This Land

For someone who’s not from here, it must be eerie to head out for breakfast on a Sunday morning and discover the roads deserted, only to realize on the drive to the café that all the cars are stowed in church parking lots, as if swept there by some giant…

The billboards go up in early November: the flushed cheeks of a Coca-Cola- reminiscent Santa Claus rendered 10 feet high. The words, the call to action, read simply, “RideTheChristmasTrain.com.”

In less than two days, the 50,000 tickets available for the 2011 season of The Christmas Train in Dry Gulch, U.S.A.—the…

About 20 years ago, a group of students at Rhema Bible Training Center met in secret, somewhere under that spinning shield emblazoned with the word “Faith,” before the annual display of Christmas lights could be hung from the trees and buildings and gardens on campus. They’d come up with plan…

J.M. Hall, the often-called Father of Tulsa who partnered with his brother H.C. in the early 1880s to build Tulsa’s first wood-frame mercantile on the northwest corner of First and Main Streets, talked in a Christmas Eve, 1933 Tulsa Daily World article about Tulsa’s first Christmas. There was just one…

Badger sipped coffee in the audience at The Gypsy Coffee House open-mic night for an entire year before he wrote his name on the sign-up sheet. He had decided he’d read a song he wrote about how one of his ex-girlfriends had come down with a bad case of throat…

Janine Esler’s entry for the 2011 Grand National Wedding Cake Competition rode in the back of her van through five states before coming under the long glance of the Golden Driller. It was 10 minutes after sunrise, three hours before the judges would pull out their score sheets, and the…

Mutton busting is that curiosity tucked between lines of tall letters on rodeo posters, usually toward the bottom. It’s never explained, what mutton busting even is, and outsiders to cowboy culture assume that it’s some bone-cracking, crudely named rodeo game that everyone who wears an old pair of Ropers knows…

When Richard Linihan was a boy, his mother dreamt that a horse bit her on the back of the neck. She couldn’t shake the fear of it, the night terror that began to reoccur, and she never allowed her son to spend time around those animals.

Fast-forward to 1986, two…

In 1973, author and two-time Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne published How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. When he was 32, Jeff Hiller read the entire book, to the last lines: “They’re your dreams; it’s your life. No one else is going to make things right for you.…

I watched a man I’d just met lug what looked like an industrial tricycle into the middle of an open soccer field. He wore a helmet and harness that cinched his t-shirt to his small frame. He approached a five-meter, four-line maneuverable traction kite that was tethered to the earth.…