Photo Log 7: Midwest City

Not many pictures today; bummer.

It should have been simple enough. I was going to ride west on SE 29th into Midwest City, around Tinker AFB and down to the bicycle entrance to Draper Lake. The whole trip would be about 20 miles, but once again, things didn’t turn out as planned.

It seemed worth the risk since the rain pattern was taking a break for awhile here. I rode off down SE 29th. As always, I have to cross somewhat hilly terrain to get anywhere. At one point, we cross that snaking watershed between the two branches of the Canadian River (the far crest in the picture). Two miles out things start to get easier, with a long slow descent between Westminster and Post Roads. Two more valleys with matching hills on either side and we hit the vast prairie on which Tinker AFB sits.

It was previously a Douglas Aircraft production plant running up to WW2, then passed to the US Government as a centrally located air depot. It was just about the only open prairie in the area at the time, several miles on each side. For a time, much of Midwest City’s existence was as a bedroom and shopping area for Tinker. The core of economic activity for the city is still Tinker.

The primary runway is north-south. At one time there was a problem with some of the aircraft crashing on the northern approach and destroying homes in the flight path. Eventually, the Air Force bought out the neighborhood just off the north end of the runway. What’s left is just a one-block strip on the west side of this square mile section. All the houses were removed, most of them built for adjunct base housing, anyway. It has since been fallow and allowed to grow wild over much of the concrete streets. The Zoomies use it for training to simulate wild terrain.

Back when REX 84 was still a popular subject with the underground militia types, one of the wild stories included this training area as a probable future FEMA camp. However, the real nuts insisted it was already built and ready to use. While there is a high chain-link fence around it, and the trees have gotten thick, you can see enough of the place to know that is pure hogwash. The rail lines running into the base as a whole are all out of service, slowly being dismantled as the railroads decide to recycle the steel. In other words, while just about anything can be strung up with enough tents and fence panels, this place is wholly unlikely to see FEMA use. It would take weeks just to make enough clear space for such an operation. Believe me — my job in the Army involved POW operations, and this place would be a huge pile of work and no good way to ship in large numbers of people as cheaply as the government tends to do such things.

However, the entrance road to the south gate of this training area also connects to some back roads and such that allow me to get off the main thoroughfare. Right here just outside Tinker’s main entrance is easily one of the nicest shopping plazas in several counties. For some reason I can’t exactly explain, we see less predation than many of more expensive areas of the OKC Metro. None of the stores were open when I passed through, so I continued as far as the back routes would allow and rolled on down to Sooner Road.

This is one of those minor highways that has seen major traffic since before my time. Prior to the Interstate Highway System, it was a section of US Highway 77, pretty much the predecessor of I-35 here in Oklahoma. Sooner Road itself runs down south of Norman. To the north it merges with I-35 near Edmond, and reappears independently somewhere north of that, ending up around Guthrie.

There is supposed to be a link with the Grand Boulevard Route, the Oklahoma River Route, and a few other loops in the Metro, but the various sections are hit-n-miss for now. Turning south on Sooner Road, we hit one of the earliest sections of these extensive bike trails. It’s old enough that the asphalt surface is cracked and has a few serious sags from soil subsidence. Right along the middle of this mile is the typical Zoomie propaganda art, just across from what used to be the Air Force Hospital Gate. It appears to depict the sequence of an AWACS plane doing what we see them doing just about every day: It comes down to the runway, doesn’t quite touch and takes off for another lap. I’m not sure if it’s testing the hardware, training the wet-ware (crewmen) or what, but it’s a fact of our existence. The flight pattern for this endless looping includes our trailer park at times.

This street is also marked as an official bike route. In the second mile south you have the option of switching from the bike path to a sidewalk. While the Metro unified code says you can’t ride on the sidewalk in a business area, that’s really for urban areas. Out here in the suburbs, enforcement is nonexistent unless you threaten pedestrians, of which there are precious few most of the time. But come SE 59th and the bike route turns east again, clinging to the underside of the airbase. We get to see all those heavy industrial plants and the monster office buildings for companies like Boeing. At the old Air Depot Boulevard, we turn back south. I got to see the queue of trucks waiting at the truck gate and some of the older industrial buildings now devoted to military related contracting. At the end of this southerly mile run, we pass under the railroad tracks that used to feed the old GM Plant.

Back when GM was producing X-body cars (mostly Citations) it was one of the highest paid jobs in the state for regular blue-collar folks. Everyone else considered the workers pampered and whiny. Now the union hall stands empty, and after years of sitting vacant, the massive facility itself is owned by the Air Force. It was a great place of indoor storage and office expansion. (No, I can’t take pictures of anything that belongs to Tinker AFB without prior arrangement.) Oddly enough, the independent automobile railhead and storage yard across the street still received new cars not long ago.

This brings us across SE 74th and the I-240 underpass. It began to sprinkle just as I came within sight of the newest section of bike path. It runs over some open terrain that still gets mowed, and drops down onto the perimeter road for Draper Lake (seen in this last image viewed from the Draper perimeter road). But the rain started getting a little more serious. A cell call confirmed we were in for a heavier patch of rain rolling slowly up from the SSW. So I let it chase me back into the shopping area four miles back and made it into a speed workout. While there, I took advantage of the shelter and reconfigured my riding gear for a wet one. Riding in the rain isn’t too bad, but you have to make some adjustments or you’ll be more miserable than necessary.

So I came back out to my bike and the rain had quit. Well, nothing for it but to head home and end this trek for the day.