Tulsa – Oklahoma City

Beautiful sunny day, and warm – high of 75F.

We picked up Old 66 as it left the city of Tulsa.  We found a 1920’s iron bridge, still in use for local traffic. We then found a beautifully preserved concrete stretch, with the characteristic lipped curve, running straight and true through rural Oklahoma west of Tulsa.  This highway runs right past people’s front yards – hard to believe for one of the major transcontinental highways of its time.

The rest of the ride into Oklahoma City was through a combination of wooded areas and open vistas, all riding a ribbon of concrete, with a gentle ba-dum-ba-dum every second or so as the tires crossed the expansion joints.  

Once we hit the outskirts, we fired up Bruce the GPS to guide us to the Oklahoma City National Memorial.  This is a somber and moving memorial to the victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building, in which 168 people (including 19 children) lost their lives.  

The original site had the building, and its parking lot separated by a block of city street. 

The building is gone, its footprint replaced by a grass slope with 168 chairs, each with a name of a victim, arranged in 9 rows, corresponding to the floor in which their remains were found.  Poignantly, 19 of the chairs in the second row chairs are child-sized. 

The chairs look out over a reflecting pool, whose footprint replaces the city street in front of the building.  The reflecting pool is bracketed at either end by two black rectangles called the Gates of Time, one labelled 9:01 and the other 9:03.  

The chairs look across the pool to a tiered grassy slope, the former site of the parking lot, where a mature American Elm improbably survived the blast that damaged 300 buildings in downtown OKC and caused some 30 buildings in the vicinity to be condemned, and demolished.  The solid brick building behind it survived, despite having its roof and upper floor lifted by the blast - these largely fell back down into place with minimal structural damage.  The scars of this violence have been sealed for weather, but otherwise unrepaired, to preserve its post-blast appearance.  For similar reasons, the windows (which were all blown out of course) have been bricked in with black stone.

This building houses the excellent Memorial Museum, which has a timeline-based explanation of the event and its aftermath.  It starts with an audio recording of a mundane court proceeding in an adjacent building, which captures the moment of the explosion and the ensuing confusion.  You are then ushered out into the display area, decorated with bomb debris, where there is a whirlwind of actual television coverage and police radio transmissions as citizens and emergency responders alike try to wrestle with the nature and scope of the explosion.  Subsequent rooms chronicle the search and rescue operations, survivor stories, world reaction, enumeration and identification of victims, and the course of the forensic investigation, the largest in US history, which involved 28,000 personnel and the collection of 1 billion pieces of evidence.

When the truck that was used was identified as a Ryder truck, Ford located the vehicle built immediately after it on the same assembly line, repurchased it from its owner, and had it delivered to the FBI as a comparator for identification of vehicle fragments.

Subsequent rooms documented the identification, arrest, trial and conviction of the conspirators.  Perhaps the only notable absence (perhaps this is deliberate) is an explanation of why they did it.

Just opposite the memorial is a smaller one one the site of a Catholic building destroyed in the blast.  There are 19 rough-hewn columns of varied heights, in black, arranged behind a white statue:
 

Note the inscription on the base of the statue:

And so did I.