This is the hardest part of moving. Our apartment is not ready yet. And while the mortgage company does consider our debt paid off, it’s an example of why we despised them all along that they require some three weeks lag time to pull together the paperwork and issue a lien release. That means 12 November before they even act. Meanwhile, much of our stuff is already packed and stacked around the mobile home here waiting.
So for yesterday’s ride I was moved to seek some solitude. I opted for a shorter ride on the old Harrah Loop. Just south of my picnic spot on Harrah Road are a couple of fields on the west side used for various crops. Last year I recall seeing sunflowers with giant seed heads. This year one part was watermelons that were never harvested. They still sit out there rotting. Next to that was something that I didn’t recognize. At first it looked like some kind of squash, but then the plants developed little pods the same color and size as small leaves. A couple of weeks ago the pods turned red. As I passed by yesterday, I saw that it was cotton, but a type I’d never seen before. As a child here in Oklahoma, all the cotton I ever saw was more thinly spaced in the field, and the plants were spindly with a single thick stalk. The cotton bolls were green balls that pointed upward until they browned and burst open. I never would have guessed the field in this picture was cotton.
When I reached the crown of the ridgeline on NE 50th and pulled up into the driveway of the orchard (closed for the season), there was very little wind. It was a light breeze from the north that hardly touched me. Worse, there was too much traffic along the road and in the driveways near me — not very much solitude. I tried, but couldn’t get into any contemplative frame of reference, so I rode off down the west side of the ridge. However, once I got past the as-yet closed section of Triple X and headed west toward Indian Meridian on NE 36th, I glanced over at a very large pond south of me.
Cranes aren’t rare, but they seldom stay here long in Oklahoma. I don’t know the various breeds, only that they appeared all white with black edges wing and tail, with a wingspan a little less than two meters. This was noonish, warming after a rather cool morning. A lone crane rose from the water and began circling clockwise, climbing. From what I could tell, the breeze aloft got much stiffer just a few meters above the ground. The crane would glide on the upwind part of his circle, then flap his wings slowly on the downwind side. Right behind him was a couple more, then a dozen. They all circled and climbed for quite some time. As they rose, the wind pushed them southward. It seemed a couple dozen total, but a great many more still in the water. After the first group was well aloft, this larger group rose up almost at once, mostly circling in the opposite direction.
My angle of view changed as I hit Indian Meridian and turned south, but also because they continued to climb. The first bunch eventually formed a ragged V and flew straight eastward a ways before stopping to climb some more, and I could barely see them. The much larger group that rose behind kept climbing. Suddenly an even larger group of a couple hundred met them from the west and they all began circling together. I have no way to estimate their altitude at this point, but it was quite a sight with these large birds and their slow flapping and intermittent gliding. I passed briefly under some thick tree limbs and emerged to see them in a ragged overlapping multiple V formation all heading southeast.
That stayed with me the rest of the day, in some indefinable way.
Today I decided I wanted to get a look at the single largest Doppler Radar site in this part of the state. If you watched our local news channels, you would see the radar beacon centered somewhere southeast of OKC. That communications tower behind it has a couple of dishes aimed line-of-sight to the OU School of Meteorology at Max Westheimer Field in Norman. Should you spend much time out here in the Draper-Thunderbird Lakes area, you’d see this facility often, since the white dome is perched on the highest hill out here. For me, it meant a brutal hill workout, of course. I zig-zagged out to Triple X and then southward. It was a good chance to see SE 119th and the Hog Creek Valley again. From there it was just another mile south.
I was hoping I could see the hidden airstrip out there parallel to Choctaw Road and south of SE 134th, but I took a wrong turn. Still, heading west on 134th was a real hard workout. This shot was taken from the second razorback ridge I hit between Choctaw and Hiwasee Roads. As you can see in the photo, there was yet another waiting on me before I got to Hiwasee. I kept going and made another pass through that beautiful flat valley with all the expensive homes and turned back north in Anderson Road.
There was no good way to get a shot of the Schwartz Cemetery where I stopped for a snack, but I did get this gratuitous hill-n-valley shot almost across the road from it, facing west from Anderson Road near SE 89th. By the time I got home, I could feel the burn.
I sure hope we can see our new digs soon.
