<a href="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/2012/07/roaming-talimena-drive-special/dsc_0647/" rel="attachment wp-att-11690"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-11690" title="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" src="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/DSC_0647-500x752.jpg" alt="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" width="500" height="752" /></a>

After we finished up at <a href="http://www.woodyguthrie.com/" target="_blank">the 15th-annual Woody Guthrie Festival in Okemah</a> last weekend, the husband and I headed southeast. There are mountains down there, he told me—one of the oldest mountain ranges in the entire U.S., full of ribbon-like buckles and 180-degree folds. "Oh, yeah?" I said. "Bull. Prove it."

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So he did.

<a href="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/2012/07/roaming-talimena-drive-special/dsc_0644/" rel="attachment wp-att-11689"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-11689" title="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" src="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/DSC_0644-500x332.jpg" alt="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" width="500" height="332" /></a>

<a href="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/2012/07/roaming-talimena-drive-special/dsc_0632/" rel="attachment wp-att-11687"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-11687" title="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" src="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/DSC_0632-500x332.jpg" alt="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" width="500" height="332" /></a>

<a href="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/2012/07/roaming-talimena-drive-special/dsc_0578/" rel="attachment wp-att-11680"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-11680" title="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" src="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/DSC_0578-500x332.jpg" alt="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" width="500" height="332" /></a>

You guys. There are MOUNTAINS in southeastern Oklahoma.

They're the Ouachita Mountains. They're not exactly the Rockies, or even the Ozarks. But they're gorgeous, low-slung and rolling and crowded with pine. 

<a href="http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/O/OU001.html" target="_blank">It's said that the area is named for the Caddo word that means "good hunting ground."</a> These mountains would have been some of the first parts of what would become Oklahoma that the first French explorers to traverse the U.S. had ever seen. And the Choctaw, ripped from their ancestral lands in the east, came into Indian Territory via the Ouachita Mountains. Their peaks would have provided those first glimpses of an alien place.

Later, when Robbers Roost was on the list of the Indian Territory's many nicknames, the Ouchita Forest was an outlaw highway. I.T. was like home plate, a place where you could slip behind a veil and keep on running, and no one would give chase. These peaks and valleys gave these people, the ones who had things to hide—sometimes big things (I'm looking at you, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_Starr" target="_blank">Belle Starr</a>)—a chance to disappear, to devise the next move. Or to reinvent. Begin again.

And then there's this guy. He lives there now, along the Talimena Scenic Drive.

<a href="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/2012/07/roaming-talimena-drive-special/dsc_0590/" rel="attachment wp-att-11681"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-11681" title="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" src="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/DSC_0590-500x332.jpg" alt="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" width="500" height="332" /></a>

<a href="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/2012/07/roaming-talimena-drive-special/dsc_0594/" rel="attachment wp-att-11682"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-11682" title="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" src="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/DSC_0594-500x332.jpg" alt="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" width="500" height="332" /></a>

This place has made him a fearless thing. He would have let me snap photos of him at close range all day long.

<a href="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/2012/07/roaming-talimena-drive-special/dsc_0630-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-11686"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-11686" title="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" src="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/DSC_0630-500x332.jpg" alt="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" width="500" height="332" /></a>

We hadn't been on the drive for long before we got caught in a summer storm.

<a href="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/2012/07/roaming-talimena-drive-special/dsc_0618/" rel="attachment wp-att-11685"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-11685" title="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" src="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/DSC_0618-500x332.jpg" alt="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" width="500" height="332" /></a>

In the mountains. <em>Alone</em>. It was like The Notebook...meets Jurassic Park...meets Napoleon Dynamite. Because we're us.

<em>Romance</em>.

<a href="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/2012/07/roaming-talimena-drive-special/dsc_0639/" rel="attachment wp-att-11688"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-11688" title="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" src="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/DSC_0639-500x332.jpg" alt="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" width="500" height="332" /></a>

We could hear the rain approaching, rolling up the road toward us in a band as it wet the street, and rose in what looked like curls of steam. We dodged it, diving into our car just as we felt sprinkles on our ears and our shoulders. We watched the storm from behind our windshield at first, and then we tailed it as it hovered over into the valley. 

<a href="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/2012/07/roaming-talimena-drive-special/dsc_0615/" rel="attachment wp-att-11684"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-11684" title="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" src="http://www.tashadoestulsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/DSC_0615-500x332.jpg" alt="Talimena Drive LeFlore County Oklahoma" width="500" height="332" /></a>

No Bigfoot, though. Maybe next time. 