God's Country

Jesus is Lord.

Or so says the rundown billboard in Pryor, Oklahoma. Red paint on a white background, faded and peeling.

The billboard doesn't have a rundown look because the sentiment it advertises has gone out of vogue here. It's been weathered, and Pryor is a small, working, weathered town. The Days Inn was obviously a mom and pop motel until the chain bought it out, and the only joint with a new paint job is the log cabin bar on the side of the highway. A local tells me that the bar actually has a name but, because of the fresh green paint job, everyone just calls it "the green bar."

Pryor may look rundown, but it isn't poor. It's a place where work is done, and it sits smack in the middle of nature's highway. Ice storms in winter, tornados in summer. Take your pick.

The vehicles people drive are big and powerful and expensive, and the locals wear fresh workingman duds. There's tattoos, but they mean something. The name of a girl, a place, or a flag (American).

In Pryor, you cannot buy beer without a photo ID. It doesn't matter if you're eighty years old and have the tell-tale gimp of a hip replacement, you must show an ID at the Wal-Mart counter. If that seems a little overboard, don't sweat it. Wednesday night is Ladies' Night at the green bar, and they serve free beer all night long. Just show your ID to the bartender, and he'll get you hammered in no time. The free beer is supposed to be for the ladies, but the rule slides further down the list as the night goes on.

The people of Oklahoma are resilient. Another ice storm hit this week, and the state's three snow plows and salt trucks can't keep up. I've heard local after local say that they've been without power for the past three days. One guy talked about his neighbor ripping out a privacy fence for firewood. A woman told me she slept in her long johns and a winter hat. Another guy told me he was burning gas because his wife wouldn't let him buy a generator and he couldn't take his family to a motel because "people that check into motels just come home to frozen pipes." Another guy told me about a truck he saw on the side of the road. Power lines fell on it and the guy inside, "was all cooked up and there wasn't nothing anybody could do about it."

It's been a bummer week for Pryor, Oklahoma. The temperature on Sunday morning dropped just a tad below freezing, and then it started to rain. And rain. And rain. The roads turned to ice and the branches of trees were sheathed in same. So it rained some more and the trees started falling over and the cars started to crash.

My neighbor in the Days Inn motel showed me the side of his truck where a hubcap came off when he went into a ditch. He told me that the two people in the backseat were now in the hospital because they slammed together during the crash and one of them had a broken collarbone. He told me the story while having a smoke, and when I asked him when all this happened he said matter-of-factly, "Couple hours ago." His girlfriend was inside the room and the door was open. She was watching something with a laugh track and when I said hello, she smiled and said, "Hi!"

Nothing fazes people here. You get the feeling you could set off ten tons of TNT over the next hill and someone would mutter, "Storm's coming."

The weather occupies their thoughts. The most popular question in town is, "You got power?" When the person answers that they have, they aren't called a lucky sonofabitch. They're answered with, "Huh. Mine's been out three days. But I saw it was back on east of town, so maybe we're next." Then the conversation moves on to Friday's weather, or the guy that fried under the power lines, or the fact that the people up north are going to get it because the storm's headed that way.

The weather occupies their thoughts, but it should be occupying their ballot box. This is the first "emergency zone" I've ever found myself in, and I can't say I'm wetting my pants. Oklahoma gets hit with ice storms all the time, but it's weather that would make a Canadian yawn. Yes, ice is bad. But after three days, you'd expect to see some salt on the roads. Instead, people just bear it for a week or two until it melts. When I asked about this, I expected some locals to get mad at me for calling them incompetent. They didn't. They agreed with me. One said their politicians had no sense, but common sense is the least common thing around.

They're friendly people, but they're not stupid people, and they're not shy about showing their feelings, either. Most of them work in the various factories that litter the emptiness of Oklahoma, and they know the difference between right and wrong. I've only been here a short while, and I've already heard half-a-dozen people tell each other off. When I heard a man in a hard hat order another man in a hard hat to go get him some work materials during lunch, the man said, "And when am I gonna eat lunch? You eat lunch and I don't eat lunch? That ain't right, man. That just ain't right, you know? Come on. That ain't right." The other man relented and they parted ways.

That wouldn't happen back home. In Toronto, the man would say, "Okay, no problem, boss," and not mean it. Then he'd bitch about it to his friends during work, after work, and into next week. He'd hold a grudge for months, and bad mouth the guy to everyone that said the boss's name. But that's Toronto. In Oklahoma, men in hard hats say, "That ain't right!" And their boss knows it, so he lets it go.

Wal-Mart is the town center. It's where you go for food, clothes, jewelry, you name it, they got it. When I went to the gas station and asked if they had some paper towels lying around, the lady said, "Sorry." I said no problem and she said, "You just don't want to truck up to Wal-Mart." As it happened, she was correct.

Jesus is Lord.

I guess that sign should make me think this is the land of the Bible Thumper. God's country. But no one here talks about God, or religion, or much else beyond the weather and how good their beer will taste after work. One guesses that Ladies Night at the green bar is as good a Sabbath as any, but I wouldn't push the religious talk if you paid me. I heard one guy go on about religion being bull and just a bunch of magic tricks, and the local that was listening to him got quiet and his eyes went stony and deep. He kept his gracious southern hospitality, but somewhere in there I could hear the bolts click back. This is a state where men wear camouflage jackets because they actually use them to hunt stuff on weekends.

If the chips were down during an ice storm, or if bullets were flying past my ear, I'd take a man from Oklahoma in a hard hat over a Californian with a Blackberry any day of the week.