ancient and worn down

The best way to come upon the Wichita Mountains is by surprise. Drive north-west from the greater Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Follow the train tracks until you get to the falls, and then drive north, across the river and the red dirt and the endless green fields. Start this drive early, entirely too early, on a spring morning after a night of thunderstorms, when the air is still heavy with the memory of rain and the earth smells fresh and vegetal with that underlying scent of life. If you time it right, you’ll turn onto a county road just as the mist and fog comes in, and the bones of mountains will only themselves be hints against the steel wool sky, what’s left after a millennia of rains just like the one you stayed at home to avoid.

Unlike the eponymous clothing-staining mud of the Red River region, the dirt upon which you camp and hike in the mountains themselves is dark, the broken down remains of 500 million-year-old granite, the rounded boulders of which rear their head against the sky. Around every sweeping bend of the roads that wind their way through the public lands that encompass part of the only bumpy parts of the map before western Colorado.

However it feels to chance across the mountains through the mist, the sun highlights the things that were once hidden - the way the worn-away rock hides secret waterfalls, or the color of the light through the new leaves on the trees themselves hiding a somewhat otherworldly landscape.

Writing about this trip at a remove feels like that final morning, where we drove to the top of Mount Scott and I hobbled on a sprained ankle around the top of what is (at a minimum) the highest publicly accessible point in Oklahoma while someone running for local office attempted to record a political ad and the wind worked to separate me from my hat and a Swainson’s Hawk soared on the currents looking for a snack and we looked, in vain, for the USGS summit marker. The countryside spread out below me, subject to my gaze and yet removed from it, the boat crossing the lake just a speck of glitter in the harsh morning sun. Everything moved quickly and yet didn’t move at all, the solidity of the rock under my feet hiding the spinning of the earth through space. Me, the observer of my feelings, of life, but still connected by the thin sliver of tarmac spiraling back town towards the ground.