TuzigootJournal: Oklahoma! September 2008

Greetings, Family and Friends:

My sister, Verla, turned 50 on September 25, the same day I turned 66. To mark the occasion she put on a dance party in Edmond, OK. We went -- via the Ford Explorer, not Tuzigoot. (We couldn't leave until Friday and the party was Friday night, so there wasn't time to take Tuzi.)

Earlier this year Susie and I had gone to a friend's 66th birthday dinner, which was fetchingly-themed with Route 66 memorabilia, so we adopted that idea and had this birthday cake created for the party. It depicts Highways 50 and 66 (get it?) and is topped off with a couple of buses from my collection.

Here's some of the birthday revelry:

My brother, Lael, flew in on Saturday. He and his wife, Katherine, are preparing to sail from their dock on the Chesapeake Bay to Australia over the next year or two, so it may be a while before he gets to see us again. Pictures and more at their Painted Skies website. Here's a picture of Mom and kids:

We've made several trips to OK in recent years in which we just zipped over and back on I-40. Enough! I said. This time we'll get off the beaten path and see some other country, and some family. So, leaving Edmond on Monday we headed for NW Oklahoma, where both my parents grew up. I rode with Lael in his rental car and Susie followed as we careened across the landscape. Our destination was the farm where my mother and her four sisters were raised. Cousin, Dennis, now farms and maintains the home place and we're grateful to him for preserving the buildings as we remember them from our childhood visits. I drove a tractor for my grandfather the summer between my junior and senior years in HS and have some great memories from that time. Here are pictures from an earlier visit (2003). If you look closely, you'll see that I was wearing a Route 66 t-shirt even then.

After a good visit with Dennis and his son, David, we drove on to nearby Buffalo for lunch and more visiting with two more cousins, Ross and Charlene, and spouses, Marsha and Frank. Ross had given me great directions to the cafe: "It's two blocks north of where the stoplight used to be."

We left Buffalo (school mascot: the bison) in mid-afternoon and drove straight through the OK panhandle and stopped just across the border for the night in Clayton, NM.

Several years ago I bought a book titled Miles from Nowhere: In Search of the American Frontier, by Dayton Duncan. It was published in 1993 and is about US counties that had less than two people per square mile in the 1990 census. I've been recently rereading it. Lots of interesting insight into today's frontierspeople. Anyhow, one of those counties is Cimarron County, OK, the last county in the panhandle and another is the adjacent Union County, NM. Lots of wideopen spaces. I love it. Here's the Union County courthouse and some wideopenness:

Tuesday morning, on the way to Springer, NM, I spotted a sign for the Dorsey Mansion, so I U-turned and we drove 12 miles up a dirt road to see the mansion (a maneuver you can't do in a Tuzigoot). I've read articles about this place in NM magazines and newspapers and thought it would be neat to see. The mansion was built by a Senator Dorsey, close by the Santa Fe Trail, and was quite the place to be in the late 1800s. Here's a picture and some text from the website:

Construction on the rambling 2-story log house began in 1878, with completion in 1880. In about 1884, he began to remodel his home, adding the stone castle structure that included faces of his wife Helen Dorsey, his brother John and himself carved in stone on the castle tower. (Along with a few gargoyles.) Among a few of the amenities of this magnificent house, is an art gallery, billiard room, library, 9 bedrooms, a 60 guest dining room, servant quarters and the first indoor bathroom. (Prior to that, he had a spacious 8 hole outhouse behind the mansion.) But, not to be outdone, the grounds boast an 1800's swimming pool, with 3 islands and a gazebo!

Unfortunately, we found, you have to make reservations for a tour and you can't get close to the building, without ignoring a No Trespassing warning. Rather jarringly, there's a large junk yard on the property, just to the right of these pictures. Out here in the middle of nowhere you wouldn't expect either a mansion or a junkyard.

Here's a windmill and stock tank along the road to the Dorsey Mansion:

We then made our way across the mountainous regions of northern NM -- Eagle Nest, Red River, Taos. From Taos we headed south over what is called the High Road to Taos. Beautiful day, beautiful fall colors. The ancient village of Truchas is a fascinating place on this route. Assorted pictures: