Oklahoma City Memorial

May 7, 2007

A visit to the Memorial at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. If you walk through downtown to the site, you enter the 1970s-style brutalist plaza, which is built over a parking level so there are a lot of steps and level changes. At the top of the last flight, you should be confronted with a tall office building, but there is an empty space where the building wall used to be.

Standing at the edge of the void, you look down to the chairs representing the dead, the reflecting pool where the street behind the building was, and beyond where there were some other buildings and a parking lot. The tree in the distance is the "Survivor Elm" which was in the parking lot, but survived the bomb and has been made a centerpiece in the space.

Detour to Oklahoma

May 6, 2007

A little side trip to Oklahoma to see the prairie for Bob's birthday.

The Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge preserves some prairie because the small mountains made the soil too rocky to plow, and right around the time of Teddy Roosevelt people noticed the bison going extinct, so they started a herd here. Also longhorn cattle because they are rare now too.