Wednesday, March 30
A day filled with responsibilities and possibilities. After breakfast at the campground, we made our way into Woodward in search of the library and the County Courthouse. Woodward is the county seat of Woodward County, and as such has a larger population than most other towns around the area. It is in NW Oklahoma, just a stone's throw from the Oklahoma panhandle, once referred to as No Man's Land because nobody wanted to live in this hot, dry land that was host to tall grasslands and bison by the millions at one point in history. It was the cultivation of the land to grow wheat to sell to Europe during WWI that caused the devistation that resulted in the decade of the dust storms in the 1930s.
I dropped Duffy off at the library, where he spent about four hours filing taxes electronically. Fortunately, there was a nice little corner where there was a table, chair, arm chair, T.V. (silent mode) and soothing colors where he could work. Plus, nice librarians. (Smile) Then, I hoofed it across the street to the courthouse – how conveniently situated – to talk to the nice, helpful folks in the Assessor's office. I was taken to a back room where there was a county map laid out on a draftboard. Together, the helpful woman employee and I, found the parcels from property descriptions I'd brought with me, and pinpointed the road intersections. In that part of the county, the roads are simply numbered.
Duffy was going to be a while at the library, so I did ran an errand, then visited the Pioneer Museum. Primary among the displays inside were those of Temple Houston, youngest son of Sam Houston, who claimed Woodward his home after attending law school and was instrumental in bringing Oklahoma to statehood; Black Sunday, the worst day in the history of Oklahoma dust storms; and the worst tornado to hit Woodward, with a photo of everything save the courthouse leveled by the massive winds, and the windows blown out of it. It was hard to tear myself away, but it was getting late, and we still wanted to locate the family property.
Four o'clock and we still had some daylight. We followed the directions south of town to find the road coordinates southeast of the small community of Sharon. What we found was brushy, unfenced land with only one neighbor to the south (a real dump), and an access road brush-cut onto it curving off in two directions. My aunt holds the property directly adjacent to the north and her cousin owns the plot just across the road to the east. All of it is soft dirt that appears to cake when wet, with a variety of grasses, scrub brush, and drought resistant trees. The cleared path on our property led to three structures that appeared to be placed there by deer hunters. A blind erected on a steel platform wrapped with wind-whipped, faded and torn camouflage cloth, holding a chair on top appeared to have been there for quite some time. One other piece of equipment, apparently much more recently placed, seemed to be a feed hopper. I can only guess it was used to draw deer to the spot within view of the blind. The other piece of equipment appeared as old as the blind, but wasn't clear to us what purpose it held.
Other than these and the evidence that someone had recently brush-cut the swaths on the land that led to the equipment and beyond, perhaps to other parcels, the only other sign of human encroachment was an OSB structure across the road on my cousin's property – another blind? We took photos and recorded the GPS coordinates in our Garmin, then called it good. Or, as good as could be with so little time.
Dinner at Big Dan's sounded good about now. It has been a long day.
Until next time,
Pam
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