Oklahoma Places piece brings back memories of a proposal on the rocks
A Bob Doucette photo from the Charon's Garden Wildernes Area outside of Lawton.
Almost 10 years ago, I knelt on a large boulder in the rocky desert of Western Oklahoma and proposed marriage to my girlfriend.
I had planned it all day, but my nervousness postponed the proposal, and we kept hiking along until I finally made the move. By the time we headed back to camp, we realized we had gone further than we had intended and ran out of water. As a result, we became temporarily lost, partially dehydrated and completely exhausted on the walk back to camp.
But we survived and are still married. I still “joke” that I proposed in the middle of nowhere so I could have left her there if she had said no. (But we all know I was the one who would have ended up face down in a cave three weeks later).
I remembered that fine moment in my life as I read, watched and listened to Assistant News Editor Bob Doucette’s piece on the Charon’s Garden Wilderness Area – part of NewsOK.com’s series on Oklahoma Places.
Bob is a hiking and outdoors expert. By day, he edits stories, deals with reporters and organizes content for our daily news products, especially the stories we report on Oklahoma politics at the state Capitol. But when he takes the editing hat off, he becomes a hiker, backpacker, angler and skier — and he blogs about his adventures in his Out There blog as part of our ‘know it’ topic on Outdoor Recreation.
Bob’s article and slideshow effectively described the area west of Lawton in the Wichita Wildlife Refuge. He puts it best in one sentence:
Welcome to one of the last wild places left in Oklahoma.
I haven’t been there in many years now, but his piece reminded me of the few times we camped there next to the wild Buffalo that probably enjoy walking through a camp site at 3 a.m. just to scare the heck out of guys who grew up in suburban Tulsa.
The Places series is one of my favorite Web initiatives of 2009. To date, we’ve produced 13 unique places in Oklahoma, and we plan many more. It’s a great site to visit to learn more about the unique areas in Oklahoma. Just last week, we launched a piece on the Drum Room at the UCO’s Academy of Contemporary Music. You can see a full panorama of the room and get a feel for the area with John Estus’ description.
It’s just one more place that makes Oklahoma special.
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