T. Cole Rachel's own private Oklahoma ­ Coming Fall 2004

Okla-home

Growing up in rural Oklahoma, it was as if the rest of the world only existed in theory. Aside from our little trailer out in the country, the seven miles of Route 66 that I drove every day to school, and the wheat fields stretching out in every possible direction, the rest of the world-big cities, beaches, shopping malls-was just as far removed from my life as anything on television. Mine was a universe of expanses, rolling hills, and hugely open skies. When I see it now, the landscape of southwestern Oklahoma is almost magical in it's own sweeping, magisterial kind of way. Of course, it's easy to idealize places after you've moved away from them, but as a reasonably mature adult I can finally go home and appreciate just how lovely Oklahoma really is. It's just unfortunate that the landscape of my childhood often felt so isolating and Siberian that it made the very idea of leaving seem mostly impossible. Having spent so much of my youthful energy actively plotting escape, I never fully appreciated how austere the backdrop to my upbringing really was.

I went to school my entire life with the same 12 people, all of us in a town witn no streetlights, one short main street, and very little to distract us. Everything involved distance, so, from a very early age, much of your life revolves around driving. Most of my friends could drive a tractor by age 10 and the majority of our social lives centered around cars, or more often, trucks. A simple trip to the store to buy milk involved at least a 5 mile drive. You hung out in your car, most early experiences with alcohol and sex took place in a car, and most parties involved the use of your car, or at least parking it on a dark dirt road in close proximity to a bonfire. So when I think about growing up, I can't help but replay the hundreds of hours spent zooming down treacherous dirt roads, a blur of livestock, oil rigs, and limitless farmland blurring past the windows. Summertime heat always makes me think of the hours spent roasting on the back of an open-air tractor, listening to The Cure on my headphones, and wishing, wishing, wishing I might be somewhere else, all while a dizzying panorama of patchworked fields nearly enveloped me.

Oklahoma is a landscape of extremes, prone to blistering summers, arctic winters, psychotically tornado-riddled springs, and, as I remember them, the most breathtaking autumns I have ever seen. It's a place full of red earth canyons and scrubby cedar trees. It's a state full of Native American folklore and backwoods trading posts, and a land of relentless blowing wind. It's also a place where people visit the Cowboy Hall of Fame, attend rodeos on a regular recreational basis and live on Tulsa time. Dotted with Red Rock Canyons, ghost mounds, bat caves and an abundance of town fairs, Oklahoma is equal parts natural beauty and country-ish charm. And while it's unfair to make sweeping generalizations about an entire state, I can say that Oklahoma, like much of the Midwest, is also a land heavy with gun racks and bristling with, at times, an overpowering religious conservatism. But there is also a real sweetness to the people who live there, a generousness that I've come to recognize more and more as I've grown older. It's a kind of unhurried, genteel sort of kindness that I don't often experience in my current urban setting.

Oklahoma City, while perhaps not the most cosmopolitan of urban sprawls, has it's own share of treasures, which I discovered once I was finally old enough to drive myself there. It was there that I drove to buy obscure records and find the kinds of books I wasn't supposed to read. It was there that I saw my first punk rock show and went to my first gay bar, where, for the first time, I saw two men kiss each other on the lips. What shocked me the most was the idea that all of this-the bars, the shows, the gays-had been going on just an hour's drive away from me, and I had never known it In the quiet womb of my bedroom, I had no idea that in towns all around me were lots of other boys much like myself, feeling alone, adrift, dreaming of some bigger, better, more fabulous place where we might run away and feel somehow normal.

So, no matter how long I've been away, when I go home there is always a moment when I catch myself at the window of my old teenage bedroom and feel suddenly connected to that adolescent version of myself. At those times, my current life here in New York City still seems like a distant implausibility, and I look out at a horizon that seems to have no end.

A poet and freelance writer, T. Cole Rachel's first collection of poems, Surviving the Moment of Impact, was published in 2002. He recently co-edited a poetry anthology for teenagers, Bend, Don't Shatter: An Anthology of Youthful Desire, which will be published in April by Soft Skull Press. Though he lives in Brooklyn, he still calls Hydro, Oklahoma his home.