The Boom and the Bust and the Boom

Oklahoma has a rhythm that outsiders sometimes mistake for instability. It is closer to a cycle, one that the state has been running since the first oil derrick went up in eighteen ninety-seven near Bartlesville.

The pattern is almost predictable: oil prices spike, money floods in, towns build fast, speculators arrive, then the price drops, the wells run thin or the markets collapse, and the money drains back out faster than it came. The Dust Bowl of the nineteen thirties wiped out an agricultural economy that had been built on borrowed assumptions about rainfall. The oil bust of the nineteen eighties hit the state so hard that the Penn Square Bank of Oklahoma City failed in nineteen eighty-two, triggering one of the first major bank collapses of the savings-and-loan crisis. Oklahoma City's central neighborhoods lost residents as families moved to the suburbs.

What the cycle does to the landscape is visible from any car window. Abandoned strip malls sit beside new ones. Pump jacks rust in fields next to fields where new horizontal drilling rigs operate. Small towns built around a plant or a mine that closed have main streets full of empty storefronts next to a Dollar General.

What the cycle does to Oklahomans is harder to see but recognizable in the culture. There is a practiced toughness here, not the performative kind, but the kind that comes from losing something and rebuilding it and half-expecting to lose it again. The state is also, repeatedly, faster to recover than outsiders expect. Oklahoma City added a professional basketball team, rebuilt its downtown, and emerged from the nineteen eighties bust as a growing metro. Tulsa reinvented itself around aerospace and medical technology. The cycle turns.

The state motto, labor omnia vincit, means labor conquers all things. On a long stretch of highway, watching another pump jack nod in a field of red dirt and dormant wheat, it reads less like a boast and more like something said quietly to no one in particular, just to get through the afternoon.