Dispatch 06: Stillwater, Oklahoma, to Beaumont, Kansas

I crawl out of my tent and jump on the motorcycle first thing in the morning. The comfort and quiet of a car would be nice, but the vulnerability of the open cockpit instantly connects you to a new place. When you meet other riders on the road, they drop their hand low, palm facing forward, and give the two-wheeled wave. The camaraderie of motorcycle travel never gets old.

We broke camp earlier and fast. No coffee was brewed, so we stopped for java at Aspen Coffee Company in downtown Stillwater. We had skipped our morning routine to prepare for a guest. On this trip, we’re interviewing people of the plains, and today Jerod and I had the honor of visiting with Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear, the leader of the Osage Nation and great grandson of Chief Lookout.

We met with the chief in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. He asked us if we’d read the book, Killers of the Flower Moon. We said no. “If you consider yourself real journalists, you’ll read the book,” he said. It’ll be the first thing I read when I get home. The conversation was thoughtful and enlightening. He told us how the Osage have developed a syllabary to represent a written form of their language. All the signs in Pawhuska have English letters and the Osage syllabary. Before we left, the chief showed us the greenhouses he established so his people would always have access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

We finished the day riding through the Joseph H. Williams Tallrass Prairie Preserve, the largest in the world. None of the 40,000-acres along the sea of grass has ever seen a plow. It was magical to ride through the rolling hills and curved gravel roads of this untouched prairie.

We straddled the Oklahoma/Kansas border before turning left into Kansas and shortly dropped into a low water crossing for the Elk River. We were stopped by high water flowing across the road. Averse to dropping and wrestling our massive two-wheelers in a moving river, we stopped and scouted a shallow route on the edge of Osro Falls, where the water cascaded off the roadway. We finished the day at the fly-in Beaumont Hotel where we set up tents on the hotel’s grass lawn and showered in a vacant room. We are in the rhythm of the journey now!