"Boom Town"

[fiefoe]

Given the subject matter (Oklohoma City, its founding, its (ill) planning, its racial relationships, its sports teams, its local celebrities, its weather), the book was surprisingly engaging, polished and well-organized. Sam Anderson narrated the audiobook himself.

• But it’s the kind of city that, in its excesses, its imbalances, its illusions, its overcorrections, its lunges of pride and insecurity, its tragedies, and its improbable achievements, says something deeper about the nature of cities, about human togetherness, than a more well-rounded or traditional city ever could.
• Most places have one sky; Oklahoma City has about twelve. There seem to be many different vectors up there, completely unrelated to one another, happening all at once. Sometimes you’ll see silent lightning blinking, very high, in one region, while smooth white clouds slide around low behind you. Will Rogers’s lasso, if you look through it, might be holding the sun, might be holding some ragged cirrus clouds, might be holding a volcanic piece of dusk.
• (James Harden's) beard, up close, was overwhelming, a real ninety-ninth-percentile super-mammalian face bush. A slow-motion testosterone explosion.
• Sports interviews are a special category of non-conversation, and this was particularly true in Oklahoma City, where a typical Thunder media session was a call-and-response of non-questions and non-answers so relentlessly empty that it became almost profound, like the chanting of Buddhist monks.
• In person, up close, the beard looked like a disguise. It may as well have been rubber-banded to his face. It was real, of course, but it implied things that weren’t real. Most of all, it implied age. The beard was a big curly pile of time.
• thousands and thousands of tunnels, some with false bottoms to fool predators, some leading to rough bedrooms and storerooms and bathrooms, all of them invisibly interconnected and meticulously organized into distinct neighborhoods. The largest prairie dog colonies covered hundreds of square miles, and above them buffalo grazed by the millions. It was a teeming abundance of life, operating almost without restriction, farther than the eye could see.
  In other words, in American terms, Oklahoma was a wasteland.
• It came to be known as the Unassigned Lands: a vacuum, nearly half the size of Connecticut, right near the center of America.
  Vacuums, by nature, tend to get themselves filled, often with sudden violence.
• The Boomers crossed flooded rivers, suffered through terrible storms, and endured threats from the Nez Perce Indians. As they rode, they scooped up buffalo skulls, bleached ultra-white by decades and centuries of sun, and dropped them in a line behind them to mark their trail.
• When a large object exceeds the speed of sound, it essentially crushes the air molecules it moves through. When that air manages, very suddenly, to uncrush itself, to decompress, it creates a violent, explosive rumble that we know as a sonic boom. It is more or less the same mechanism as thunder; a supersonic jet, in effect, carries its own perpetual thunderstorm. This is often confusing, and terrifying, to people on the ground.
• The Saturday Review published a partial list of residents’ complaints that sounded like an incoherent nightmare: “a schoolroom ceiling lamp had dropped and knocked a boy out of class for an hour…plaster from a bedroom ceiling had cut a three-inch gash in a sleeping woman’s head…flocks of chickens had been crazed into erratic flight with considerable loss of egg yield and some loss of life.”
• When President Harrison signed the document announcing the date of the Land Run—April 22, 1889—his signature sent a bat signal out over the end of the nineteenth century. Oklahoma was a gift: a free chunk of America for anyone who needed it. But it was also an emergency: it was free only to those who could get there first. The hysteria spread worldwide.
• In retrospect, the Land Run seems spontaneous and wild, and it was, but nothing about it was easy. Thousands of people and thousands of animals had to be chaperoned across flooded rivers. Oklahoma’s treacherous spring weather did not pause for the big event. People had to balance on rickety railroad bridges. Whole families drowned. The settlers who survived carried civilization with them in tiny pieces, like ants, in order to collectively reassemble those pieces in Oklahoma.
• In the face of this rejection, the Oklahoman owners e-mailed one another with the rollicking confidence of men who believed they would never be subpoenaed.
• designing a scouting database so sophisticated it was adopted across the NBA. As a scout, Presti discovered, and then convinced the Spurs to draft, an unheralded French teenage point guard named Tony Parker,
• And yet the euphoria was at least partly based on a deep misundertanding. Many people in Oklahoma City worshipped Presti not because they bought into the Process but because the Process had been, in this case, so explosively successful that it looked exactly like a boom. For all his meticulousness, Presti looked like a gambler with a scorchingly hot hand.
• Every player, on every play, has to find the proper balance between self-interest and self-sacrifice—a threshold that moves with just about every bounce of the ball. The game is fluid, with everyone shifting roles and responsibilities more or less constantly. The calculus of selfishness versus self-sacrifice can be crushingly complex.
• Male prairie chickens have inflatable orange throats and what looks like a second set of wings—pure black—on their necks. At that time of year, they would have been busy with a ritual called “booming”: puffing their orange throat sacs, flapping their neck wings, leaping around, squawking for mates.
• By the end of the day, tents would stretch to the horizon—it looked, according to Harper’s Weekly, like “a handful of white dice thrown out across the prairie.” The wildflowers were crushed, the soil torn up. The frogs and ducks and prairie chickens had scattered. In a matter of hours, Angelo Scott wrote, “the natural beauty of the scene was completely obliterated,
• the U.S. marshal and his deputies, were busy instead grabbing the best land for themselves. (Most of the deputies had signed on only for this purpose, and they took the bugle call as a signal of their resignation.)
• there was no Joe, there was no mule. The words were a closed loop, an incantation through which Oklahoma City was going to chant itself into existence. This was an experiment in civilization. The place was so new and precarious, so strange, that its residents had to shock themselves into community using whatever method they could find—the way a human body, freezing to death, tries to generate its own heat by shivering.
• If there had ever been an excuse to ditch the Process and go all in on a Boom, 2012 Harden was it. The talent he was beginning to show overflowed any spreadsheet cell. You couldn’t find it on an actuarial table. This was as close as Boom and Process could ever come to touching each other, to trading places.
• A few seconds later he added, with the rhythmic precision of an orchestra conductor calling in the kettledrums, “It should be coming—right…now.”
  And then it came. The clouds accelerated, whipping past the tower as if fleeing something terrible. The rain went from a steady pour to dense, hectic, laser-targeted swarms coming in at us sideways. The trees churned with new urgency. <> England, having apparently seen all he needed to see, turned and left us at the door. It was unclear whether we had just witnessed a weather forecast or a feat of shamanism—if England had been predicting or controlling the storm.
• He made barnstorming tours across the region, lecturing crowds of thousands about the subtle violences of the ocean of air that churned and teemed and flowed over them. He helped to make people fluent in the language of supercells, wall clouds, dry lines, wind shear. In 1996, England appeared as himself in the movie Twister.
• Scott called the Seminoles “the evil genius of the founding of Oklahoma City.” And yet he was also forced to acknowledge a bitter paradox: any order, even a corrupt order, was better than total chaos. “Oklahoma City would have been spared her birth-pain agonies,” Scott wrote, “if those first-day citizens had tamely accepted the Seminole survey in full and paid the modest price demanded. Thus would Oklahoma City have been founded in absolute peace upon the basis of absolute fraud!”
• Durant was seven feet tall, slim and smooth, with a skill set no one his size had ever come close to showing. Watching him play was like watching the Eiffel Tower breakdance.
• The state’s atmosphere was perpetually unbalanced in a way that sent the air rushing, almost always, from south to north, on an invisible track from Texas to Kansas—so consistently, in fact, that if you ever happen to find yourself lost in the countryside of Oklahoma, you can just look at the trees: they lean north.
• He created a constant low-grade tension. This struck me as perhaps a deliberate tool, a way for Westbrook to extend his own unusual focus to the people around him. His personality was like a grinding stone—he dragged blades across it, all the time, to keep them sharp.
• And so Oklahoma City leaders fought, with the mighty righteousness of undeserved pride, to steal the capital from Guthrie.
• Officially, the turnover was charged to Westbrook—his sixth of the game, against only five assists—but it could just as easily have been charged to the ghost of James Harden or to Sam Presti’s Process or to the bling-blorng-blarnxxx, ancient symbol of life’s ineluctable disharmony.
• the English writer J. B. Priestley, whose philosophical plays were then all the rage in London. Our conventional notions of time, Priestley posited, were far too simplistic—the idea that we move through life shedding moments behind us like flower petals, one by one, as we stride off into the future. Instead, Priestley argued, we live in an “Eternal Now,” in which “the Past has not vanished like a pricked bubble.”
• Draper sprang him from jail, put him on a plane home, and had the only copy of his arrest report hand-delivered to him in Washington, D.C. OKC won the contract from Wichita. To this day, Tinker Air Force Base remains a major economic engine in the region.
  Thus were things Draperized. This pattern was repeated any number of times, on any number of projects. After a while, Draper could afford to be quite explicit about his power. As he put it, in a widely admired speech: “The properly organized Chamber of Commerce is the best compromise possible between the principles of democracy and those of a benevolent aristocracy.” Its leaders, Draper said, were exempt from “the disorderly and violent processes of our elections.”
• When the room got too crowded, he’d move to the next room, and then everyone would assemble around him in there. You got a sense of the origin of the word “star” as a metaphor for celebrity: not just a distant brightness but a microdensity so intense it could move other bodies around.
• During World War I, black soldiers boarding trains to leave Oklahoma City held banners that read, DO NOT LYNCH OUR RELATIVES WHILE WE ARE GONE. This was a reasonable fear.
• The map was not nearly done growing. The following summer, in August 1960, Oklahoma City metastasized to 392 square miles. The thirty-seventh most populous city in the nation was now larger than New York and rapidly expanding Dallas and even insatiable Houston. Oklahoma City now occupied parts of four different counties.
• As we drove around town, Claus often spoke in these terms. He would point to what had once been Main Street, now cut in half—a one-hundred-year mistake, he said. He would point to a parking garage—a twenty-five-year mistake. The Stanley Draper Expressway, Claus said, was a fifty-year mistake, and now its time was over. But its replacement, the Oklahoma City Boulevard, looked like it would be another fifty-year mistake.
• Oklahoma City, clearly, was not Boston or Pittsburgh. Its oldest major downtown buildings were hardly even fifty years old. And yet Stanley Draper and the other major powers loved the idea of urban renewal beyond all reason or restraint. The Land Run had left the city center frozen in disarray.
• I. M. Pei unveiled the Pei Plan: a program of downtown annihilation that dwarfed even what was being done in Cleveland. It was breathtakingly extreme. On the map of the plan, cross-hatched lines marked the buildings set for demolition, and there were so many it looked like a map of bomb damage in post-Blitz London... Public transportation, Pei believed, was essentially dead, so a network of superhighways and one-way streets would funnel cars into downtown parking garages.
• Grass and weeds, sensing an opportunity, began to emerge downtown. Oklahoma City seemed to be reverting to its early days, scraping the civilization right off of itself, lot by lot... The planners, however, were drunk on their plans. The Urban Renewal Authority had grown into a monster, with 125 employees and $60 million in assets. It moved in such secrecy that even the city council often had no idea what it was up to. The destruction rolled forward as scheduled.
• Their slogan was “Grit ’n’ Grind.” They were big, tough, and unglamorous at every position, and they basically beat the shit out of you. They were stagnation incarnate. These two teams knew each other uncomfortably well.
• Westbrook was in clear violation of everything true and beautiful about basketball. He had plunged off the cliff of self-interest. He had dribbled ten times during that possession, and not one dribble had given him even a split-second advantage. Every problem he’d encountered had represented an opportunity for somebody else—that’s how basketball works—but this had never seemed to occur to him... Westbrook, in these situations, has the peripheral vision of a cyclops looking through a paper-towel tube.
• Stewart eventually pulled his support and started fighting urban renewal, but by then it was too late. Neighborhoods were cleared. The medical center was built. New freeways, with their gigantic cloverleaf ramps, were stamped on top of more bulldozed black homes.
• “We are consciously making ancestors of ourselves today,” Angelo Scott told us. “We who have long been dust…salute you.”
  One hundred years was suddenly nothing. Our now began to blend with the now of the Oklahoma City that was gone. Time circulated freely, we inhaled and exhaled it, we twisted with its twisting. We felt the fullness of these absent people’s lives and, by extension, the fullness of our own future absence. It was disorienting, uncanny, thrilling, scary.
• I passed a yard sale that consisted entirely of animal cages, ranging from the size of a deer to the size of a squirrel. <> Failed businesses lined the highway like bad metaphors, their billboards speaking empty words to cars.
• Every once in a while the landscape offered a scrap of pure beauty. A little creek ran off undisturbed into the woods, swooped over by iridescent birds.
• It made me think about OKC’s obsessive quest, for its entire history, to turn itself into a real city—to build as majestic a downtown as possible and annex all of this inhuman prairie scrub and fill it with homes. OKC was more than just a city; it was an existential crusade, an attempt to assert the primacy of consciousness, of human life, in this endless sea of nothing. It had to keep booming, because whenever it stopped to rest, the prairie rose up and tried to swallow it.
• I bought one. It was a grid of mug shots, page after page, people looking dopey, vicious, angry, or blank—a fold-out gallery of desperation, defiance, befuddlement, shame.
• He looked like the nerve center of the stage; into his body flowed dozens of glowing white tentacles, heaps and heaps of electro-spaghetti that pulsed in patterns of light. It looked like the religious shrine of an alien civilization that worshipped intestines.
• Everyone seemed to agree that the atmosphere, on some level, needs its worst storms. What looks like chaos is, from another perspective, only a return to equilibrium. That is the process: balance, imbalance, destruction; balance, imbalance, destruction. Instability is inevitable.
• Gary England, at his home fifteen miles north, heard the explosion in double—in his headphones once, and then again in real life.
• What came out of Timothy McVeigh’s yellow Ryder truck that morning was a huge, scorching wind. This wind, more than the fire, was what did most of the damage. It poured out at seven thousand miles per hour, far faster than any wind ever naturally created by the atmosphere of the earth, more than twenty times faster than wind inside even the fastest tornado. This burning wind slammed instantaneously into the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, and many of those who died did so in that first blast, in an unimaginably small fraction of time: one two-hundredths of a second.
• It took 150 pounds of nitroglycerine—more than they’d expected, the company said, because the ruined structure had been so thoroughly shored up during the rescue, which had made it surprisingly strong. The remainder of the Murrah Building collapsed in just 7.75 seconds.
• felt a lack of emotion, only an urgent need to get there—this was part of the training. Blumenthal couldn’t see the school, because there was nothing left of it to see, so he started running toward its absence.
• Gardner said he could see dirt being sucked up off the fields into the storm—it looked like a staircase, he said, rising from the earth into the sky.
  A huge cloud heaved itself away from the group and hung low over I-40. A horizontal band of peach-colored light stretched between two masses of darkness. The radar screen looked like a medical scan: a terrible bright malignance, multiplying out of control.
• It was coming to OKC. Outside, the air turned green. It was as if the atmosphere were trying to become its own radar image. Huge, warm raindrops started to fall.
• There were plastic bins loaded with mysterious objects that looked like giant worms and ostrich eggs. There were multicolored haystacks of tinsel. There was a pirate sword. The stuff stretched out and took over the whole yard. It looked like Wayne’s entire subconscious had been vomited out into the world.
• the Oklahoma City media, as a whole, given its close relationship with its corporate sponsors, was happy to fully explore every possible competing theory. Even the state’s official geologists were slow to acknowledge the true cause of the quakes. Finally, after years of denial, in 2015, Oklahoma acknowledged the truth: that this unprecedented earthquake swarm was, in fact, self-inflicted. It was a side effect of high-pressure wastewater disposal wells. The cost of Oklahoma City’s wealth, of its glittering downtown and its low cost of living, was now, in part, an unstable earth.