The Dog Went Over the Mountain by Peter Zheutlin

Author:Peter Zheutlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2019-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

This Land Is Your Land

Broadway, the main street that runs through the center of Okemah, lives up to its name. It seems about as wide as the westbound half of the Santa Monica Freeway. Downtown Okemah would certainly feel more intimate if the street were narrower. Maybe there’s a historical reason it’s so wide—to accommodate cattle drives or large farm equipment—I don’t know. On an ordinary day this too-big-for-its-britches stretch of pavement would have added to the town’s sense of emptiness and desolation, but we had, by sheer luck, arrived in Okemah on no ordinary day.

This farming and ranching town of 3,200 sits right off Interstate 40, about an hour east of Oklahoma City and a little more than an hour west of Sallisaw. Sallisaw is where the Joad family, fleeing the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression for California, begin their journey, one that would have taken them right through Okemah, in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath.

We came here to pay my respects to Okemah’s most famous son, America’s greatest folk singer and folk-song writer, Woody Guthrie.

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