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By Root 758 0

about oil, what comes to mind is Libya, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Texas or big plumes of flame burning on North Sea oil rigs. I’ve never thought of Oklahoma as an oil state. But here’s the thing – less than a hundred years ago, Tulsa was the oil capital of the world. In 1859 a driller seeking salt water struck oil, and fortune-seekers immediately invaded the local Indian territory. Then, in 1901, prospectors discovered vast oil deposits at Red Fork in southwest Tulsa. Investors swarmed to the city, which in a matter of months went from a cow town to a boom town. Four years later, an even larger oil deposit was struck and Tulsa’s population grew to almost a hundred thousand people. Four hundred oil companies were based in the city. Propelling Oklahoma at breakneck speed into the twentieth century, the black gold brought two daily newspapers, four telegraph companies, more than 10,000 telephones, seven banks, 200 lawyers and more than 150 doctors, as well as numerous other businesses, to Tulsa.

Nowadays, Tulsa’s big industry is gas. However, oil still has a presence, albeit in a less obvious way. It’s more like a cottage industry, with ‘mom-and-pop’ oil companies producing just two or three barrels a day.

White-haired and dressed in a light blue Lacoste polo shirt and jeans, Wiley Cox (what a great name) is a very unlikely looking oil baron. He described himself as ‘just about the smallest end of the oil industry you’re going to get’ and had agreed to show me around his oilfield. Anyone who has been to Los Angeles or some parts of Texas will have seen those nodding metal donkeys at the side of the road, steadily pumping oil out of the ground. They look like the kind of thing boys made with their Meccano sets in the fifties. Wiley had four or five of them and, with the recent escalation in oil prices, was making quite a decent living out of them.

Wiley’s a perfectly pleasant man and he gave me the full guided tour, but I couldn’t summon up much interest. In fact, as I listened to him talking about oil and the process of getting it out of the ground, I almost lost the will to live. That might seem ironic, given that there would be no Route 66 without oil, but it just held no fascination for me.

So I said goodbye to him, got back on my bike, and headed for Oklahoma City, which was still about ninety miles away. It was a harsh ride: long, straight roads pointing all the way to the horizon. Whenever I crested a hill, the road would stretch out in front of me again, as long and as straight as the previous stretch. The monotony and emptiness were quite extraordinary, and by the time I reached Oklahoma City I was ready for dinner, bed and a long sleep.

The next day started with the promise of a big, fat, juicy steak. It’s one of those things that horrifies almost any British person – the idea of steak for breakfast – particularly if eaten the American way, which is with a Coca-Cola on the side. A steak? For breakfast? What kind of people are they? What kind of savages eat a hunk of meat dripping with blood for their first meal of the day? But actually it’s fabulous. Steak and eggs set you up for the day, especially when you’re going to spend that day astride a trike, and possibly even more so when you’ve not eaten steak for forty or fifty years.

I gave up red meat decades ago because I thought that was the healthy way to go. But in the last year I’d started eating it again. My daughter advised me to tuck in after reading a book that advocated matching your diet to your blood type. Both of us are Type ‘O’, rhesus-negative. According to the book, red meat is good for us. So, since the beginning of the year, I’d been eating a bit of steak and quite enjoying it. Now I was really looking forward to my steak breakfast at the Cattlemen’s Steakhouse. But I’d forgotten it was Mothering Sunday, and the place was jammed. There was a huge queue, so I went elsewhere and had a hamburger instead. I was disappointed to miss out on the steak, but it was a cracking good hamburger, and it set me up for the long ride out to Stan Mannshreck’s cattle ranch.