Tulsa

 

Thanks to all the warnings on Tulsa’s morning tv shows of barely plowed roads and black ice and single digit temperatures after a second night of snow, three inches on top of the five the night before, the masses were staying in and I had the roads pretty much to myself.  I had no desire to spend a second day marooned at the Motel Six in Bartlesville, so dared to see what the conditions were like and how far I could get, and was sure happy I did, so much so that I wondered if I’d made a mistake to lay low the day before.

This wasn’t a record amount of snow, but it was more than the region gets most winters, so it was a major story, The story.   With snow a relatively rare occurrence the region doesn’t have a huge arsenal of plows and just a limited number of independent contractors.  Someone with a snow blower was such an oddity he was featured on one newscast.   

The Motel Six where I was staying with an adjoining Pancake House hadn’t bothered to plow its parking lot during the two days I was there, despite it being a 24/7 restaurant with an offer of all-you-can-eat pancakes for $5.99.  I would have loved to take advantage of it, but I had stocked up on a whole roasted chicken and had other food I needed to eat.   The TV reports advised motorists to take food and water in case they got stuck.  There were numerous accidents, mostly vehicles sliding off the road, but no fatalities other than a twelve-year old boy who’d been sledding and went into the road. The motorist who hit him didn’t stop.

I had attempted to be on my way the day before, but turned back when I saw the highway I’d be riding was all snowpack. My legs could use a rest day after eight fairly strenuous days, so wasn’t all that reluctant to take the day off and read Balzac. Plus I felt fortunate to have ridden fifty miles the day before in snowy conditions when I feared being stuck in a motel on the outskirts of Vinita. 

But that ride out of Vinita was off in the hinterlands well away from Tulsa, where I would now be heading with much more traffic.  There was so little traffic I was concerned that if I took a fall it’d be a while before someone came along to rescue me.  Whenever a pickup passed I feared it would stop and offer me a ride and I might accept, but none did.  The light snow, which was mostly micro-ice pellets, was coating my helmet and water bottles and wind breaker and glasses with a layer of ice. When the pellets let up I stopped to shed my wind breaker to replace it with my goretex jacket, as I had begun to overheat and it is breathable, unlike the windbreaker.  It came as a surprise to discover how encrusted it had become, requiring a vigorous shake to shatter the ice that had made it as rigid as a board. 

Fortunately there was enough of a residue of salt on the road for it not to ice up.  The challenging conditions made the Carnegie in Bartlesville, forty-five miles west of Vinita, an even greater site than usual.  It’s dignified yellow brick, pair of columns, tall windows and  immaculate landscaping registered a peak reaction on my Carnegie-meter.  That it was now a law office and had the firm’s name etched across the facade hardly mattered, as it still retained all its grandeur along with “Carnegie Library” above its entry. And it was free of any addition.  It was a good first Carnegie of the seventeen I hope to get to in Oklahoma.  The state had twenty-five.  Seven had been razed and I had previously visited one other in Tahlequah on a trip with Janina in January of 2014 to visit a print-making classmate of hers in Dallas from her time at Indiana University.

The next Carnegie on my itinerary was in Collinsville, another town like Bartlesville named for its founder, with both settled in the late 1800s.  It was thirty-five miles south to Collinsville from Bartlesville.  My departure was slightly delayed, as when I pushed my bike out of the Motel Six into the cold not sure of how far I would manage  I was waylaid by a guy in a wheelchair who told me he’d give me five bucks to get him a bottle of vodka from a nearby liquor store.  He couldn’t push his wheelchair through the snow to reach it. 

Since making pickups and deliveries on my bike used to be my livelihood, I didn’t mind at all lapsing into that role and doing the guy a favor.  The directions he gave took me through a gate and on a sidewalk that was still deep in snow.  The snow was too much,  so I came back and returned the twenty dollars he had given me.  He said I could take a longer way via the road, but if I didn’t want to I could just have the twenty bucks.  As I hesitated, he shoved it under the bungee cord on the back of my bike.  That closed the deal.  It was actually more than half-a-mile away, but gave me a taste of the road I’d be riding. There were ruts of clear pavement with snow in between, and negligible traffic.  It was a joy to be in motion, so I hardly minded the delay of this errand.

It was a clear day, unlike the day before, so the bright sun kept the road from icing up.  I warily rode at seven miles per hour the first couple of miles, but soon gained the confidence to nearly double my speed.  I couldn’t have been happier to be freed of my dungeon.  I rode right past the Collinsville Carnegie on its Main Street as it was bereft of the usual Carnegie features. Nor was there a Carnegie portrait, but, almost as good, a  framed front page of the town newspaper with an article on the library acquiring the portrait on the centennial of Carnegie’s birth in 1835 and a picture of it.  The library had been remodeled and had an addition to its rear twenty years ago that doubled its size.

The fifteen miles on to Tulsa required some navigating, forcing me to stop several  times to consult my GPS.  In Owasso I stopped in a bike lane along the road.  Within a minute a police car stopped and asked what I was doing and wanted to see some identification.  A moment later two more police cars showed up.  They weren’t curious and helpful, but rather suspicious and leery of a white-haired guy on a loaded bike in such conditions.  They ordered me off the road to a parking lot.  One officer gave me directions, at first suggesting a bike path not realizing it wouldn’t have been plowed.  I had to wait a couple minutes for my driver’s license while another officer ran a check on it.  No happy travels from them.

Downtown Tulsa was fairly desolate, but at least the streets were passable, unlike a one-mile stretch several miles after my encounter with the police, which I had to alternately walk and scooter along, keeping one foot unpedaled lest I wipe out on the slick surface.  I am lucky I’ve only had this one dose of treacherous road.

As I passed through Tulsa I rejoined Historic Route 66. It would take me to the next Carnegie in Sapulpa, one of three towns on 66 with a Carnegie.  I was hoping to reach it before dark, as I was confident there would be cheap motels there catering to those traveling 66.  But the vodka run and having to walk that snow-packed mile delayed me enough that I fell seven miles short as dark closed in. 

I was getting nervous about finding accommodations.  I feared having to ride in the dark or even more so possibly camping in the snow on a night when temperatures would be near zero.  I couldn’t have been happier to see a sign to the Capri Motel, though “weekly and monthly” rates gave me pause that it would be full. The parking lot had a lot of cars, but there were still rooms available. It would be my fourth straight night in a motel, but I was happy for it.  Temperatures will be back to normal in the fifties by Tuesday, so the snow will soon be gone and my tent happily back in use.