Sometimes road trips are mostly functional, like distant errands, a rural work meeting, or to visit friends in Wisconsin. Other times they’re much longer like during vacations. All of them lift my mood and change my perspective, but the long ones can transform me. I’ve never finished a long road trip and felt it wasn’t a good thing to have done. There might have been times it felt hot and endless, sketchy, even risky, but I’ve always felt better afterwards because traveling through time and space always feels good. Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Andrea Ghez, and other notable astrophysicists have spent their careers researching and informing us about spacetime, even floating weightless to show us how things change out there. Driving a car at interstate speeds won’t allow us to escape earth’s gravity, or slow the aging process, but it’s still time travel.
We were surprised to discover that Tulsa is almost due south from the Twin Cities, along with Des Moines and Kansas City. It’s a north-south corridor of the country that we hadn’t visited before. We arrived in West Des Moines at dinner time and ate Mediterranean food near the shore of a small city lake. Then drove to Kearney, Missouri north of Kansas City and spent the night. The next morning my wife woke early, had the continental breakfast, and walked the neighborhood while I slept in. We grabbed coffee and food at a Filipino kitchen located in a mall parking lot, drove into Kansas City, and ate on the enormous green lawn at the Nelson–Atkins Museum. She suggested we stop there when planning our trip and showed me their website. It’s a classic Beaux-Arts building from the early twentieth century and looks like other stately museums from that period. Then we noticed there was a modern addition to the museum as well, and it was designed by Steven Holl Architects, one of my favorite studios. After we finished lunch, we walked through a variety of gorgeous contemporary exhibitions inside the partially subterranean Bloch addition and then explored the grounds. Before leaving town, we drove by the nearby Kansas City Art Institute where professors I used to know had attended, then refueled, and gathered snacks before driving further south.
Visiting Tulsa has been on our road trip list for years. We have friends who moved there decades ago, and we’ve always wanted to visit them. We finally did and were able to spend part of an afternoon and evening touring the city, reminiscing, sharing stories about their dog Bailey, and eating Italian food for dinner. My wife became a virtual member of a church located there too and is more involved since the pandemic. She was overdue to visit her newest friends and colleagues in person, so it was the perfect trip to accomplish both. The night we arrived we drank wine with a new friend in their screened porch lined with party lights and candles, next to softly lit shrubs and trees that glimmered in the still blue pool. The community affirmed their affection for my wife and demonstrated that her place in Tulsa isn’t only virtual, it’s local too. She read a poem during services, we walked through the lush Gathering Place near the Arkansas River, visited the Greenwood District, followed multiple tornadoes north through Iowa, and finally arrived home where time felt different and noticeably compressed.
Songs :: Hello In There by John Prine, Like a Ship by Pastor T.L. Barrett & The Youth for Christ Choir, (Cross the) Heartland by Pat Metheny Group, Everyday People by Sly & The Family Stone, Can’t Find My Way Home by Steve Winwood, and Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody by Joni Mitchell
© C. Davidson