A Whole Lot of Fun

I was born in California and grew up in Seattle in the early 80s. The Seattle Seahawks became the team to beat, and we finally had a playoff run. Then we moved to Minneapolis, and in 1987 I watched Kirby Puckett and the Twins win the World Series. I still have my Homer Hanky somewhere. We lived right down the street from the Metrodome, and I even went to a few playoff games.

As far as I knew, that was just part of childhood. You lived somewhere packed with people, and your team was on TV.

Now we’re in the 90s, and my parents moved me to a podunk Oklahoma town called Sulphur. A town of about 4,800 people. No professional sports anywhere near it. OU was a powerhouse, still an hour and a half up the road. OSU was even farther away. Everything I understood about how a kid spends a Saturday was gone. No museums. No water parks. No major league ballparks. Nothing that screamed man-made fun.

So we went looking for fun. Chickasaw National Recreation Area was two blocks from my house, and we found creeks, ponds, and rocky cliffs to climb. The summers were hot, and the spring waters were cold. Buffalo roamed the park, and we understood from the smell why the town was named Sulphur.

Yeah, it was a stinky, strange little town. Four thousand eight hundred people live there. Over a million visitors come through every year, mostly in the summer. People were driving for hours just to get a taste of something we got to experience every single day.

I’m writing this from a rented place on Grand Lake of the Cherokees. I’m back in a small town, far from the OKC Thunder, the big stadium lights, and the man-made fun that comes with them. I’m sitting on the water, watching a week go by more slowly than my weeks do at home.

There’s no Disneyland out here. No Six Flags, no Magic Mountain, none of the places that were so much fun when I was little. And I’m having a better week than I have in a long time.

The water is only part of it. Though the water here doesn’t smell bad, it still reminds me of the fun we had in cold water on hot days. No cell phones. If you wanted to know what your friend was doing, you got on your bike, rode to his house, and found out. If he wasn’t home, you rode to the next house. You picked up enough pals to get in trouble and find adventure. You were gone all day, and nobody needed to reach you because there was no way to reach you. The only rule was tied to the streetlights. When they turned on, you came home.

That’s the part I miss. Not the creek. The whole day with nothing scheduled. Just rambling around, searching for something to do. Putting stories in my back pocket that I still pull out and tell my kids to this day.

I left home days after graduation, running back to the big city. Dallas was closer than Kansas City, so that’s where I landed. I’m fifty now, and I realize my parents did me a favor by moving us to that podunk town on a cold, spring-fed creek. They gave me a taste for something slower, friendlier, and pretty dang beautiful.

Not a whole lot of man-made fun out here. But this blue lake, this setting sun, and the deer peeking through the trees sure make up for it.