After spending Sunday morning packing and dining at IHOP, I left Kathy and Conway for the open road. Staying in Conway was good and it was nice to catch up and hang out with Kathy again. She has to stay and teach in the Arkansas Governor's Program, so I'm on my own again.
As I write this I am in a Motel 6 just on the outer western edges of Oklahoma City. The city itself is nothing to write home about. It's like many so-called "Heartland" cities: generic office towers in the middle of the city, an empty arena, and nobody to be seen on the streets. The rest of the city is unplanned urban sprawl. The one highlight, for me at least, is the Oklahoma National Memorial & Museum. I had planned to take a tour in the museum but a traffic jam near Shawnee, OK prevented me from doing this, so instead I spent about 1/2 an hour walking around the memorial near sunset and took a few photographs.
For those who remember, in 1995 Timothy McVeigh planted a bomb in the Oklahoma Federal Building. The bomb destroyed most of the building and killed 168 people.
The memorial is built on the former federal building site. Two large arches frame a mirror pool which runs parallel to a lawn with brass chairs lined along it. The chairs are in nine rows, each row representing a floor of the original federal building. Each chair represents someone who died, and small chairs represent a child.
The monument is stark but it works. It reminds me, in terms of appropriateness, of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C.; that is it sums up what it is memorializing well without being, say, too sentimental or dramatic, or undervaluing the event itself. In contrast, consider the WWII memorial in Washington D.C, which misses the mark and is in the wrong place, in my opinion.
Tomorrow, I hope to get to Amarillo in the Texas panhandle and stop for lunch and then try and push on to Albuquerque, NM for the night. Most of what I wish to see is west of Albuquerque and this part of Oklahoma and Texas is rather flat, but not in the interesting South Dakota way (where you can see the horizon for hundreds of miles and not a tree in sight).
By the way, I've now set foot in 33 states, or 66 percent of the states.
1 comment:
What you need to do, maybe under the slide show, is add a map of america with all the states you've been to. next time your sitting in a motel 6 with nothing to do, maybe you could look into this.
Post a Comment