Erik Mathy returned to Stillwater, OK for the inaugural Mega Mid South, a 300-mile gravel cycling endurance event hosted by Bobby Wintle and the team who bring the Mid South to life every year. Below, feast your eyes on a gallery full of Erik’s unique handmade images and enjoy quotes and prose from the Oklahomans who welcome these events into their communities. Without further ado… this is the Mega Mid South.
Mega Mid South 2024
On July 15th of this year, the Mid South staff introduced the Mega Mid South. Starting and ending at District Bicycles in Stillwater, the 300-mile loop is comprised of the outer perimeter of every Mid South course over the past 13 years, traversing the tribal land of the Quapaw, Kiowa, Osage, Kickapoo, Pawnee, Iowa, and Wichita Nations. It goes through every small city the Mid South has ever gone through: Guthrie, Perry, Pawnee and more. The event was free, there was no registration cap, no time limits. Register online, get to the Grand Depart, roll your bike up to the line, and go. And on September 18th, 110 people did just that.
Friends, family members and race supporters wait for riders to arrive in Stillwater, OK during a thunderstorm the evening of October 19th.
They rode into weather that featured daily 95º to 105ºF heat and 50 – 70% humidity. The fastest racer, Justin Cary of Texas, brought it in at an astounding 23 hours and 55 minutes. Mid South founder Bobby Wintle and his crew survived being caught out in the open by a thunderstorm that hit the area with hail and 73 mph winds to finish in 47 hours and 30 minutes. More people came in as the days passed, with the official DFL arriving back to District Bikes four days after they started. 38 people finished in total.
Race winner Justin Cary, of Austin, TX, after finishing the Mega Mid South in an astounding 23 hours, 55 minutes.
In the Mega Mid South introduction video, Bobby called the course a love letter to ultra endurance cycling and Oklahoma. But is it too late? Have we gone past the point where love letters matter? Has our politics and the influence of social media made them a moot point?
2024 has been an intense, contentious year in the world at large and in Oklahoma, specifically. Non-binary youth Nex Benedict was savagely beaten by their classmates and their subsequent death from injuries was labeled a suicide. State Senator Tom Woods called LGBTQ+ Oklahomans “filth” who needed to be kept out “because we’re a Christian state.” In June Oklahoma’s state superintendent of schools, Ryan Walters, directed all public schools to teach the Bible, including the Ten Commandments, as part of their curriculum.
Cushing, OK is the center of a huge number of oil pipelines and has a maximum storage capacity of 98 million barrels of oil. This makes it the holder of nearly 15% of all oil in America at any given time.
So I went out to Oklahoma to experience Bobby’s love letter for myself, while also asking others what it is that they loved about not just Oklahoma but all of the people in it, regardless of politics, gender identity or race. I asked them to write a love letter of their own, if you will. But perhaps the most beautiful love letter for Oklahoma that I received isn’t a letter at all. It’s a poem, written by Arial Ross.
“The particular beauty of Oklahoma is not really the beauty that as a nation we recognize. There is no national park in Oklahoma. As a country, we prioritize other types of natural beauty like canyons and mountains. The physical beauty of Oklahoma is more subtle and it takes longer to see and appreciate.” —Dr. Arial Ross, Professor of Comparative Literature, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK.
Dr. Ross is a professor of comparative literature at Oklahoma State University. Originally from Colorado, she moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma with her husband Seth and then-3 year old son, Mark. She didn’t expect to stay in Stillwater for long. Over the years her love for Oklahoma has quietly grown. “I’ve thought a lot about what is the particular beauty of the Oklahoma landscape. The physical beauty of Oklahoma is more subtle and it takes longer to see and appreciate. I think the people in Oklahoma have been shaped by that. We know what we have here, but we recognize that nobody else does or that it takes a lot to recognize. So I think a love letter to Oklahoma just involves time. You can’t actually see what there is to love about Oklahoma immediately. You have to be patient. You have to stay here for a while. You have to be willing to see it, to adjust your eyes and your heart to be able to love Oklahoma.”
A lone Mega Mid South rider travels the red dirt roads the morning of October 20th, the third day of the race.
The Meeting Tree, By Dr. Arial Ross
There’s so much dirt here –
but look what we’ve done with it.
It sifted under the door sill, so we opened
wide, and invited the dirt in, said
this is a house of dirt now.
“The people that I encounter I think are kind, nice and thoughtful. They help. They’re resilient. We’ve got a name for it, Oklahoma strong. If there’s any type of tornado or storm, when anything gets hit, immediately people show up to help their neighbors.” —Amy and her mother Linda Cline, owners of Char-Lin Ranch in Cushing, OK.
It blew into our eyes, so we opened
them wide, and dirt is what we see,
and what the dirt has colored
is beautiful, and what the dirt has bathed
is dirty – and clean.
“I find being in Oklahoma and having grown up here, that people care about things and about other people. Working here we may have a rancher that’s helping us catch an eagle one day, or a good Samaritan the next day. And those people might have completely different views if you put them in the same room but their care to get the eagles’ rescued and back out into the wild is universal.” —Megan Judkins, Aviary Director of the Grey Snow Eagle House, which is one of the largest bird of prey rescue organizations in America, located in Perkins, OK.
It crept between our lips
soft as any breath, and we washed
it down with a gulp of water
so now it circulates, dirt in the blood,
and we’ve left blood in the dirt
so now we circulate
and erode, bake in the sun,
gather in the ruts, turn the rivers
red.
Hannah Glatter and Jared Gab ride their tandem across the bridge at Pawnee Lake during the Mega Mid South.
We’re all river
reserved in banks of bodies
trying to flow together
in roads, along remembered routes,
rustling through grasses, gathering
in the shade of a cottonwood tree.
“I still haven’t met a stranger in Oklahoma. I really haven’t. Everybody in Oklahoma is family. In a small town, big town, you’re still not going to meet a stranger.” —Lori Battles, General Manager of the Perry Daily Journal in Perry, OK.
What we murmur there feeds the tree
like the creek giving all its water
to the roots so that hawks
kites and owls can launch
from its highest height.
“In North Carolina we lived in a neighborhood where our houses were twenty feet apart and I could not have told you very much about any of them. We know our neighbors so much better here. We rely on each other. We check in on each other. And that’s with being so spread out that we can’t even see each other when we step out of our front doors.” —Ted and Sheila Loring, Peaceful Valley Donkey Rescue outside of Perry, OK.
My friends in dirt,
sharing these words with you
in the shade of the meeting tree
has fed me, has watered me.
I mingle my words with yours:
words like dirt, water, sun, wind.
A 3rd wheel RV camper that was overturned by a storm with 73 mph winds and hail the evening of October 19th at Pawnee Lake. Multiple RV’s were blown over. One person was killed.
If one day the wind should hang
the dirt in the sky
like a great curtain,
and if it should sweep us up
as light as any grain,
if we should become weather,
feeling ourselves
disintegrate
just remember –
“We found something cool about this place that a lot of people never would have known about. Now the cycling endurance community can embrace and accept it as a love letter to them, and the state of Oklahoma can accept it as a love letter to them, because Oklahoma is amazing in a way neither community ever realized.” —Bobby Wintle, co-owner of District Bicycles in Stillwater, OK and co-founder of the Mid South and Mega Mid South gravel bicycle events.
We have all been dirt and blood
and river and grass
and shade and hawk
and meeting tree
together.
After a week in Oklahoma spent along the red dirt roads, talking to cyclists and non-cyclists, locals and visitors, blissfully removed from the daily news cycles and social media at large, I left with a renewed sense of hope. I’ve come more and more convinced that if we ignore the politicians and their identity politics, talking points and wedge issues, we will find that we have infinitely more in common than we don’t. Or, in short, love letters like Bobby’s do matter.
They matter more than I think even Bobby himself realizes. This is also the home ground of gravel cycling. It’s not in the recent pro-ification of the “sport” or money chasing moves by UCI, USA Cycling, and a small number of race promoters. It’s right there in places like Stillwater, Perry, Guthrie and Morris, OK where cyclists of all identities from all over the place meet strangers, have conversations while giving and receiving small acts of kindness. Ignore the clickbait headlines, all of them, and go ride your bike in new places while meeting new people. You and they will both be the better for it.
About the photographs, from the author:
All images (save for a few, the photo nerds in the crowd will be able to tell) in the body of this piece were taken with a 4 x 5” ultra wide camera body that I made myself which can take multiple formats and lenses. For this project I used a 6 x 12 cm, 120 format film back. Panoramic imagery suits Oklahoma’s landscapes so well, and makes for a challenging approach to portraits that I really wanted to try to tackle. While I am known for handmade camera lenses, this time I used commercially made Mamiya 75mm f/5.6 and Graflex 90mm f/11 lenses. The film is Harman Photo’s new Phoenix color negative stock, graciously supplied, developed and scanned by Underdog Film Lab in Oakland, CA.
The digital images were taken with a medium format digital Fuji GX50R and a Nikon F 35-70mm f/3.5 manual focus lens.