On a Recon-Burial Mission from Wapanucka Oklahoma to St. Louis Missouri – and Back, June 20th – 27th, 2020

My older sister’s husband, Bob, died on Christmas Day, 2019, after a year of decline and two intensive months of futile, expensive attempts by the medical community to bring him around. We are a methodical family and plan our leaving of the planet years in advance, so his body was cremated to be interred at our family plot in a cemetery near Milburn OK.  

At his death, we had planned that I would travel from Wapanucka OK to St. Louis MO, pick up the sister and the brother-in-law’s remains, and return to bury them. But Covid-19 intervened and we delayed the task. Watching week-to-week as the US data on the virus unfolded, we eventually decided to make the 1400-mile round-trip trek and plant Bob in peace. We calculated that the route along US-69/I-44 would require one stop for gas each way and we hoped we could carry sufficient food and drink, disinfect at the pumps, and avoid using restrooms as much as possible.

For the most part it worked and we had minimal exposure to Earth’s human-carried biology. But we witnessed an America that apparently does not watch the news – or prefers to recast it into another political reality. Ninety percent of the people we observed at stops along the way wore no face masks and casually interacted at normal social distances, about 3 – 4 feet. Along the highways, local police and state highway patrol officers wore no masks. In Savana OK, an obese local white officer had stopped a car and was carrying on an animated conversation with the driver -- with no mask, as he leaned into the car’s driver-side windshield and pressed his point and waved his ticket.  Highway patrol officers in Missouri an Oklahoma demonstrated the same behavior. Apparently America’s Heartland cops are immune to disease – and have the right to exercise their immunity on anyone they stop.

For motorists with a heavy right foot, speeding in this part of America’s Heartland can land you a ticket -- and possibly an encounter with a deadly disease.

At gas stops along the way, very few people wore masks: a white, multi-generational family arrived at a Circle K near Joplin with no masks and paraded inside as if it were 1980. The fat, white grandfather in overalls directed his clan to charge the front door.

Tulsa now leads the more populated Oklahoma City in cases of Covid-19 -- but not in deaths. On June 20^th, the day of Trump’s failed rally, a hawker on US-69 in Muskogee was selling Trump T-shirts and MAGA caps to eager, white, overweight travelers. 

The nation needs a new franchise to market the truth and pander a new gimme cap that projects Trump’s ​calamity: MASA: “Make America Sick Again.”

Bo McCarver reporting for Radio-Free Oklahoma

from Greater Wapanucka

June 27, 2020