Route 69 was very southeast Oklahoma, there was no other way to describe it. I pulled off the road and got a room at the 69 Motel in Chouteau, OK. After checking in I called my Grandmother from a pay phone out front. It was nice to hear her voice and she was happy that I called.
There was an old roadside truckstop diner across the road. I walked in and sat at the counter. The place was pretty quiet. There was a cook in the back. A fifty-something waitress and 3 patrons that I could see from my seat at the counter. The one guy at the counter a few stools down from me was familiar with the waitress and she was with him. You could easily tell her life was a hard one. She derived brief pleasures from the overworked drivers who stopped in and made her feel like a little something special with their admiration.
She seemed annoyed that I was there, I clearly did not fit in. That was ok, I just wanted my fried chicken plate and to go to my room so I could sleep. This was one of those off days for me. What I needed was to hang at this nice little country motel till tomorrow morning, but that is not what I did.
I couldn’t sleep so I watched a show called The Lone Star Bar and Grill. I was addicted, further prompting sleeplessness.
I was from Connecticut, and severe thunderstorms would prompt a message to scroll across the bottom of the screen every few minutes, but here in southeast Oklahoma when there was a severe thunderstorm warning, a solid warning stayed in the right bottom of the screen. This was tornado alley and I was inexperienced.
I was anxious. My plan was to take this room, get some sleep then leave at midnight...again. So when at 7:30 the television had a steady overlay on the lower right corner of the screen, on every channel that said "severe storm warning". Brilliant me decides, “I better leave now and beat the storm!” Stupid little Connecticut boy, you cannot outrun a thunderstorm in southeast Oklahoma! I was so clueless.
I hit the road, without sleep, and drove right into the biggest storm I had ever seen. I could see it for 50 miles and was right in the thick of it for over 30 miles. The wind and lightning were serious business. My wiper blades were worn and the wiper motor could not run the wipers fast enough to keep up with rain like this car has never seen. There was a section of Highway 69 where a row of trees on the side of the road was on fire. The violence of this storm felt like a tornado was imminent.
While I gripped the steering wheel of my 72 Dodge, all I could think about it that I STILL HAD THAT MOTEL ROOM RENTED TILL NOON THE NEXT DAY! What an idiot! The storm seemed to take forever to go away. It finally did and I was running out of road in Oklahoma and I knew Texas was coming.
I finally drove into Texas, my final state, but I was still a day away from Port Aransas. I stopped at this dark little convenience store and grabbed a coffee. I had to ask the woman to repeat what she said three times. Oh boy, I was going to really need to listen to people down here. I was not accustomed to the dialect and I was the outsider.
Things were pretty calm until I made it to Dallas around 2 AM. The traffic patterns were foreign and it blew my concentration. Yet, I could still be sleeping in my Chouteau, Oklahoma motel room that was still paid for. Dallas was in my rearview finally. I decided that I was very tired and at this point, I thought just pulling into a rest area and laying down on the front seat to sleep was welcome, despite the motel room in Chouteau.
All the rest areas were full. I began to worry that the full rest areas were warning that storms were further south. I got off the interstate in Hillsboro and took route 22 west toward Lake Whitney State Park. The sky opened up and again, the wipers were no match for the deluge. I drove a long way out to the state park on back roads and there was a tree across the road. I turned around, I had seen a small motel on 22 on my way out to Whitney. When I got there it was actually not open anymore. The rain pounded down, wipers slamming up and down, defroster full speed, lights on full, and of course, the alternator gauge started to pull down toward the low side, it was not charging. Remembering that morning back in northeast Ohio, yep there it was. I backed the defroster down to conserve battery power, as well as dim the brights, and wipers down 1 speed. The headlights grew dimmer all the time. It was getting dangerously low. My car would run without power, it was a 72 with breaker point ignition, but I still needed lights and wipers. When it got down as low as I thought it possibly could and would have to stop driving, the needle jumped over to the overcharge side with a vengeance. It overcharged all the way back to the interstate.
I had enough! I pulled up to the swimming pool of a larger hotel parked, laid down on the front seat, and went to sleep. As I slept, a nice little motel room in Chouteau, Oklahoma sat quietly across the road from an old truck stop diner empty and mine, where I should have stayed until the next day.
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