, but grabbed another blanket. Then, on impulse, I grabbed our padded and waterproof picnic blanket in case the eclipse viewing spot was too crowded for my camp chair.

Getting out of the Denver area on any Friday can be problematic, as everyone drives up to the mountains for their weekend adventures. I was going in the opposite direction, but I didn’t know how eclipse travel might impact the roads. So I tried unsuccessfully to nap through the worst of the afternoon traffic, and then embarked around 10:30 pm. Got sleepy around 2:30am and pulled into a rest area to nap. It was nice having the whole back seat to myself. I slept soundly for about five hours, and got back on the road a little after 8am.

That drive was one of the most tedious slogs I have ever experienced. I was fighting heavy winds the whole way, and the landscape was flat and desolate. Whatever the opposite of “scenery” is, that’s what I was driving through. Got briefly trapped in Wichita Kansas, where a section of the interstate was closed for construction, my map app kept bringing me back to the same barricaded onramp, and I couldn’t find a way around via surface streets. Eventually a nice local couple directed me to a turnpike that got me back on my way. I bet that interstate closure generated a fortune in turnpike tolls for Kansas during the eclipse migration.

One stretch of road in northern Oklahoma had dust and topsoil blowing so thick off the cropfields that I had to slow down and turn my headlights on.

The last couple hundred miles of the trip finally started to get pretty. Lakes, rivers, grass, green trees. My campground was on Winding Stair Mountain in Ouachita National Forest (pronounced like Wichita, but Watchita).

Luck was with me–I snagged one of the last available campsites.

Setting up the tent by myself in that unrelenting wind was a chore. The wind kept trying to blow everything off the mountainside. I had to set it up with all the windows unzipped and open so the wind could blow through it rather than capsizing the walls. But once I got all four corners set and the guywires staked in, it was very stable. I know it’s long past time to upgrade to a better tent; our little SunDome was never meant for any conditions harsher than the occasional summer rain. But I’m always impressed by how well it handles situations it wasn’t really designed for. Nearly worthless against the cold, but an absolute champ in heavy winds.

Once I had the tent safely guarding my campsite, I walked up to Emerald Overlook, where I planned to watch the eclipse. It has lovely views of Ouachita National Forest.

It wasn’t cold that night, but I had to leave the tent windows open so the wind wouldn’t blow the tent down. I was thankful for that extra blanket Luke made me bring.

Sunday morning dawned sunny, warm and much less windy. I had the whole day free, so I drove down to the nearby town of Heavener and had a late breakfast/early lunch in an old railcar-turned-restaurant.

An active rail line runs through Heavener, and there’s a big trainyard just across the tracks from the Southern Belle.

The Canadian Pacific Kansas City Railroad is a big part of the local economy and culture here; you can see old train cars and railroad paraphernalia all over town.

One thing I noticed on my trip is that traveling solo put me in a completely different mindset than traveling with company. I tuned in more to the strangers around me: how they presented themselves, what they talked about. Of course, since Luke is all about road trips and seeing the country, I messaged him often with little tidbits about my journey. When I told him I was eating in a railcar, he asked what sort of people were there. (That’s not exactly what he asked. My son has opinions about culture in general and rural culture in particular, and not all of his comments are suitable for public consumption.) I said there were all kinds of people, and so far I hadn’t seen anyone in Oklahoma that fit the “lumbering hayseed with a dozen children in tow” image he was thinking of. (Although I think Dale Gribble came into the railcar while I was there.)

To illustrate my point, I asked the couple at the next table if I could photograph them. I said, “I won’t post it on the Internet or anything.” The woman smiled and said, “It’s okay if you do.” So here they are:

I sent the pic to Luke, and he said, “Huh,” and then made a joke about what Vinny and Mona Lisa are up to these days.

Meanwhile, a member of the middle-aged, salt-of-the-earth-aesthetic, midwestern-accented party at the table behind me was talking about something she had seen on reddit. It’s a brave new world we live in.

From the Southern Belle I went to Runestone Park, to see their famous viking relic.

There was some sort of eclipse-related event going on there; a guy near the entrance charged me $10 for a parking pass. It was worth it. The park is lovely and by now the day was really warming up. I felt like I’d skipped forward in time a few weeks. Like Heinlein’s Door Into Summer, I’d found a highway into late spring.

The Runestone itself has a little house built around it, with skylight windows and a glass pane protecting the stone from visitors. But some of the skylight windows are broken, and a bird had come in to sit on the stone. He was about the size and shape of a turkey vulture, but his head looked more like a seagull.

The runes are hard to photograph behind glass. Can you see them here?

The Runestone house seen from above.

On a whim I followed a trail that branched off from the Runestone loop. I thought it was a slightly larger loop that connected back to the trail above the little house. Instead it led me off into the wilderness.

I followed it for a while, because it was a pretty trail and a pretty day. But I hadn’t brought any water with me and the sweater I’d put on in the cool of the morning was too hot now. When a pirate-looking dude strode past me in the other direction, carrying lots of hiking gear, I started to wonder if I’d stumbled onto part of a larger through-hike. I kept going, but when I came to a crossroad (cross-trail?) I pulled out my phone and got onto the AllTrails website to see if I could find a trail map of the area.

I normally use AllTrails on my iPad or MacBook. When I opened it on my phone and tried to find the trail I was on, it refused to show me until I downloaded the app. I don’t usually let websites bully me into using their apps, but I was curious to see what the difference was.

As soon as I downloaded and opened the AllTrails app, a screen popped up with my blue location dot on the trail map. It confirmed that I was on the Runestone Park Nature Trail loop. Very cool.

I continued on…and my dot left the trail. I went back to the cross-trail and turned down the other path, and my dot followed the nature trail.

At this point pirate-looking dude reappeared, once again coming from the opposite direction. This time I asked him if he knew where the other trail went. He started telling me about small loops and big loops and parking areas and a scenic overlook, then he pulled a park trail map out of his backpack, handed to me and told me to keep it. I looked it over, but the rudimentary hand-drawn map just looked like squiggly circles to me. “The scenic overlook is on the big loop?” I asked. “The other way where the trails cross?”

“Yep, I’m headed that way myself.”

I thanked him, and he strode off again. I studied the map for a few more minutes, trying to get a sense of how much bigger the bigger loop was. I was hot and thirsty, but I am all about the scenic overlooks. I decided to go for it. I went back to the cross-trails and continued on the way I’d been going before.

Maybe ten or fifteen minutes later I emerged onto the parking area pirate dude had mentioned. There were food trucks and a bouncy castle and a playground. While I was looking around to see where the trail continued on to the scenic overlook, I realized that I was in the same parking area that I had parked in. I was standing maybe 300 feet from my own car.

I went over to it, chugged some water from my Thermoflask, grabbed a t-shirt and went into the gift shop restroom to change out of my hot sweater. Thus refreshed, I picked up the trail on the other side of the parking lot and continued on.

The trail followed the edge of a stone cliff overlooking a valley. It was a pretty trail with intermittently pretty views, depending on the density of the forest.

Near the end of the trail, I ran into pirate dude again, this time chilling in a hammock near the cliff. By now we were practically old friends, so I hung around for a while and we chatted about random stuff. He said he’d chosen that spot for his hammock because it gave him a nice view of the landing hang-gliders. Until he mentioned them, I had not noticed the gliders wheeling slowly above us in the sky.

He talked about all the different sorts of adventures to be had in the area: cave-diving, kayaking, fishing, hiking. His enthusiasm was contagious, and by the time we parted ways I had a new appreciation for this green little corner of Oklahoma.

I asked if I could take a picture of him for my blog, because apparently that’s a thing I do now. He agreed.

I said it was lovely talking to him and he said likewise, and I continued on to the end of the scenic overlook.

It felt like a day well spent, but I didn’t want to leave my tent unattended for too long. I wasn’t sure how determined latecomers might be to acquire a campsite. So I headed back to the campground, to defend my claim.

The wind picked back up in the evening, so I had to sleep with the tent windows open again. This time I used the picnic blanket as a “bottom sheet,” and added the blanket I’d slept on the night before to the pile I slept under. I was toasty warm all night, and would have slept in later if my phone hadn’t woken me up at 5:15 am. I had remembered to cancel the Monday morning alarm on my iPad, but forgotten to cancel the backup alarm on my phone.

Up next: Eclipse day!