When visiting small towns in Oklahoma, there’s always a chance you’ll see one, two, maybe a whole team of them. It’s shocking at first, and then disheartening. You don’t want to blame the whole community and you try hard not to, but realizing you’re, for the most part, on enemy territory, there are sometimes when it’s best to keep quiet and just leave. But let’s start at the beginning…
It was a friend’s belated birthday and, presented with a few options, we decided to head on out to McLoud for their famed Blackberry Festival, a seemingly lighthearted afternoon where we could stuff our faces with the noir fruit until we realized one of us has a deadly allergy to berries and must be rushed to the hospital to have our stomachs blissfully pumped. Or something like that...
Around five o’clock, the festival was still going strong, or as one in McLoud—population around 4,700—possibly could. Walking past the dunk tank, the recruitment station, and other pseudo-fairway games of chance, we went up a dirt road to an imposing grandstand that, with broad exclamation points, told us that all types of blackberry goods were sold there.
However, when I asked one of the people wearing an event shirt where everything possibly berry was, I was told they had sold out for this year, but there were still a few food trucks selling their sweetened wares. Feeling a little—pardon the expression—black and blue about missing most of the natural eats, there was a plain truck off to the side that was selling fried pies, honestly all I truly craved.