Now Playing: Jars of Clay, “Who We Are Instead,” Track 1.
A slightly surreal experience for me this evening: I’m typing this post on my brand new Dell 13” using this Windows Live Writer program, which is completely foreign to me, while my old Inspiron sits on the desk beside me, running iTunes.
Today my family went to Woolaroc in eastern Oklahoma for a field trip. It was a surreal experience to say the least. Ever since I was in elementary school, I have had vivid memories, a whole photo gallery of them, from field trips to Woolaroc. The place is almost completely unchanged, so today was a wander back into childhood.
We started off driving down the turnpike, then turned off onto a two-lane highway with spiderwort and sweet yellow clover blooming in enormous masses on either side. Lovely hills, too—thick with trees, green-and-gold like lush moss. We drove through a string of tiny towns, all of them just barely clinging to existence, some in better shape than others. Hominy, for example, boasts a series of murals by a local artist, but another wee place was notable mainly for its burned-out buildings.
Woolaroc rather takes one by surprise around a bend in the road. On the grounds we followed a narrow road that wound through parkland sprinkled with trees. Ungulates grazed in the shade: Frank Philips, who established the ranch, imported Scottish highland cattle, fallow deer from England, sika deer from Japan, emus, ostriches, mountain goats, water buffalo, elk, and bison, specimens of which gazed at us sleepily as we drove past.
At the ranch we visited the animals in the petting enclosures. As I said, everything was nearly unchanged, from the statues in the front grounds to the chapel with the stained-glass window to one side (I have vivid memories of fuming as a child in one of the “pews” while they played “America the Beautiful”, which was sacrilege to me).
We walked down to the old Frank Philips house, and in the living room we were confronted by his fine collection of stuffed animals. Fantastic, weird, eerie would all be good adjectives to describe the sight that met us. Hawks, an eagle, and an owl hung suspended from the rafters; deer, sheep, boars, elk, bears, and big cats gazed or growled down from the walls. There were even an elephant and a giraffe!
Then we went over to the Woolaroc Museum, where the Frank Philips collections are housed. I remember it particularly for its hideous entrance facade—some aspiring artist in the 1970s must have thought that mosaics of Native Americans embedded in a weird shade of bright blue were just the height of fashion….
The museum inside hasn’t changed probably in forty years at least. I felt queasy from the smell of formaldehyde. Every display case had an animal perched on top, and there was even another, larger elephant head. There were collections of Native American artifacts, 101 Ranch memorabilia, a Colt revolver collection, a doll collection, and on and on….
The museum also has paintings, hung on the walls with very little regard to the actual quality of the work or the time period in which it was executed. A lovely small Bierstadt, for example, hung below some dubious portraits of famous explorers. The whole collection is hardly organized at all, which is rather sad, really—a smart curator could make some user-friendly displays out of the raw material, but at this point, housed in glass cases decades old, against fading paint, the collections are less than impressive. My father and I speculated that money is probably the problem.
Out of the whole collection, my favorite piece was possibly a birch bark canoe. Hanging from the ceiling, the canoe had a sleekness and purity of line that was really quite special—the last of its kind, apparently.
Anyway, I was thankful when we left the museum to eat lunch outside. We climbed onto the rocks behind the Frank Philips house and sat under an oak tree to eat. The house perches on a cliff above Clyde Lake, and the cliff face is a maze of big sandstone boulders and paths, with water rushing merrily over the rocks, and irises blooming in crevices. A nice garden gone wild. We ate and explored.
After lunch we started back. On the way, we drove the loop around the parkland to see the rest of the animals and made a stop at the living history mountain man camp. “Mountain man” might seem like an oxymoron here, but it’s a generic term for trappers who appear to have lived in tipis like the natives. The dressed-up docent taught my mother how to throw a tomahawk and showed another guest how to fire a flintlock rifle. Meanwhile, a pair of glossy gorgeous horses grazed on thick grass in the open pasture, blue wood smoke curled out of the opening of the big white tipi, and the sunshine hung hazily on the small creek behind the camp.
On our drive back to Stillwater, we went through a large thunderstorm. At home I ate a bagel, changed clothes, and went to work at half four. Work tonight wasn’t unusually busy or unusually slow. I was home by about half nine. Ate tea, read Claudius the God (a biography of the emperor Claudius), said good-night to my parents, and came upstairs.
I was glad to be able to go with my family today to Woolaroc, even if parts of the trip felt rather weird. It’s a quirky slice of Oklahoma history. Photos from today here.
