Once Upon A Drive
Marble City is a town nestled in the Cookson Hills of Eastern Oklahoma about 9 miles north of Sallisaw on Oklahoma Highway 10. Its population hovers around 300. It has always seemed to me to be just large enough to stave off ghost town designation. I was more than a little surprised when I picked up a recent Sunday edition of the Tulsa World to see the lead front page article on Marble City. The article concerned the Cherokee Nation’s decision to construct a Community Resource Center of some type in Marble City. I believe it would be difficult to read that article and not consider the tribal endeavor to be quite worthy.
But no matter how much Marble City flourishes I shall always recall it is being a landmark on a favorite Sunday drive. Coming south from Tahlequah, Billie and I would exit Highway 82 at Blue Top, the small store with the blue roof. Just east, the paved road gives way to gravel. Unless we were deep in a dry August, a clear cool stream of water flowed over a low-water bridge. I’d stop the car and poke my Chuck Taylor’s into the cool water.
Moving east, the forest thickened. The trees closed in until they met in the middle, progressively blocking the sunlight. The gravel road itself seem to become more natural. It became less a road and a more path. Thoreau wrote that nature had an essential and unexplored harmony to it. I think he was writing about such places. Henderson School, its fields hosting a Sunday baseball game, appears on our left.
Homer Flute had assured me that there was a free-flowing spring of sweet, cold water rising from the rocky hillside to our right. I would often point out to Billie what I thought to be a narrow path leading away from the road. I never walked up it. I should have.
Here the gravel ended. Do they still play “Rolley-holey” at Flute’s Store?
In a few miles and we were on the bridge over – is it Brushy Creek and Sallisaw Creek that boundaries Marble City? I paused the car mid-bridge and looked up stream. The view was like a Norman Rockwell painting. God seemed to have fashioned a perfect pool in the clear flowing water beneath the railroad bridge. Any number of youngsters were splashing and playing in the stream. I was envious.
Marble City sat along the bank. There is what was clearly once a downtown anchored by a sturdy stone bank building. A school serving students through the 8th grade sits on the hillside.
NowI’mobservedtheworld of my backyard through Coke fizz. A disturbing made it’s way through the fog. “What do you mean it isn’t that way anymore!” “Well, if it isn’t, it darn well should be!”
Anywhere which is in a forest, that’s my Zen place. Raveena Tamdon
