Thursday, April 27, 2006
Day Three: The Larrabee Boys and The Wizard of Oz
After eating steak for both lunch and dinner yesterday, I opted for the fruit plate this morning despite the waitress’s warning that most of it came from a can. I was somewhat surprised that I did not regret this decision. Once we finished breakfast, we drove around town a little before Jim called Joe Larrabee to arrange a place to meet. Joe said he’d be over in a few minutes with his brother Bill. We all had coffee at the motel restaurant and looked over some photos and documents Jim brought with us. They didn’t have much new information to share, but they offered to take us around to see some sites.
Jim didn’t look too sure about things when I eagerly accepted Joe Larrabee’s invitation to go see his snakes before we did anything else. As a surveyor, Jim spends a lot of time trying NOT to see (or, more accurately, feel) rattlers when he’s working in the field. He’s a good sport, though, and we took off with the Brothers Larrabee to peer inside Joe’s giant box of snakes. Joe used to put on shows featuring the snakes, but stopped doing them recently because it was too expensive. He also told me that he took up hunting snakes as an alternative to golf.
After the rattlers, we headed out to Arkalon, which is where Henry Larrabee first settled before the family moved into Liberal. There isn’t much in Arkalon now but an abandoned school house and a cemetery. I did get to see a praire dog, though (Joe is always on the lookout for them because rattlesnakes also live in their prairie dog towns). After that, we drove down to the Cimarron River, which wasn’t much wider than a big creek. There we saw a beaver dam and the bridge known as “Mighty Sampson.” Bill said the bridge was built in “quickie sand” and that in order to support the bridge, the engineers had to bury pylons 90 feet deep (that was his rough estimate).
While driving around with Bill, Jim also learned that what he saw yesterday was probably a female grouse and not a roadrunner. And to my dismay, Bill confirmed that Jim probably did see a boar’s head in the road. Hog farming is apparently big here.
We ended our tour with the Larrabees at the cemetery in Liberal where their great-grandfather, Henry, is buried. It might be difficult to see in this tiny photo, but the headstone was very unusual, and Jim and I wondered if the pattern etched into the front might possibly contain another clue.
I don’t have time to write about our trip to the museum, but I will leave you with this tantalizing photo of the Wizard of Oz exhibit. My favorite part of this tour was our guide’s retelling of Frank Baum’s story. It was folksy, succinct, and featured lines like “well, I guess that old witch was pretty sore about those shoes....” It was, in a word, OZSOME!
