Drilling the Devil's Skull

Eco-Rape in Southern Oklahoma

By an hour after each tender dawn their machines start to rumble: diesel engines bang to life; warn-up, and then slip into a low, harmonic drone that provides the day’s bass notes -- until the merciful dusk ends all labor and its cacophony. As each day heats up, bulldozers, tractors and livestock trailers rumble about onto the state’s two-lane blacktops and the county’s red gravel roads that passively bear the loads of whatever men can scrape and grow on the fragile crust of this part of Earth, which takes the shape of an inverted bowl. 

What lies with the 30-mile perimeter of this formation would surely have faced a more violent fate but it has been partially protected it with a blue granite crown, several miles deep, that makes drilling for oil and gas unprofitable. So “the Devil’s Skull,” as disgruntled drillers have dubbed the deep, rock formation, has thwarted entrepreneurs’ oil derricks and fracking that poisoned the water and air in the rest of Oklahoma; most of Texas, and the Devil knows where in the rest of America.

My neighbors who surround this 54-acre piece of Earth go about their days, extracting whatever profit they can. Some draw pensions, teach in public schools, deliver mail, or grade roads for the county. Some torture cattle for a living; others grow hay to sell to those who torture cattle. They are largely an angry menagerie -- strangely none have any good words for their relatives or neighbors – and add a shrill, terse wind section to each day’s symphony. 

Six souls now run for Johnston County Commissioner, District 2. Some of them spot me at chores and pull up to the farmhouse and chat for my vote. There are three Republicans and three Democrats running in an election that will draw maybe 200 total voters. It is largely a contest of who has the most relatives and close friends. None of them want to identify with Trump or talk about him, but 80 percent of the county voted for him in 2016. The local TV stations are laden with minor crimes or the high price of beef-over-the-counter, but none carry much about local protests about Black Lives Matter. Any weather that might project rain that might help my struggling grapevines is reported as “bad” for recreational outings.

Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Health Department buries the surging Covid-19 cases in a barrage of no-context data, not intelligence, as the state’s goofy governor still tries to “open up the economy.“ The recent, brisk southerly winds that blew his spin into Texas have not yet been  redirected northward  to bring Texas’ new message: Shut the Hell Down.

While we fated humans on the planet putter and joust, tonight on my small niche the horny frogs croak love songs on my 2-acre pool on which the ever-busy and optimistic beavers each night add height to their dams. This dusk has brought a new song of the coyotes, bullfrogs and crickets that replace the human clatterings. 

Maybe tomorrow that pesky Mocking Brid will echo back my whistled first four notes of Beethoven’s 5^th. 

Peace to All

Bo McCarver in Wapanucka

for  Radio-Free Oklahoma