Reverse Dustbowl Diaries
Click on the photos to see the full photo essay.
It’s been four years and eight months since my wife, daughter and I packed up a 22-foot U-Haul and moved from Hermosa Beach, California to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
I’d lived in Hermosa/Manhattan Beach since 1978 and my daughter was born there. The beach lifestyle was all we had ever really known. Sure, I have lived in other places throughout my life—I’ve even lived in other countries—but I was never away for too long and when I was, I always knew I’d come back. This move felt different, though, on every level. This one felt permanent.
A few days before we made the move, I had ridden my bike north up the Strand to the house I had grown up in. I wanted to say my goodbye, but when I reached my old street and turned up the hill, I couldn’t do it. I started to cry like a little baby. The memories of growing up here overwhelmed me: drag-racing bicycles with my best friend, Chris, when we were 13. Skateboarding the back alleys to the church where legendary punk rock band Black Flag practiced. My first kiss with the girl I liked after the seventh-grade dance. Playing beach volleyball at Marine Street until dark with the best players in the sport. Dawn patrol surf trips to Trestles and Encinitas. Getting first tracks snowboarding Mt. Baldy. It was the Southern California idyll of song and story, only I got to live it. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to move back this time and it was breaking my heart.
We didn’t relish the idea of moving to Oklahoma City but, as with many I know, the increasing cost of living in Southern California, combined with stagnant or decreasing wages since the Great Recession, had sent us into a debt spiral and we could see no way out of it without moving. My wife, Tracy, is originally from Oklahoma and had family there. The cost of living in Oklahoma is substantially less than in Southern California. That played a big role in our decision. The move made sense.
Looking back on it, I see us as being caught in a reverse Dust Bowl migration. The original Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930’s traveled to California to escape the crushing economic impacts of the Great Depression. We, on the other hand, were going to Oklahoma to escape the crushing costs of living in the best beach town in America. We’re not the only ones. It’s no secret that middle-class Californians are feeling increasingly squeezed by the Golden State’s cost of living.
Oklahoma is a land of extremes. From the extreme highs and lows of Oklahoma’s boom/bust oil and gas economy to the extreme weather, which vacillates between super-hot and humid from May through October to frigid-cold wind and freezing rain from November to April—and don’t forget the tornadoes in between!
I won’t say Oklahomans are any more extreme than people from other states, but a lot of the older born-and-raised locals I’ve met have a hardness to them that I can only describe as seeming to be constantly irritated. Still, despite caricatures that have accompanied news coverage of the President’s summer Covid-spreading rally in Tulsa, you can’t pigeonhole Oklahomans. I’ve met roughnecks, landmen, lawyers and teachers, artists, doctors, nurses and models. I’ve gotten to know an old local who is an unabashed socialist… the people here run the gamut! And while the loudmouth MAGAs want Oklahoma to be known as the reddest state in the nation, from what I’ve witnessed, that mindset is changing.
In Los Angeles, I was a 20 year veteran art director/graphic designer–part of the imperiled creative class that the late Scott Timberg wrote so compellingly about. Now, I work at a Trader Joe’s in Oklahoma City, where I meet new people every day. The most common thing I hear people say when I ask where they are from is that they are from everywhere. And why did they move here? Because it’s cheap, or they got a job, or they are reverse California Dust Bowl refugees like me.
Another interesting thing I’ve noticed, is that a lot of these people are younger than 40. And it shows in how much Oklahoma City has changed over the last few years. Midtown OKC, just blocks from the Federal Building that white supremacist Timothy McVeigh and accomplices blew up in 1995, killing 168 people, has become the hot spot for boutiques, restaurants and nightlife for well-heeled 20-30 somethings. Of course, this wasn’t Oklahoma’s first experience with mass destruction at the hands of white supremacists. Hundreds were massacred in 1921 when white mobs, aided and encouraged by police officers and members of the National Guard, set upon the thriving Greenwood District (the Black Wall Street) in nearby Tulsa. The incident served as the contextual backdrop for HBO’s award-winning series Watchmen.
Midtown was a ghost town for years after the 1995 Federal Building bombing. Landowners were practically handing the keys to anyone who wanted to develop there. The Plaza District is OKC’s version of Venice Beach, California, with its funky art galleries and dirty dive bars, haute boutiques, hipster restaurants and mom-and-pop thrift stores. Twenty years ago Bricktown, which skirts along the southeastern edge of downtown OKC, was a mass of abandoned warehouses and failed businesses. Now Bricktown is one of the trendiest areas in the city, in large part because it’s where the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team plays its home games. Uptown, which runs east to west up NW 23rd Street is where most of the smaller music venues with spillover bars are located.
I equate Uptown OKC with West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. The joints along this strip are where all of the up-and-coming music acts play. There is a great music scene in OKC, with plenty of great local and touring acts rolling through—and shows are cheap!—But promotion is non-existent, so you absolutely have to check the venues daily. Henry Rollins and X came through in 2019 but I didn’t even know about the shows until the night of!
Since moving here, I have made a point of exploring the state. I wanted to get to know it on a personal level so I could form my own perspectives. My wife, daughter and I have taken many day trips to different parts of Oklahoma to visit family, camp or just get out and go somewhere. On my days off work, I love spending time just visiting different neighborhoods around Oklahoma City.
I carry a camera with me everywhere, taking pictures of the people I meet and the things I find interesting. The process has helped me come to terms with this always-changing experience of life. And life here isn’t what the caricatures portray. There is a lot of beauty here. Travel 15 minutes in any direction out of the city and you are in the country Willie, Waylon and countless other country music stars sing about–wide open, raw, resilient and uncompromising country.
I find the physical terrain to be an apt analogy for so many of the people I’ve met. A lot of the newly transplanted and younger city dwellers are wide open and want to transform the landscape, literally and figuratively. The old-time locals are raw and uncompromising in their ways and attitudes, but they are absolutely resilient and proud.
Exploration has been the catalyst to help me better understand this unique state and the people who live in it. As part of that process, I decided early on in my experience here to make impromptu portraits of as many of the people I met as I could. The people who have come to know me have grown accustomed to seeing me with my camera, so they aren’t so self conscious when I’m taking their photo. When I’m introduced to their friends, they’ll say, “Don’t mind Bacon, he’s always got his camera, so just know your photo will be taken.”
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
Big Nick: Big Nick is originally from Knoxville, Tennessee, but moved here with his family 10 years ago. Nick is 22 and really just a big teddy bear of a guy, which isn’t to say he can’t be a bruiser too. I pegged Nick as a football player, mainly because we live in the land of all football, all the time, but Nick grew up playing ice hockey, if you can believe it. He played on a club team and they travelled all over the Midwest. Knick is studying mechanical engineering at one of the local community colleges and will transfer to Oklahoma State in the coming year. He plans on leaving Oklahoma after he graduates to work in the aerospace industry.
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
Escape by any means necessary: Malory is a fun-loving, 19-year-old nature girl from Mustang, Oklahoma. She loves gardening and doing anything outdoorsy and she is exceptionally good at silversmithing jewelry. She has dreams of leaving Oklahoma for Colorado some day. Leaving Oklahoma is a common refrain I’ve heard from many young Oklahomans, especially if they’re from a rural town. I’ve also heard from many older Oklahomans that they did leave for another state but ended up coming back years later. Sometimes, they returned to raise a family in a more grounded environment or to care for their elderly parents, or the all-too-familiar financial squeeze of more expensive locales brought them back. Whatever the reason, they seem to come back in droves.
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
Mudbug cookout: This is Nufer, he’s originally from Walker, Louisiana, and he is an amazing guy. A plumber by trade, he’s as Cajun as they come–the Jambalaya King. On this particular day, he had driven up from Louisiana with a 100 pound bag of crawfish so we could have a proper “mudbug” cookout. On the right, Susan, Justin and Nufer are prepping the potatoes and peppers to go along with our crawfish feast. Susan and her husband Joe were our next-door neighbors for our first three years in OKC. Susan and Joe and their circle of friends welcomed us into their lives and made us feel at home when we needed it most.
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
Paige: Paige is a born-and-raised Oklahomam. She is from Prague, not to be confused with Prague, Czech Republic, and it’s pronounced PrĀgue, with a hard A. But get this…Prague, Oklahoma, was founded by Czech immigrants after the opening of the Sac and Fox Reservation during the land run on September 22, 1891. And Prague isn’t the only town in Oklahoma with a sizable Czech population. Yukon, Oklahoma, which is just minutes west of downtown OKC, is known as the Czech capital of Oklahoma because immigrants from Bohemia came here after WWI.
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
Claire: “Put me in coach!” That was Claire’s Instagram tagline a couple of years ago and it fits her personality like a glove. Claire and I worked together at Trader Joe’s, but she was first and foremost an up-and-coming ballet dancer with the Oklahoma City Ballet. She has since moved on to the Minnesota Ballet. Claire is continually pushing herself to be the best with everything she does. Her positive, youthful energy and infectious smile help keep me from becoming a grumpy old man. Whenever the OKC Ballet had a show, she would get tickets for me and the family. Which brings me to something great about OKC: It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to see a show or go to a concert. You don’t have to sit in traffic for two hours, and you can park near the venue, sometimes for free.
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
Vape Central: According to usnews.com, Oklahoma is the vaping capital of America. From my own observations there seems to be a vape shop on every corner of every block in Oklahoma City. If you love to vape then this is the place for you.
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
Muddin’ at Kaw Lake: I’ve lived at or near the beach my entire life and Oklahoma is landlocked, so I am thankful that there are more than 200 lakes here. Most of them are man-made and the beaches are scarce, but I’ll take what I can get. Kaw Lake is in the north-central part of the state, in the middle of Kaw Nation, which is Native American land. My wife’s uncle owns a farm, called Bobville, with access to a “beach” that is either mud or silty sand depending on water levels. We have celebrated Independence Day here a few times and it’s fun because we are on private land and can pretty much do what we want.
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
Aaron and Austin: Aaron and Austin Shaw are twins and they are both great kids. Their dad, Craig Shaw, is a transplant from Seattle, Washington. His parents moved to OKC in 1988. Craig was 12 at the time and he hated moving from the West Coast to a podunk city. Eventually he met a local girl, fell in love, got married, had four great kids and started a business that is thriving. While Craig was a fish out of water from Seattle, Aaron and Austin are born-and-raised Oklahomans. They both played football and basketball in high school, they each have full-sized, gas-guzzling pickup trucks, they both love the rodeo and they both love tearing shit up with their 4-wheelers. The good-ole-boys image of Oklahoma from a bygone era will live strong with these kids.
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
OG Okie: My wife, Tracy, was born and raised in Blackwell, Oklahoma, a really small farming town just south of the Kansas border. Blackwell is about as rural as it gets in Oklahoma. Her family line is OG Oklahoma, part of the late 1800s Oklahoma Land Rush. In high school, Tracy had big dreams to get out of small town Oklahoma and go East to be on Broadway, or go West and become a Valley Girl. She made it West and lived the West-Coast-is-the-best-coast life for 20 years, but always felt a bittersweet longing to be back in Oklahoma, which was noticeably changing and progressing with every trip home. Meanwhile, gentrification had turned once-modest South Bay, Los Angeles into a super-wealthy enclave detached from everyday America. It wasn’t normal and Tracy was adamant that our daughter Kira not grow up thinking it was. It took a while to convince me, but after years of financial recessions and housing crises, and considering Oklahoma’s affordability, it started to sound not-half-bad.
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
Lauren: Lauren is a born-and-raised Oklahoman, with her family roots in Woodward, Oklahoma. But she was raised in Oklahoma City and has lived in OKC most of her life. Her parents bought a house in the Plaza District 25 years ago, when the neighborhood was considered rough. She has witnessed the Plaza District’s gentrification and she is genuinely happy with the changes. Like a lot of people who grew up in The City, she doesn’t have an Okie drawl and is more inclined to wear upmarket fashion—Louis Vuitton bags, Hunter boots and 7 For All Mankind jeans as opposed to Wrangler jeans and Ariat boots for country folk.
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
Alexandra Dugan: Alex is a professional photographer I met through a local film photography group. She’s a born-and-raised Oklahoman. Her philosophy is, “Find beauty in everything.” She’s a natural networker and through her work as a wedding and family photographer she has met and photographed a lot of people within the LGBTQIA community—which is growing and thriving here in OKC. She’s become a leading photographer for OKC’s Pride celebrations over the last few years. “It’s not about where we live, it’s about how we live,” she says.
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
Lauralee Bowen: Lauralee is an artist and teacher I met while doing some graphic design work. Over the past several years, we’ve continued to bump into each other randomly. Lauralee was born in Tulsa and spent summers in OKC with her grandparents. Her summers in OKC were filled with museum visits (There are quite a few great museums in Oklahoma believe it or not!) and private art lessons with Greg Burns, a local artist who is handicapped and drew with a pen in his mouth. Burns instilled important philosophies about how to use the practice of art to free and empower yourself and to allow insight into difficult subjects. Lauralee has found that making art is the most healing, generous and fulfilling act she can do with her time. And, like Greg Burns, she is passionate about teaching art to children.
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
Scott and Bethany: Scott and Bethany moved to Oklahoma City together, originally because Bethany was enrolled at Oklahoma University College of Medicine to earn her master’s degree in Nutritional Science. Scott is enrolled at Oklahoma State University working on a degree in Geographic Information Systems. Their plan is to later move to Colorado where Bethany will finish her doctorate. Oklahoma is really just a waystation for them on their upward trajectory. Meanwhile, they appreciate how much there is to do downtown: the craft beer and distillery scene and the local parks. Bethany says, “What has really taken me off guard, what I love the most, and what makes OKC feel like home, are the people and the sense of community. It doesn’t take long to find a second family here.”
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Photo Credit: Alex Bacon
Madeline: Madeline was born in OKC. Growing up, she spent her summers with her grandparents in Laguna Beach, California. She teaches sixth grade and she loves doing it, but she wishes she was better paid. Oklahoma has one of the lowest pay scales for teachers in the nation, capping out at $75k a year after 25 years of service. A lot of teachers leave the Oklahoma school system for Texas because the pay is better there, which means Oklahoma is continually relying on teachers with less experience. And it shows. Oklahoma schools are rated 47th in the nation. Madeline comes from a family of artists and musicians and she can be found playing local gigs with her bandmates on a regular basis. She loves Oklahoma for its sense of community and the down-to-earth and open-minded people she is drawn to.
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My friend Alex. We miss you and your family here in Hermosa! OK is a better place because you are there. -Chris O
Awesome work Alex. Your photos always make me feel like I’m right there in Oklahoma with you.
You are, and always will be a South Bay original.