There Is Always Something to See

How Steven and I turned one small weekend into a miniature travel book

Who Thought We Would Be Eating Vegan Food on a Mountain?

On Saturday afternoon, Steven and I were sitting in the back seat of a rental car with the air conditioning running, eating vegan food from the Healthy Hippie while looking down from Mount Scott onto a lake and miles of Oklahoma prairie.

Who thought we would be eating vegan food atop a short mountain in Oklahoma on a Saturday? Not us. We had ordered takeout because I did not feel like being lifted out of the car and settled into my wheelchair just to sit inside the restaurant, then made the overlook our dining room. The cashew queso with walnut chorizo was delicious. The view was enormous. The arrangement was not glamorous. It was perfect.

Thursday: The Trip Begins

We picked Burkburnett because we wanted to check out Hotter’N Hell in nearby Wichita Falls. Neither of us had been. We saw the preparations and Friday evening criterium, but the cycling event became only a small part of the trip. By Sunday, Hotter’N Hell had expanded into the Wichita Mountains, Medicine Park, Fort Sill, Lake Arrowhead, Nocona, Saint Jo, Muenster and a vineyard above the Red River Valley.

We started the trip by stocking the car with a frankly impressive supply of road snacks: Combos, Muddy Buddies, Munchies, Cheez-Its, trail mix, gummy candy and drinks. The snacking continued all weekend. Bakery treats appeared. Dairy Queen Blizzards appeared. There was nearly always something within reach in the car. Curiosity may determine our route, but snacks provide much of the infrastructure.

Friday: Wichita Falls

Friday started in Wichita Falls at the Museum of North Texas History. Its Game On exhibit included the machines and systems that made both of us want to play instead of behaving like responsible museum visitors. Steven achieved the top Galaga score. We played Pac-Man and saw the Oregon Trail running on an Apple IIe, which has a special ability to make an adult feel ancient and delighted at the same time.

Then came the World’s Littlest Skyscraper, the old trains, the architecture downtown and the Kemp Center’s sculpture garden. At one point we also gave a grasshopper a ride on the car. We were not even trying very hard yet, and already the supposedly modest weekend was accumulating characters.

This is one of the things Steven and I do well. We notice. A building does not remain merely a building for long. We want to know why it looks that way, who built it and what happened inside it. A field becomes a question. A grave becomes a story. An animal becomes a full photographic assignment.

Saturday: Prairie Dogs, Bison and a Holy City

Saturday began early. We were awake around 5:45 and out the door by about 6:30, heading north so we could reach the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge around 7:30. I remember telling Steven how glad I was that we had left early.

The landscape changed without announcing that it was doing so. Prairie opened around exposed granite, the hills rose in low ancient shapes, and animals appeared close enough to make us stop talking.

There were prairie dogs standing upright like tiny neighborhood watch captains. There were bison—not fenced behind a zoo exhibit but occupying the landscape with the confidence of animals that know everyone else will move. One grazed beside a stone house, creating the kind of photograph that looks staged until you remember that bison do not accept art direction.

We found the curved stone-and-concrete dam at Quanah Parker Lake, with still water on one side and a rocky drop on the other. The rusting gears and hand-operated machinery made the structure feel both engineered and handmade. It was the first of several times Quanah Parker’s name would follow us through the weekend.

Then we arrived at something called the Holy City of the Wichitas. That name sounds like either a pilgrimage destination or an elaborate roadside attraction. It is, in a way, both. The 66-acre stone complex was built to resemble biblical Jerusalem and became the setting for The Prince of Peace, an Easter pageant that began in 1926 with a cast of five. As attendance grew, Works Progress Administration crews helped construct the walls, courts, shrines and towers that remain in the refuge today.

The Holy City is strange, sincere and unexpectedly beautiful against the Wichita Mountains. It also introduced one of the weekend’s recurring questions: Is this worth getting out of the car for? That question does not mean I am uninterested. It means getting out of the car is never a neutral act.

Saturday: The Aquarium We Almost Skipped

Saturday morning, our first attempt to drive up Mount Scott failed because the gate was still closed at 10:30. We waited. We wondered. We eventually left and drove toward Medicine Park, assuming we could return later.

Medicine Park is a little cobblestone resort town built along Medicine Creek, full of rounded red granite, colorful buildings, footbridges and waterwheels. It is quaint slash cute, which is the most accurate possible category. We drove through first because neither person in our car feels compelled to shop merely because shops exist.

We did, however, decide to visit the Medicine Park Aquarium and Natural Sciences Center. I had debated whether it justified getting out, covering my legs and having Steven lift me from the car into my wheelchair and settle everything into place. It did.

We bought food for the turtles and the quail. The turtles ate carrot peels from a stick while gathering in a determined pile, and the quail ate lettuce. We saw at least one river otter, cute as can be, swimming through water made vividly green by seasonal algae. The aquarium focuses heavily on regional wildlife, so it felt connected to the place rather than like a generic collection of tanks.

It was a really nice touch. More than that, it was the kind of small attraction that becomes memorable because we nearly talked ourselves out of going.

Saturday: Medicine Park and Mount Scott

By then Medicine Park deserved a second look. Steven went to the local bakery and emerged with a coffee-ice-cream-and-espresso milkshake topped with whipped cream and chocolate, a strawberry cheesecake muffin and an iced apple fritter. The muffin and fritter were both delicious.

With the bakery provisions acquired, we returned to Mount Scott when the gate reopened.

After lunch at the overlook, we continued toward Fort Sill.

What the Photographs Do Not Show

I love getting out and seeing things. That does not mean getting out is easy.
Every stop has choreography. To get me into the car, Steven lifts me out of my wheelchair, carries me in his arms and places me in the car seat. Once I am down, he arranges my feet, positions the seatbelt, straightens the shirt that has inevitably ridden up and, when I have landed too low or slid into a slouch, pulls me higher in the seat.

Getting out means reversing the process: he lifts me from the car seat and puts me back into my wheelchair, then settles my feet and clothing again. Even a quick stop contains a surprising number of opportunities for my body, clothing and equipment to become uncooperative.

There are also the less photogenic calculations. I sometimes deliberately limit what I drink because I do not want to need an unfamiliar toilet. This is not good medical advice, and I am not presenting it as such. It is a choice I sometimes make because Steven has to help me on and off the toilet and because an inaccessible or uncomfortable bathroom can overwhelm me before I ever reach the interesting part of the day.

I can become upset. I can scream. I can have periods of feeling deeply overwhelmed by my surroundings, my body, a toilet I do not trust or something important I forgot to pack. On this trip I brought the wrong-size wedge. I brought socks, but not the particular socks I wear to bed because I do not cover my feet with the sheets. The details sound small until enough of them arrive together.

None of this means Steven and I are miserable travelers. It means the opposite. We are very good travelers because we understand that the day will require problem-solving. We are not performing a simple division in which I receive help and Steven provides it. We are a partnership. Every trip is a little like our own Amazing Race: identify the obstacle, improvise a workaround, become irritated, recover, laugh and move to the next clue.

The photographs show the reward. They do not show everything required to place me in the frame—or just beyond it. Both things are true. It is hard, and I love doing it.

Saturday: Fort Sill and the Workaround

At Fort Sill, the first challenge arrived before we entered. Visitors needed passes and identification. I did not want to get out of the car merely to check in, so Steven took my wallet inside, held my driver’s license up for the photograph, called me for the information he needed and completed the process. We passed the background check and entered the fort.

That belongs in the story because it demonstrates how we work. Steven is swiftly smart. He understands the goal, sees the unnecessary physical burden and looks for another route.

Fort Sill surprised me with its scale. It is not a collection of barracks behind a gate; it is an enormous functioning community with neighborhoods, training grounds, museums, historic buildings and, yes, a golf course. Some of its older architecture carries the red tile, stucco and arcaded forms associated with Spanish Colonial Revival design, giving sections of the base an elegance I did not expect in the middle of Oklahoma.

Then we found Geronimo’s grave.

Geronimo died at Fort Sill in 1909 after falling from his horse, spending a cold night outdoors and developing pneumonia. Quanah Parker died two years later at his Star House near Cache. His remains, along with those of his mother Cynthia Ann Parker and his sister Prairie Flower, were later moved to the Fort Sill cemetery.

Those graves followed us into another story. A friend once told me that either Geronimo or Quanah Parker died from gas in a downtown Fort Worth hotel room. The memory was close but had attached the death to the survivor.

In December 1885, Quanah Parker and the Comanche leader Yellow Bear, generally identified as Quanah’s father-in-law, stayed at the Pickwick Hotel on Main Street in Fort Worth. The standard account says Yellow Bear extinguished the flame of the room’s gas lamp without fully shutting off the gas. Yellow Bear died from asphyxiation. Quanah narrowly survived.

That is what kept happening on this trip. A name appeared on a dam, then a grave, then a town, then a half-remembered story. The road was not a line between attractions. It was a web.

Sunday: The Drive Home Refuses to Be Empty

Sunday morning, the trip was supposedly over. We were leaving Burkburnett and driving back to Dallas. I asked whether there was anything worth seeing on the way home and initially received suggestions that did not understand us at all. We did not need a manufactured oddity. We wanted a ranch, a farm, a landscape, a small-town story—something real enough to reward curiosity.

We stopped at Lake Arrowhead State Park.

It was not the most beautiful place we had ever seen. It was peaceful, which is not the same thing and may have been exactly what we needed. The lake opened beneath a huge sky. There was an inexplicable disc golf course. A great egret walked through the road with the composed posture of an animal accustomed to having traffic wait.

Then we encountered four turkey vultures. They had found what appeared to be an armadillo. It was sad for the armadillo, but the vultures looked almost dignified. They were not creating the death. They were doing the necessary work that keeps a landscape clean.

 

The calm surface also concealed an entire town. Lake Arrowhead is a man-made reservoir created when the Little Wichita River was dammed in 1965 to provide water for Wichita Falls. The remaining residents of Halsell were displaced, its cemetery was relocated and the old townsite disappeared beneath the reservoir. During severe drought, foundations, a cistern and traces of ordinary life have resurfaced.

That history changed the lake. It was no longer only water. It was water holding streets, homes and memory.

Nearby, we found a working pumpjack, rocking steadily inside a chain-link fence. Steven photographed it. He also photographed a bee centered on a yellow flower, because industrial machinery and a tiny pollinator apparently belonged in the same afternoon.

Muenster and Wine Above the Red River Valley

Muenster—spelled with the extra e and pronounced Munster—is not a Texas town that recently applied a German theme for visitors. It was founded in 1889 as a planned German Catholic colony. The Flusche brothers helped secure approximately 22,000 acres and advertised the settlement in German-language newspapers, drawing families from Germany and German communities in the Midwest. They named it for Münster in Westphalia.

Outside Muenster, we followed a road past hay bales and turbines to 4R Ranch Vineyards and Winery. The property began as a cattle ranch and gradually added vineyards. Its tasting room stands high above the wooded Red River Valley on a deck with a sweeping view toward Oklahoma.

We had Tempranillo on the deck and looked out toward Oklahoma.

 

Before leaving, we drove close to one of the wind turbines. From the road they had looked delicate, almost decorative. At the base, Steven appeared tiny. One blade stretched beyond the top of the frame while the tower rose into a sky crowded with white clouds.

Distance makes enormous things look easy. That may be another way of describing the entire trip.

The First Trip I Journaled While Living It

I have always taken photographs when I travel. I usually remember what is in them. What I have never done is journal a trip while it was happening.

This time I documented with AI from the road. I reported what we had just seen and asked questions when a building or name caught my attention. The process preserved thoughts I would never have remembered to write later: the exact pleasure of the aquarium, the peacefulness of Lake Arrowhead and the sensation of seeing a face in a grave photograph before I had time to talk myself out of it.

It did not experience the trip for me. It helped me gather the experience before it scattered. Steven supplied the extraordinary photographs. I supplied the running commentary, questions, corrections and occasional yelling. Together, those pieces became more than a slideshow and more than an itinerary.

They became this miniature book.

I do not want the finished story to suggest that traveling this way is easy. It is not. There are transfers, bathrooms, clothing, equipment, exhaustion and moments when I feel completely overwhelmed. There are also bison beside stone houses, otters in green water, vegan queso on a mountain, graves that connect one century to another, a town beneath a lake and Tempranillo overlooking Oklahoma.

Steven and I keep finding ways to reach the next thing. Sometimes I stay in the car while he photographs it. Sometimes we move me through the entire complicated process because getting out matters. Sometimes we bring lunch into the back seat and realize we have created the best table in Oklahoma.

People say there is nothing to see. I no longer believe them.

The photographs show where we went. The journal preserves how it felt to be there—and everything it took for us to get there together.