Ooooooooklahoma, everyone!

I’m falling a little short of my goal of seeing the whole Midwest this year, but I couldn’t wrap up 2018 without at least seeing the musical land of Oklahoma. Though I didn’t smell much waving wheat in the season of Lastleaf, the wind sure was whipping down the plain. As my first time in the Sooner State, I was really curious what there was to see here on the Great Plains. Right away, I headed for the nearest national park site, Oklahoma City National Memorial.

The memorial is divided into an indoor part and an outdoor part. The outer memorial, surrounded by the surviving buildings of the city, feels like an eternal crater that can never be filled. At its center, a glassy pool reflects the gently rustling branches of the trees planted in honor of the first responders.

This pool stretches between two arched Gates of Time, the eastern one reading 9:01 for the moment before the bomb went off, while the western one reads 9:03 for the moment when the shock of something awful hit the whole city.

On the south side of the pool, 168 empty chairs remind visitors of the lives that winked out of existence between those two gates of time. They were mostly office workers in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, just starting a new day in the Social Security Administration, Housing and Urban Development, and Department of Veterans Affairs. However, it may have been the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that made this particular building a target, first in October 1983 and then, fatally, on April 19, 1995.

The blast from a Ryder truck loaded with 7,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, nitromethane, and diesel fuel immediately blew off the north side of the building and damaged several buildings nearby. It took two weeks for the rescue teams to find all the bodies, alive and dead, and then the rest of the building had to be demolished. The plaza, the east wall, and the parking garage are the only remaining parts of the original building and are now part of the memorial. The wall now has 600 names of survivors engraved on it.

Another miraculous survivor of the blast is this American elm. Once a highly coveted provider of shade in the parking lot, this poor tree weathered the full force of the blast and yet, somehow, survived. This Survivor Tree is still standing today as a symbol of strength and resilience, built up on a high promontory with a state-of-the-art water and aeration system to keep it healthy for many more years to come.

From there, I headed into the museum, where the first exhibit walked visitors through the opening of a normal day for the Water Board near the Murrah Building. The audio recording of a water rights meeting, which survived the blast, began with monotonous routine and ended with a sudden blast and the panicked shouts to take cover and evacuate. It was jolting and terrifying, and then the exhibit poured into the rooms of artifacts recovered after the explosion: mugs and watches and calendars, the most innocent items charred and cracked and shattered.

On the second level, the car that terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, used to escape remained on ghoulish display. He had planned the attack as a form of revenge for a 1992 shootout at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. His revenge ended up killing a whole lot of uninvolved people and 19 children in the building’s daycare. Yet, at the end of the day, an Oklahoma State Trooper pulled him over for driving this unlicensed car and having an illegal firearm. It took two years to convict him and another four years before he stopped appealing for life in prison.

So at the end of the day, Oklahoma City was left with a hole in its heart. Folks still leave their tributesflowers, ribbons, and stuffed animals on the fence that once enclosed the ruined building. Though 23 years have passed since this disaster, there’s still a lot of hurt here, and I think it’s an important reminder of the consequences of unchecked rage. The museum itself even goes as far as to have an interactive program describing how to spot and report signs of violent plots before they’re committed!

So this introduction to the Sooner State may not have felt me feeling OK, but the Oklahoma City National Memorial is a beautiful tribute to the lives lost so suddenly on that April morning, and as a place to reflect and remember, it’s a jewel of the city worth a stop on a visit at any time of year.

Off to the Plains!

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More 2018 Adventures

Total Ground Covered: 9.3 mi (15.0 km)

Later That Day