What Tulsa Looks Like in November, From a Truck Window

I grew up here, technically, but the version of Tulsa I actually see most months is the one framed by a windshield at seven in the morning, heading north out of the city toward a plant in Kansas, or coming back the other direction three weeks later with the heater running and the radio doing that thing where it picks up three different stations at once on the edge of a signal boundary. I know the skyline from a distance better than I know most of the streets underneath it. There’s something a little embarrassing about that, a hometown you mostly experience the way you’d experience someone else’s city, passing through, noticing the light.

November specifically has a color out here that I’ve never found a good word for, not gray exactly, more like the sky and the flat plains underneath it agree to stop competing for a couple months and just sit at the same shade together. Bright, cold, and a wind that doesn’t let up, the kind that pushes against a truck door hard enough that you feel it in the handle before you even open it. I’ve stood in a gas station parking lot at six in the morning in that wind more times than I can count, coffee going cold before I even get back in the cab, watching the sun come up sideways over a highway I could probably drive with my eyes closed by now.

I keep a small stack of CDs in the truck that I never update, the kind of habit that makes no sense anymore with a phone that plays anything I want, and there’s something about digging through them for the right thing at seventy miles an hour on a flat stretch of highway that I haven’t been able to talk myself out of. It’s not really about the music. It’s one of the only physical rituals left in a job that’s otherwise all diagnostics and readouts and a laptop bolted to a service cart.

What I actually think about, on these drives, more than I’d have guessed a few years into this job, is how strange it is to love a place mostly in passing. My apartment is home in the paperwork sense, the lease sense, but the real texture of Tulsa for me these days is the on-ramp, the specific stretch where the plains open up north of the city, the exact gas station I always stop at because it’s the last decent coffee before an hour of nothing. I used to think that was a sad way to know a hometown. I’ve mostly made peace with it now. Some people know a place by staying still in it. I know mine by how it looks from the road, leaving and coming back, leaving and coming back, on a schedule that’s more honest about my life than any lease ever will be.