@roger,
Well as you well know, Roger, there's lot's of stuff on the backroads and farmroads that don't have plates. When you are riding your bicycle up in the Osage or out in any Oklahoma County, you are constantly coming upon, depending upon the season, tractors with dragplows or tillers, haymakers, combines and the occasional water well rig.
That's not even counting the oil company stuff, the kind of thing you are talking about. There's stripper wells all out through there that need fixing of one sort or another all the time.
I do feel a little bit for those truck guys, probably everything else on the ranch or farm wasn't tagged. (I don't know if it's the same now, but, in the 80's, if you were using a motorcycle or a four-wheeler for herding cattle, you couldn't drive it on the roads, but you didn't have to tag it. (There was some restriction on how much modification you could do it so it wasn't just a pleasure racer pretending to be a workhorse.)
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I was on a bike-ride one time when I met a cowboy in Wewoka (sounds like a song, don't it?) he was steamed. He's been driving his truck into town from out East somewhere when it broke down. No problem. He rolled the work motorcycle off the back of the truck and proceeded to drive it about a couple of miles towards the 7-11 "To get help and some beer." That's when the County Sheriff's Deputy drove by. No tag. No ride.
This is in the days before cellphones. Calls to the ranchhouse weren't being answered. He couldn't leave the motorcycle there and walk back. The bike didn't need keys to start it, just flip a switch and kick it. (There are dishonest people in Oklahoma, sorry to say.)
He'd been sitting there for about three hours waiting for somebody to come looking for him.
So, we intrepid cyclists took down the directions to the house. We rode out past the railroad and over across a couple of section lines and, after a couple more turns, found the place. They were so grateful that we would do that, bring the message.
We were headed up to Seminole or Okemah, I forget which, (I've ridden through that part of Oklahoma several times) they wanted to drive us the rest of the way, but we said, "No thanks."
They couldn't believe that we would ride a bicycle all that way. (We were doing 60-80 miles or so.) We got a big laugh when we said that the next the cowboy took the truck to the store, he should instead of a motorcycle, he should put a bike in the back.
Joe(Those were good days)Nation