Real life stories more compelling

By Rachael Van Horn, Commentary

April 10, 2007 12:21 am

— ROSSTON — It has always been my preference to tell the stories of those who live in the community and who work around me. I find the stories you bring from your real life endeavors are more compelling.
A savvy newsperson, who used to work for the News & Eagle, once showed me the import of leaving “the me” out of the column and just telling great stories about the colorful folk who make up this great place we call northern Oklahoma.
Turns out, she was right.
However, my faithful neighbor, Eva, who has noticed the confusion about who I am and from where I came in online comments regarding my stories, suggested I spend one of my columns explaining my eclectic past.
“It will only confuse them more,” I said.
“Do it anyway. At least then, instead of being confused they can just know you are crazy” she said. This made sense to me.
I was born in Ipswich, England, and lived in Europe for about six years before coming back to the United States. I was a dual citizen.
My father was a career Air Force officer and war veteran who, in 1953, met and married my mother, a psychotherapist from west Texas. They had three of us kids, and we all are pretty much affected by our nomadic lifestyle but also gifted by it in many ways.
To understand my family, one must watch the Robert Duvall flick, “The Great Santini.” When I saw it, I wondered which one of us told Pat Conroy, the author of the book on which the film is based, our family secrets.
I have a brother, Mark, and a sister, Victoria. I am the baby by about five years, but the only one who went on and joined the military. It was what I understood and why wouldn’t I? I had spent my life around uniforms, jet engines and the dress-right-dress order of the military. I also knew, intimately, the juxtaposition-familial chaos that is the byproduct of any commitment to something that superimposes itself onto every facet of your life.
In our childhood lives, we lived in six states and two foreign countries. I added two other foreign countries to my list when, as an adult, I lived in Kuwait for a short time and then Iraq.
Many people ask me why and how I ended up in Oklahoma. Some have even asked me if I was running from the law. I chuckled at them.
Anyway, my Oklahoma life started with my father, who chose the state as a place to call home when he retired from the Air Force in 1979.
I will never forget the day he called my mother and me, a 15-year-old, pimply, high school youth, together and told us our choices for a place for him to retire were Saudi Arabia or Oklahoma.
I couldn’t get “Oklahoma” out of my mouth fast enough. Even a kid like me knew Saudi Arabia — for a young, female teenager — was not going to be fun.
My mother agreed, having spent all of her life packing and “blooming where she was planted,” as she used to say to us. Each move ushered new and sometimes painful changes into our lives. But the “Oklahoma move,” as we call it, turned out to be final in so many ways.
I will never forget arriving here after a two-day drive from Virginia. It was a June day and the grass on the prairie was green, long and damp. A rare, gentle rain had just washed Oklahoma’s face for its introduction to me.
It would be the first place — in my life of moving from state to state — with which I would fall deeply in love. Oklahoma just envelopes you, sucks you into its long, hot summers, its cruel, windy winters and dysfunctional spring storms. It etches on your senses the smell of vine-ripe tomatoes sprinkled with salt and pepper and fresh cucumbers and onions so that you need the stuff to make summer be summer. Oklahoma wraps you in its warmth with a piece of pie and peace of mind that can only be purchased in the smallest and least known cafes of our state. It tests your commitment by thrashing you with the meanest and most frightening storms and yet, so far, it is the only marriage in which I have remained. There have been three.
While I left the state multiple times after attending then Central State University, I was never really home until I came back here. I have made do in other states, but never felt right until I was back here. I think my daughter, Johnna, now 22 years old, knows this feeling as well. She is smitten by Atlanta in this same way, and she can count on my unbending support in her passion there.
Everywhere I wandered in my career, wherever my curiosity and passion drove me in journalism as well as the military, I compared my surroundings with Oklahoma. I missed the smell of it, the taste of it, the way it reminds you of yourself and holds you to its gnarly standard.
So it was no surprise to me that, while still in Iraq, I began searching the Internet for my ultimate place to sort of retire. And, without really knowing why, I continued to search northwest Oklahoma. Oh, I tried to vary my search in all the “best places to live” category, but always drifted back here and finally got caught in a barbed-wire fence like one of those stickery tumble weeds that bounce around out here.
It is home and where I probably will remain writing the rich, human stories of Iraq and northern and northwest Oklahoma. From time to time, I will go back to Iraq and work or write, but ultimately, make the three-hour drive north from the Oklahoma City airport as soon as I hit the ground to home.

Van Horn is a freelance writer and government consultant living in northwestern Oklahoma. She spent 21/2 years in northern Iraq as a military liaison and recently was embedded with 1st Battalion, 37th Field Artillery Regiment. E-mail her at vconsult@ptsi.net.

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