Radix Fidem Blog

Photo Log 5: Brutal Loop

Posted on June 11, 2015 by ehurst

No pain, no gain.

Today we cross over into Cleveland County to the south and visit the nastiest hills in my area. The baddest climbs are on Hiwasee Road south of where I reside, but we have to take a detour over to Anderson Road to avoid the washout I mentioned in the Draper Lake ride. Once we get back to Hiwasee, we continue south over the toughest terrain until we get to SE 149th, AKA Stella Road. Follow Stella far enough east and you’ll come to the very old unincorporated community of Stella, but we will come back north somewhere short of that, taking Indian Meridian up a mile, over to Triple X and back up to SE 59th so we can hit last Saturday’s 3 grueling slopes in reverse order. This comes out to about 26 miles of a near complete absence of flat ground. Woohoo!

By the way, Stella Road westbound passes just a quarter-mile south of Draper Lake and runs off into Moore — just about the middle of the highest tornado zone — and into far South Oklahoma City. It dies just west of our Bailey Turnpike that runs down to Lawton. The reason it stops is because it runs into the “South” Canadian River (popular label, but technically the main branch of the Canadian without any prefixes). Stella Road eastbound runs into one arm of the Shawnee Twin Lakes. Did you know that Oklahoma has not a single natural lake? Every stinking lake and pond of any size has at least one man-made dam on it somewhere.

I love Hiwasee heading south. Once we turn off SE 29th, we have an easy mile of low humps, followed by a steep drop from SE 44th and our first brutal climb (pictured above left), not even two miles from home. Then it snakes east in order to jump over Interstate 40 using SE 59th. By the time we rejoin the original surveyed route of Hiwasee, this diversion has added a mile to the journey. But it’s worth it, because Hiwasee is such a beautful run. On the right is a view from SE 74th with the far crest two miles away at SE 104th.

Of course, we have that detour at SE 74th over the Anderson, down SE 89th and back to Hiwasee. While this whole thing is bisected by the West Branch of Hog Creek (which is the source of the washout requiring this detour), we still have matching razorback ridges on both sides of the valley before we get back to Hiwasee. Even the detour is brutal. Once we turn back south on Hiwasee, it is one long mile of climbing all the way to SE 104th. Just beyond is the physical crest of the ridge and I took a shot (above left) showing this vast, wide valley some three miles across before we start the final climb to Stella Road on the far hazy visual crest. There are a couple of intervening humps, but what makes it epic is the last three running up to Stella Road. Each one looks like this beast (right), requiring I gear all the way down to A-2 to make it.

But Stella Road itself is all hills. Here (left) I shot from just above Choctaw Road looking back west the way I came. Down in the bottom is Choctaw Road, which we will see again as the only route I can reasonably take to get down to Lake Thunderbird. While the little Indian community of Little Axe perches on the far east end of Thunderbird, everything near the lake belongs mostly to Norman. In fact, during the annexation battles over the past century, Norman at one point grabbed up a bunch of oddly shaped pieces up north of Stella Road. Most of the section lines out here have twin designations, from both OKC and Norman. The latter reverses the scheme, labeling the north-south roads as numbers, and the east-west lines are all named. I’ll try not to confuse you; I’ll chauvinistically use the OKC scheme.

I’ve always marveled at the beauty of Hog Creek Valley here (left and right) where the main stream runs into Lake Thunderbird. It continues feeling good until I top the rise at the end of Indian Meridian at SE 134th. I’ve not discussed it much in this photo log series, but I do manage to ride with my sensory heart active, and something about this area annexed by Norman feels very different, just a tad unpleasant. It stays with me over the continuing humps and razorback hills, and all along Triple-X as I head north. While Hiwasee was epic, Triple-X is just plain mean in both terrain and the odd feel in the place. The people are okay, but the moral ambiance is just a little foul.

Over the years I haven’t seen too much roadkill. The Watkins Lake Loop offered an awful lot of flattened snake, but today I saw mostly squirrels, both alive and dead. However, I also had the rare sighting of a live snake. A six-foot rat snake (AKA black snake) whipped across the road in front of me, way too fast to catch it with the camera.

Once I hit 104th, the ugly feeling faded. On the left is the view northward on Triple-X from SE 104th. Before I got into decent shape, I used to come out only as far as 104th, and that was pretty wild in its own right. You’ll notice it snakes a bit (right), deviating significantly from the survey line. With the ragged and sharp ridge lines and peaks out here, it’s just not possible to run a straight road. This is the one place to see blind curves that match blind crests. Witness SE 89th where it drops down onto Triple X (below left).

Eventually we cross I-40 again. Now, with Hiwasee, it crosses just a mile from where I-40 and I-240 merge, and the latter is almost hidden until you get there. Here on Triple-X it’s a high overpass crossing a slight rise in the interstate. The main thing about the interstate is how noisy it is. Out here you can hear it well before you see it.

We run on north to SE 59th and turn back west so we can catch the last three brutal climbs. After we crest that truly massive ridge before Henney, flying down the hill you can just barely make the turn onto Henney without braking if no traffic prevents you swinging all the way over to the left edge of the pavement. But then you promptly have to shift down because it’s a steep climb immediately. Once past that, it’s just the normal easy humpy terrain two miles back to the house.

With stopping for pictures, it took almost 3.5 hours.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cycling, fitness, geography, history, nature, photography, sensory heart | Comments Off

Backporting Your Assumptions

Posted on June 10, 2015 by ehurst

In software development lingo, “backporting” is making adjustments in software code so that it works on some older OS. Software development typically takes place using the latest and greatest software environment. Backporting often means rewriting the code so that it compiles on something earlier, yet somehow tends to work pretty much the same. As you might expect, some developers get nasty when you suggest there might be a good reason for it, as their world makes no room for the existence of folks who aren’t in a hurry to upgrade and update something that works well.

Just so, we find ourselves living in a Western society that bears an unconscious spite for anything from yesterday. Society does recognize nostalgia as a sentiment, but nothing more than a mere wishful aura for something that cannot be, and should not be, and might never have actually been. “Get over it.” How easily we forget that Western Civilization has been remarkably short lived even as it appears in accelerating collapse.

Perhaps you are acquainted with the history and intellectual background of the West? You still might not know that Aristotle’s primary innovation was trashing the bulk of human wisdom and knowledge from previous civilizations. Given what we know of the historical context, we can reasonably assume he was exposed to a wide range of older philosophical backgrounds from elder civilizations, and apparently dismissed the vast majority of it all. His teaching shows virtually no acknowledgement of vast stretches of human thought still available in his time. It was truly a radical departure.

For example, if you read the text of Daniel’s Prophecy, you’ll notice the story in chapter 4 where Nebuchadnezzar suffers a mental breakdown. Contemporary support is weak, at best, but the event itself was not the point. Nor is it some kind of propaganda about how Nebs bought into Hebrew religion, if only momentarily. Daniel is fully aware of the meaning of all of this in a far wider context. In the Ancient Near East, Nebuchadnezzar had violated a fundamental moral assumption about reality itself, and in the process, sinned against his own gods.

The issue is not hubris. Neither in the modern meaning of the word, nor the more ancient Greek concept — a concept somewhat different from the modern. For the Greeks, it was excessive spite against your vanquished adversary. The Greek image included the idea of debauchery. In crude terms, it was beating your opponent and then forcing him to give you a blow job, or anally raping him. It’s turning victory into a zero sum game, an unwarranted level of spite that violates good sense. Only in a few Greek myths does the term “hubris” take on religious significance.

It should be obvious this had nothing to do with Nebuchadnezzar’s sin. In the first place, the Greeks made their gods out to be morally no different than any petty human. The myths endow them with the worst of human moral weaknesses. In the Ancient Near East, that would be a shocking lack of reverence. The gods of the East belonged to an entirely different plane of existence, incomprehensible to humans. It wasn’t a mere matter of scale, as it was in Aristotle’s unitary universe. Nebs failed to embrace the moral duty of humility. Nobody in his world failed to give honor to at least one deity for their good fortune. This was far different from merely being uppity and forgetting his place below some bunch of petty and easily angered gods. No one in the East took literally the idea of angering any god(s). Deities were above that sort of thing, but it might feel pretty much the same down here on the receiving end.

The Greeks had no concept at all for a fallen nature. For them, all that existed was of the same stuff and human frailty could be fixed if we just employed reason. In the East, humans were fallen and it could not be fixed without some merciful redemption from outside our realm of existence entirely. Greeks considered current reality more or less eternal, and that time and space were fundamental to existence itself. Easterns regarded time and space as anomalies we just endure until something outside time and space broke through to rescue us, and in the process remaking everything around us. There was a distinct sense that death meant departure from this realm, not simply some other state or place within it.

Within Western Christianity we can discern the Greek stain in their doctrine, as if the Greek approach is fundamentally true. Worse, it’s mixed with a bunch of Germanic mythological hogwash. We have reason to believe the very intelligent Church scholars decided to simply adjust their teachings to match the morals already held by Germans invading Europe at the end of Roman Civilization. In other words, the priests agreed with Aristotle and threw away the vast lore of how man should approach questions of fundamental reality that served as the context for all of Scripture. They ditched it all because embracing Germanic mythology made a good sales pitch and would smooth the path to “Christianizing” the invading hordes. Of course, Acquinas strove mightily to justify that shift after the fact.

Backporting can work well in software. The consequences are actually manageable. In terms of human thought processes and intellectual assumptions, attempts at backporting guarantee you’ll never be able to understand Jesus Christ, and you will not avoid accidentally blaspheming God. Welcome to Nebuchadnezzar’s madness.

Posted in religion | Tagged ANE, Aristotle, Backporting, civilization, epistemology, intellectual background, Nebuchadnezzar, philosophy, scripture, software development | Comments Off

Photo Log 4: Jones Loop

Posted on June 9, 2015 by ehurst

The Jones Loop is a rectangle. As you might expect, when virtually every road you take is laid out in a grid, it matters not how you zigzag in between, if you hit the four sides of the rectangle, you’ll cover at least as much distance as simply following the perimeter. The route I picked in past excursions varied each time, but the basic box was Hiwasee on the west, Britton Road on the north, Triple-X on the east, and SE 29th as the baseline, which is where I live.

We have to change that, since a critical passage is blocked where the North Canadian threatens to carve up Triple-X, as noted in a previous ride report. Until I know more about the situation, I can’t justify slipping the barriers more than once when I took pictures. So we no longer need to worry about hitting Hiwasee (west of my home), but can start with Henney Road (east of my home). Instead of Triple-X, I’ll have to drift as far east as Luther Road. This still promises that the original 26-mile loop becomes 28 at a minimum, and traverses more of the same route we normally use for the Harrah Loop.

As always, home is in the hills and every direction is at least a little tough. Henney Road north from SE 29th is a pair of mile-long troughs between tough hills at each section line crossing. The first image is Henney Road from Reno Avenue looking back south the way I came, toward SE 15th. The hills ease up the next two miles north until we hit the Choctaw Creek Valley at NE 23rd. Once out of that low spot, the hills of Henney are pretty easy for the next five miles into Jones. Henney is often used for at least two different annual bicycle road rallies, so you can spot paint markings for them.

Jones sits down in the North Canadian Valley. It’s not much to look at, and I’m told the biggest single employer is some insurance processing outfit that takes up half of the business and store-front space in the little village, segmented between buildings on both sides of the street. The main drag is the same as Britton Road, the north end of our box. This route clips across the eastern end of the town proper and we stay on Britton two miles, passing Choctaw Road until we hit Indian Meridian.

We cross several streams feeding into the North Canadian, but the wide flat valley turns them into miniature bayous. Some of the stream beds out here offer deeply wild foliage, with places you could hardly claw your way through on foot. Given the biting snakes, insects and other varmints, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to.

This is real cyclist territory out here. The river plunges nearly straight south for quite a ways. By rolling down Indian Meridian we can pass the State Center School — it’s built right about where the surveyed geographical center of Oklahoma can be found.

Heading west on Wilshire, we can then drop south for a long flat three miles, except it terminates near the “river that eats houses” and the section of Triple-X that is currently closed. This road gets all of the local cyclists training and racing because that zig-zag from Jones, past the school and south across the farmland is virtually flat for five miles.

This is serious farm land, typically covered in corn, wheat or alfalfa. Few things are as pleasant as the smell of freshly cut alfalfa. No McMansions out here; the land is just too valuable for building housing additions. So we head back east on NE 50th, taking that hilly course over the parallel ridges where the river turns back east. The bottom of the far side is Luther Road. This will figure prominently in the planned future ride up to Luther the town. But today we turn south and cross the river valley one more time. Gee, two weeks without rain and the river seems so tame and placid. However, that sand bank wasn’t there a month ago, and I’m told the water nearly covered part of Luther Road during the worst flooding, just to the right of this picture (at the left below).

A little farther on we come back to NE 23rd. It is now the de facto dividing line between north and south in Oklahoma County, despite the surveyed address numbers starting two miles south. It’s four lanes from Harrah on the east all the way across the county to Council Road near Lake Overholser on the west. It runs past the Governor’s Mansion, the State Capitol and all the associated office buildings, and tends to form a cultural dividing line, as well. Out here in eastern county, there is a surprising high density of Native Americans living mostly north of it.

I followed this back to Indian Meridian, simply because for the last bit of the southward leg it’s the quietest and most pleasant way to go. At SE 29th I turn right in front of the Old Germany Restaurant, where I performed a wedding back in May. As usual, at Choctaw Road I dodge over to SE 29th Place and enjoy a peaceful, shady ride for three-quarters of a mile on well maintained packed caliche.

Three hours and roughly 28 miles.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cycling, fitness, geography, health, Indian Meridian, Luther Road | Comments Off

Tertiary: Question is the Answer

Posted on June 9, 2015 by ehurst

Pardon me while I blather for a moment.

I can tell you my story and my answers, but I won’t pretend to have much more than the provisional decisions I make for myself. And tomorrow I might change my mind. Not because I am unreliable and flighty, but because I don’t rest my decisions on mere facts of this world. This world is shadows and “reality” on this level of existence is fungible.

All the more so with all the noise. I’ve written enough about the seductive lying of TV, radio and Western cultural mythology, and tried to warn you that most of what you can find on the Net is bullshit, too. There are no good guys, and I’m not going to be roped into a false dichotomy. For example, the US is lying about Russia, but Russia is lying, too. And while it might be okay to invest in China, don’t count on it long term. Invest in yourself with skills and experiences that no one steal from you.

Can you honestly sit there and page through the crap offered up as “news” on the likes of Yahoo? How about the carefully structured feeds from Google and their unconscionable tracking? Every news site is trying to make money first, but most of them engage in deep psycho-manipulation for the sake of even more profit from normal human frailty. They don’t play fair, and some of these people would sell their own mothers for the right price. Were they not utterly lacking in morals that matter, they wouldn’t be in business in this world.

Let’s pick a single recent example: In McKinney, Texas, a police corporal named Casebolt responded to complaints about a rowdy pool party. In a short video that has gone viral, he can be seen playing rough with a teenage girl — he’s white and she’s black, of course. He also draws his sidearm on a couple of kids. Read other reports and you learn the neighbors were very unhappy with the excessively rowdy kids and way too many of them in one place crashing this private party. Just what would you expect of a policeman who should have had at least two-dozen more backup officers?

Yes, we have a problem with police brutality, but we also have a problem with general lawlessness from certain segments of the population who reject the mainstream. I reject the mainstream; does that make me a thug? The real problem is so deeply fundamental that no one wants to discuss it. They’d rather yell and scream from their mutually exclusive assumptions, both as a subset of the same damned system that makes the world such an ugly place.

Here’s another from history: Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. That famous image of the young fellow blocking the tanks? Those tanks were leaving the square after the drama was all over; it was a staged photo-op. Did you know that protesters burned to death the unarmed fresh military recruits on their buses before they even got to the square? Yes, protesters were killed, too, but virtually nothing you’ve been told about the meaning of the protest itself is true. Lots of Western cash went into that operation before it ever made the news.

News people are paid liars, though some are deeply deceived themselves. Being there on the ground doesn’t make you any more cognizant of the whole story than would living in another star system and reading faint signals beamed across the light years of space.

No, I don’t love the US, Russia, China, cops nor racially diverse teenagers. I don’t hate them, either. I love my Lord and His calling on my life. That’s more than mere religious blather, but I’ll just have to let you figure that out for yourself. If you haven’t tasted it, no one can explain it to you. If you have tasted it, no one has to explain it. All we need is the occasional reminder not to get wrapped up in the activity itself, but to back off in our souls and see the bigger picture.

This world is fallen. Not in the sense of Creation itself, but we humans are fallen. Don’t trust anyone, least of all the fallen soul in the mirror. Learn the paradox that you still have to make choices despite that lack of trust. My answer to that quandary may not work for you, but I’m determined to tell my story because silence is not an option.

Posted in sanity | Tagged Moral reasoning, mysticism, news, social mythology, social sciences | Comments Off

Gentle Heart

Posted on June 8, 2015 by ehurst

It’s a simple idea: Gentle is the opposite of brutal.

Whenever I have encountered folks with a brutal streak, it boils down to a handful of things, sometimes in combination — self-righteousness, genuine hatred (rejoicing in someone else’s suffering), other forms of solipsism, and psychopathic tendencies. You have to let go of those things in order to follow your heart and to follow Christ.

Gentle does not exclude forceful. The issue is your attitude to the person in question; it’s a matter of why. Feelings aren’t really the issue. It arises from a sense of calling to act according to God’s character as He expresses Himself in your life. You are doing what pleases Him. You know He cares, even when you don’t understand the full context. You haven’t forgotten that human suffering is part of our fallen condition.

Don’t pretend that syrupy sweetness is the same thing. That’s just a distracting myth, the backside of brutality that suggests, “I’m better than you. See how sweet and perfect I am?” Kind and gentle have no connection to our Western social concept of “nice.” In fact, “nice” isn’t even a requirement of God’s Laws; it just adds to human suffering.

Most suffering is from a lack of moral wisdom. In other words, a certain amount is given after the Fall — “legitimate suffering” as Dr. Scott Peck calls it. But we can face that with aplomb if we understand it. That’s usually not really very much suffering in the wider perspective, but we often take on far more sorrow than is necessary because we have no clue about God’s character. If you can’t sense the moral fabric of Creation, it gets really hard to understand why you catch a taste of Hell. It’s because you are permitting the demons the justified authority to have a chunk of your life.

A critical element in cutting off demonic access is being gentle. Grab your kid and drag him back from the fire; don’t slap him away from it. Spank him if he keeps going back, though. Do what it takes to get his attention, but also make sure you understand as much as possible what drives him to be so foolish. Cultivate the kind of authority and protective parental presence that he’s less likely to transgress your boundaries.

It requires you tear yourself away from the game or soap opera or movie of the week. I suppose it goes without saying that your family is more important than your personal sense of entertainment, but that goes against our social conditioning. It’s easier to throw an outburst of angry wrath at your kids to make them stop something. That isn’t gentle.

It’s the call of God in your heart.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged culture, family, heart-mind, human suffering, moral consciousness, propaganda, psychology, scripture, spirituality | Comments Off

Teaching the Young

Posted on June 7, 2015 by ehurst

If you follow what I teach here, you realize quickly how powerful it is. At the same time, you realize how few people will taken interest. It’s a paradox that those of us who understand Creation and God’s revelation best are the ones least likely to fit into the dominant society. We are the aliens, yet Creation itself loves our company and chatters noisily to us.

So it was particularly pleasing when I discovered the kid next door loves this wild food business. I helped his dad and loaned them some tools a few times for automotive work, so we are on good terms in the first place. I don’t pry, but the boy probably isn’t 12 yet. I was teasing him once and mentioned that there was food at his feet in their yard. He actually wanted to know what I meant, so I pointed out henbit and chickweed. He loved the taste of chickweed, so I promised to show him where to find the berries and plums that grow wild here.

Today was the day he was ready. We sprayed on my natural insect repellent and forged off into the untamed wilderness — there’s lots of undeveloped land here. Our trailer park is a foreign intrusion of civilization into a very large patch of natural Oklahoma foliage. I showed him first how to identify the early crop blackberries, where to find the best patches with the biggest berries. I also helped him find the sand plums and he managed to collect a healthy sample of each. He also now recognizes both types of blackberry and what their seasons are. I also mentioned persimmons and we discussed mulberries, but — alas — the latter are finished in this close vicinity.

He enjoyed himself immensely and thanked me duly.

Maybe some day I’ll be in a position to teach him how nature is alive and how to hear it with his heart. For now, though, I’m sure he’s way ahead of the other kids in this park. A critical element in what I teach is not choking folks with too much too soon. We hide nothing, but we don’t rush to cram down their throats things that won’t digest easily.

Be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks about the faith that is within you.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged children, education, food, health, nature, sensory heart, survival | Comments Off

Psalm 53

Posted on June 6, 2015 by ehurst

This is quite similar to Psalm 14. While we can only guess, perhaps it’s appearance here in Book 2 simply means it was used in a different context, which would give it a different emphasis. We see it has a specific instruction in the header to play it according to a form that seems to indicate a melancholy tone — the actual term means “sickness.” The wording certainly lends itself to a gloomy and cynical outlook, at least until the end.

We remind ourselves the Hebrew people took seriously the notion that your heart could reason and consider things independently of the mind. Yet they also believed that the heart was supposed to rule over the mind, because the heart alone was capable of savoring the full implications of moral truth. Thus, the meaning of the first verse slips the Western mind entirely. David defines what it means to be a fool; a fool is one whose heart does not acknowledge God’s revelation. The heart is the only faculty capable of processing revelation fully, so without a heart committed to God’s moral character, the fool is essentially without a heart at all. It won’t matter what they have in their heads because they cannot begin to do righteousness without it.

David uses a term with subtle nuance that changes with context: Sons of Men. If he meant the broader emphasis of all humanity, then who was he to write these words? Instead, it is likely he uses it in the sense of those who are worldly, consistent with the meaning of fool and folly. By definition, such people do not seek God. The wording for rejection implies these people might pretend to serve God, but flinch when their simplistic expectations are disappointed by surprises. God is not within reach of the intellect, so it stands to reason that, if your mind is all you have to work with in obeying Moses, you won’t do very well. You have to understand His Person to understand His Law.

So in the Hebrew turn of phrase, David asks the rhetorical question: Do they not comprehend what they see? The work of God in the world is incomprehensible to those without a fully committed heart that is able to translate the moral fabric for the mind. Whatever their intention, these fools are destructive by default among the people of the Covenant, devouring each other. Whatever it is they are doing when they come to the Temple, it is not calling out to God. Instead, they live in superstitious fear of shadows in their own imaginations.

David implies such people are not really part of the Covenant, but more like the enemies of Israel. God will scatter their bones after they die because no one will mourn their death and bury them. There is no divine hedge of protection on them, so Israel rising up in righteousness can humiliate them in the day of battle. In effect, it is a call for Israel to rise up in holiness against those who are enemies within.

The final verse begins with a one last rhetorical question in the Hebrew: Who will grant from Zion deliverance to Israel? Of course, it is Jehovah, and in due time He will restore the pinnacle of blessing they had in times past. Let Israel not fail to rejoice at the prospect.

Posted in bible | Tagged ancient hebrew culture, divine revelation, heart-mind, King David, moral consciousness, Psalms | Comments Off

Photo Log 3: Watkins Lake Loop

Posted on June 6, 2015 by ehurst

“It’s good training!” That’s what we tell ourselves when something unexpected mars your training exercise.

Today’s journey takes us straight east and into Pottawatomie County. The route is mostly a matter of SE 44th one way and SE 59th the other way, with a detour out around the lake that drops us down to SE 74th for awhile. Today we are going counterclockwise which means heading down Henney Road from the trailer park, then starting our long eastward trek on SE 59th to Dobbs Road, where we turn south to SE 74th. This runs us just south of the little town of Newalla. Normally we would run down the south side of the reservoir to McLoud Road, but today we will try to add an extra three or four miles out on the end to catch a glimpse of Dale Bottom in the North Canadian Valley from a landmark ridge that rises above it on the west side. Then we’ll come back a long hard ride on SE 44th until we return to Henney Road.

At least, that was the plan. It didn’t quite come out like that.

It’s an easy run down Henney Road two miles south to SE 59th, but it drops off to a very picturesque valley that feeds into Hog Creek, a major water course that in turn feeds Lake Thunderbird. We’ll be seeing that one in a later journey, but today we see that Henney dead ends at SE59th and climbs steeply off to our left, westbound.

It’s a brutal climb as we can see looking back (the far horizon runs up over Interstate 40 near Hiwasee Road). The next hill is also brutal, and the next. Three in a row, after which it gets much easier for awhile. Not flat by any means, but the hills are lower and less steep all the way out the Dobbs Road, where we turn south to SE 74th. It’s just another mile to Harrah Road but you can tell that we are near the lake by the increased dampness in the air. Cross Harrah Road and you will catch glimpses of the swamps on the high end of the lake.

Looking back over Choctaw Road at the first hill. It’s the same from both sides.

Wes Watkins Reservoir lies mostly east and west, feeding from the west and dammed on the east end. The original water course is called Deer Creek, and the name appears in reference to the area. The road is humpy, though not brutal, all along both sides where the east-west roads cross numerous feeder streams. Lots of old money here, too. None of it picture-worthy, but really nice homes and virtually none of them in the MacMansion style. There were a few partial washouts where the traffic is diverted from the edge down to one lane, but this is a new road surface with a good asphalt covering.

If you turn left at McLoud Road and head north to come back on SE 44th from there, it’s just about 30 miles for that loop. I decided to explore a bit this time. Crossing McLoud Road we drop down slowly to the North Canadian Valley. SE 74th becomes WesTech Road here, and is gravel for a mile, a washboard in some places. Not easy on my mountain bike, I suspect you’d have to be nuts to do it on a road bike. The large gravel size would be dangerous by itself. I crossed a sheltered narrow arm of the valley that runs parallel quite a ways north. Upon hitting the North Canadian Valley proper, it’s flat for a long ways.

Just a bit south is Firelake Grand Casino on I-40, owned by the Potawatomie Nation (they spell it with one “t”). Oklahoma government complained that the lack of state taxes made it too competitive so the tribe simply charges their own tax and feeds it back into lots of giveaways. This facility has a huge fuel station that is popular with truckers for obvious reasons, plus a host of other amenities that you and I can’t afford.

The infamous Dale Bottom highway is a three-mile stretch that descends only slightly from McLoud and parallels the North Canadian River. This used to be State Highway 3, one of the earliest paved routes that ran from somewhere in the Panhandle all the way down to the southeast part of the state. So you can imagine that this was a popular illegal raceway from well before I was born. The sign on our road back west says Garret’s Lake Road, but the maps vary with other names. It’s not too much of a climb back into some old money homes. We turn right on Blackberry Drive, which seems to have been asphalted at one time, but mostly dirt now.

It passes a fairly famous combat pistol range quite popular with folks seeking the concealed carry permit, but nothing I could capture with the camera. The facility out back sits on the crest of the rise about Dale Bottom but is concealed by trees. Next door to that I encountered a woman digging at the edge of her driveway. The recent heavy rains really tore this road up, and her paying someone to drag a boxblade across it didn’t help much. We chatted awhile and then I rode on down. Technically the road is closed, but passable on my bike. I wouldn’t drive any motor vehicles without a high clearance there, as the repairs are quite preliminary — big rocks were dumped but not graded out.

Eventually we turn back west on SE 44th. My bike bogged down frequently in loose sand during the first half-mile climbing back toward McLoud Road. Some of the edges were washed out, but it appears the local flooding mostly washed slowly down the road itself, leaving large stretches of sand.

SE 44th is all sliced up. It was washed out between McLoud Road and Arena Road, requiring a detour of just about a mile by heading north to Seikel Boulevard and passing in front of the newly built McLoud High School. That wasn’t too bad, and it took me past a copy of the new trend in “Cowboy Churches”. This has gotten very popular, a sort of rural answer to the monster urban entertainment “worship centers.” As you might expect, you can show up in your agrarian work clothes and have a good time in the Lord, they say. There are several of them scattered across my favorite cycling loops, affiliated with the likes of Baptists, Methodists, and some I’m not too sure about.

So while I could still get to the lake, it’s usually not worth it. You have drop south a mile off SE 44th. The City of McLoud used to charge for entrance, but it’s free now. There is a substantial number of picnic tables and a couple of pavilions, and you can swim, but it’s by no means remarkable. If you run low on drinking water, you can refill all your containers there for free. It wasn’t worth the diversion today. Just a mile down the road was another washout. Since the detour would have added two miles, running all the way north back to SE 29th, I decided to skip it and just roll on home. Our trailer park fronts on SE 29th, anyway.

However, this used to be State Highway 3 (continuing from Dale Bottom east of McLoud). It remains very busy and the whole point is avoiding high traffic areas. The only real advantage is that is still well maintained and was better engineered — no washouts and the hills are much gentler. Twice I passed signs indicating there was yet another detour off of SE 44th; that poor road took a beating in the heavy rains.

By the time I rolled into the trailer park gate, it was 4.5 hours and about 38 miles (61 km), and the temperature was a muggy 85°F (29.4C) and climbing.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cycling, Dale Bottom, eastern oklahoma county, fitness, geography, health, North Canadian River, North Canadian Valley | Comments Off

Another Freak Show

Posted on June 5, 2015 by ehurst

Two whole books on human sexuality aren’t enough (one and two) merely to introduce how utterly freakish Westerners, particularly mainstream Western Christians, are about human sexuality. The just don’t have a clue. Discussing what the Bible considers normal in this realm immediately makes us space aliens to everyone in the West. I put it off all day thinking about it and dreading the necessity of discussing it again.

If you aren’t aware of the current soap opera regarding a certain family named Duggar and how one of their 19 kids recently came under embarrassing attention for something Western Christians regard as scandalous, then never mind; maybe it’s better you don’t bother with it. Look them up if you are curious. In essence, the Duggars had a TV series showcasing their standard American right-wing evangelical Christian religion. This is the Bible-thumper homeschool type family. I was once immersed in that American subculture, so I know all about it.

One of their sons got a job with an appropriately political active right-wing evangelical organization. It made headlines among such folks, and got the attention of their political and philosophical opponents. Then someone leaked records an investigation into how this famous son had admitted fondling little girls in their privates. Some of his victims were his own sisters. Cue the weeping and gnashing of teeth. Cue the snarky outpouring from those who hate such people.

Both sides are full of crap. So is the rest of the Western Civilization entirely.

Nobody is interested in what the Ancient Hebrews thought of such things, and you’ll see an endless supply of reading their freakish values back into the Bible. This is part of why the Hebrews were so very harsh about keeping the sexes apart from a rather young age. Notwithstanding the peccadilloes of certain ancient royalty who did not live by quite the same social restrictions for a lot of good reasons (again, no one seems to care why), the average Hebrew family watched their kids like a hawk.

And does it occur to no one a fellow’s little sisters might be altogether willing victims of such “abuse”? All the more reason to keep them away from each other most of the time. We can dispute and debate all day long at what point someone can validly volunteer for such behavior. However, I can assure you Hebrew parents didn’t panic when the kids were caught examining each other’s privates. They were utterly lacking in our pseudo-Victorian freaky prissiness about such things. They also didn’t suffer from the moral depravity half of Americans refuse to admit is inherent in Western mythology.

Children touching each other doesn’t mean the kids are evil, just fallen. To the Hebrews, it also meant the parents needed to pray and consider ways to stop it from happening again. It wasn’t a question of whom to blame and publicly castigate, just a matter of pursuing moral justice within the context. The question in biblical morality is: What do we do now, Lord? There was no deep angst over such horrifying loss, because they wouldn’t think of it in those terms. They didn’t exacerbate things by shrieking in terror at the permanent emotional scars because that’s not how they viewed reality.

Don’t buy into the false dichotomy offered by the current popular blather on this. That’s the real horror here.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged human sexuality, oppression, propaganda, psychology, religion, social conditioning, Western Christian mythology, western christians | Comments Off

Photo Log 2: Biking East OK County

Posted on June 4, 2015 by ehurst

Today’s journey takes us to Harrah (pronounced hair’-uh), but also the spot in Choctaw where the river has already eaten a house and is now threatening a major thoroughfare. The original story of the house, with pictures, is here from 2013. It’s a poignant story of the Buford folks who lost their old family farmhouse. During the immediate aftermath, their poor dog Bo was stuck out there alone for a while. On one of my rides, I passed by and out of sheer boredom and loneliness he chased me, sneaking out from behind the trash carts. I stopped and we talked for awhile, which left him in a brighter mood. I’ve included here a satellite view after the structures were removed, but prior to more cent flooding. And here you can find a recent aerial shot of the same site now completely gone as the river cuts near the road.

(Side note: The southern border of Oklahoma County is SE 89th, just a few miles south of here. Draper Lake is mostly south of that line, resting in Cleveland County. The northern border of OK County is more like 20 miles north, so I’m not likely to ride there without more careful planning. I’m hoping I can get some shots of a ride to Luther up on old Hwy 66 later this summer. The eastern edge of the county is just about eight miles east of here and I also have a trip planned to Watkins Reservoir out south of McLoud in Pottawatomie County.)

The route from my house runs east on SE 29th, but I usually diverge onto SE 29th Place to avoid the high traffic on the main SE 29th itself. SE 29th Place follows the old railroad bed that used to run out to Shawnee, but was dismantled when I was a teenager. We finally get to Indian Meridian (historical reference), one of the quietest and flattest routes running north. I stayed with this all the way to NE 36th, then turned right to Triple-X. That’s where the local government placed the barrier to block traffic from the danger area. They really do not want you going that way. Since the bank is now just a few feet from the edge of the road, you can’t blame them.

The previous driveway to the Buford home site on North Triple X Road in Choctaw.

The scene from the bridge on Triple-X shows where huge cottonwoods fell into the river and were carried downstream to sandbars. Notice the power pole on the right almost undercut.

There aren’t that many bridges across the North Canadian River in these parts, so cutting off the use of this one is significant inconvenience for the locals. The next nearest route is at least two-miles in any direction. From the Triple-X bridge just a short way north we turn right onto NE 50th. This takes us over the end of a ridge line that juts out into the North Canadian Valley.

The valley is mostly flat and used for agriculture. There are some roads crossing it, as noted, but very few in the valley itself. However, evil lurks even here. Don’t get me wrong; I suffer no hypocrisy about using electricity. The Horseshoe Lake Plant is natural gas fired, very clean and efficient. But Oklahoma Gas and Electric (OG&E) is one of the largest monopoly utilities in the state. They are always trying to deny consumers direct access to natural gas, because they don’t want to compete for it. In this part of the country, natural gas is by far the cheapest and most reliable source of heat. I can’t begin to outline what sort of nasty criminal gang runs OG&E. They aren’t the richest, but they are easily one of the slimiest outfits in Oklahoma. Do I have to mention unspeakable cruelty to rate-payers? The state utilities commission wouldn’t dare push them very hard.

We turn south off NE 50th onto Harrah Road. There’s a really fine road running to and around Horseshoe Lake, but it’s restricted access. Still, the gated entrance at NE 36th and Harrah Road offers a great picnic stop with gigantic sycamore and cottonwood trees. I’ve seen river bottom cottonwoods as much as 20′ (6m) in diameter and solid through the middle.

The North Canadian wanders all over this end of the county. Where Harrah Road merges briefly with US Hwy 62 it crosses the river again. Locals have been thrilled as the last couple of years the heavy rains have cause the river to shift around and exposes vast sandbars for off-road sports.

The primary reason the town of Harrah exists is because of the granary and the railroad running alongside the North Canadian River. The town is out on the far eastern edge of the exploding mini-mansion developments. They have a decent but bug-infested park with a fitness path of sorts, and even a bike path running between the high school and one of the grade schools. Where US Hwy 62 turns west, I usually head left into the Baptist church parking lot, then work my way over a block west and two blocks south to the high school sports field. The bike path runs a snaking route south from there through the woods and alongside a graveyard before it hits NE 10th.

On the path I ran into a couple of mulberry trees. They are about the middle of their fruiting season right now. Most Okies no longer know about them, too suspicious to eat them, so it’s not hard to get a sample. They are mostly sweet with a very subtle flavor. Just a few and you really can’t taste much more than the sweetness. Turn right on NE 10th and we immediately pass the grade school. At Dobbs Road I usually turn south. Right there on the west side of the road is a huge patch of mostly late-crop blackberries. However, there are plenty of early-crop, as well. Here we see both kinds growing together — the one in fruit with the other still blooming. You’ll find both kinds all along Dobbs Road for at least the next two miles south.

There I typically turn right on SE 15th. Yes, we are back into the hilly terrain. This picture looks west from Nixon Avenue (halfway between Luther and Peebly Roads).

From there I run back to Indian Meridian to go home.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cycling, eastern oklahoma county, fitness, geography, Harrah, Harrah Road, history, Indian Meridian, nature, North Canadian River, oklahoma, Oklahoma County, photography | Comments Off