Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

Thursday morning, hauling it south out of Oklahoma City to Dallas on Interstate 35, at about the Arbuckle Mountains, I realized I was free -- free! free! -- for the next 24 hours. Free of the house and my routines.

Felt so good, I called in a $100 pledge to my favorite NPR affiliate.

After scootin' across the Red River, I felt so happy to be in Texas, I stopped at Foster's Western Shop on the north side of Denton, at the exit to Krum, and thought hard about buying a new straw, what with spring havin' sprung and all and me bein' in such a good mood. Nothing suited my fancy, though, so I got back in the truck and headed to I-35W, the turnoff to where I was going by way of the west side of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex (three separate link there), the home of old friend and commenter GP.

Lawsy, GP had whupped up a feast on his backyard grill -- them havin' had rain in Texas and not bein' under a burn ban, they can do that. Marinated-barbecued-smoked chicken! (GP was consciously sensitive to my beef and pork Lenten set-aside, for which I was muchly grateful).

Plus hot rolls! Sliced cukes! Corn-on-the-cob! Bread-and-butter pickles and olives out of the jar! At high noon on a Thursday! Dude. I was sated.

Then we headed to GP's church for a 1 p.m. weekday afternoon Bible study. GP usually goes to the 8 p.m. Thursday study, but since we were headed to the Texas Rangers game later, he went to the 1 p.m. gathering. As we were walking up, one of the older ladies announced, "We got men!" We were the only two guys present, and dang near the youngest people there (both of us in early 40s)

The study was on Matthew 23. Jesus is majorly pissed in Matthew 23. The whole chapter is a sustained rant against the hypocritical scribes and Pharisees. The strongest language attributed to Jesus in the Bible is in this passage. He calls them snakes. He basically says hell is too good for them.

Why? Because of their hypocrisy -- their regular espousing of one world view while regularly living another way. And that was one of the lessons of the day for me: A reminder that hypocrisy goes much deeper than inconsistency and is more or less constant, not something expressed in anger or spite or pique. It's living a life that is a sustained lie or bundle of lies.

Back to the house. GP and I immediately walked the two blocks to the local grade school to retrieve GP Jr. He is quite a lad. Walking him to and from school -- he's a kiddiegartner -- is a regular routine for GP Jr. and his daddy. Warmed my heart and made me a little jealous to get to share that. GP Jr. will have warm memories of these times.

Then, ol' ER, who had gotten up early for the trip, and whose belly was still full of GP's barbecued chicken, had to have a nap. GP Jr. was kind enough to let me have his room for the visit -- he got to "camp" in a sleeping bag GP's office, so he was way cool with it -- so I conked out on his bed for an hour or so of snoozing while GP and GP Jr. played outside.

Came time to go to the game. (I will spare y'all the several tense minutes while GP, at the last minute, couldn't find the tickets). We sat on the right-field home run porch, row 2, about 12 feet inside from the first-base line. A line drive might’ve took one of our heads off! The crowd was way sparse, though, so we moved back several rows and had plenty of room to move around.

What a game. R.A. Dickey, the Rangers's starting pitcher, was practicing his knuckleball. Detroit batters hit SIX home runs and one RBI off him in 48 pitches. A sight to behold. Yep, it tied a record.

Short game: 2 hours and 40-some-odd minutes. (I will spare y'all the several tense minutes where I got separated from GP and GP Jr. and wondered how the heck we were going to find one another. Thank God for cell phones so simple that even I could find the "numbers previously dialed" function and call GP.)

Back to the house, where I was famished and had more chicken, since the only thing I could eat at the game, considering, was popcorn and nachos. (I will spare y'all details of my triggering of the GP household intruder alarm system -- about 15 minutes after lights out, when I decided to open a window. Sigh.)

Up early Friday morning. Kids off. Mrs. GP to work (GP had a late-starting work day). GP and sat around, reading the papers, drinkin’ coffee, marveling over the Scooter Libby revelations and the fact that Jesus and Judas were on the front page, talking about grace and ungrace, the central nature of what the Resurrection means and how it relates to being a Christian, talking about different concepts of the Resurrection, what truly are the fundamentals of the faith, and so on.

GP headed to work and I headed north -- to as far as Gainesville, Texas, famous nowadays for its outlet mall. There, I headed west on U.S. Highway 82 to Muenster, Texas, which is on the eastern fringe of the territory I used to cover as a journalist working from Wichita Falls, Texas.

At Muenster, a German town (obviously), I stopped and had a chicken schnitzel sandwich, kraut and potatoes at The Center restaurant. Then headed across the street to Bayer's Bakery (and convenience store and Exxon) and bought two strudels as big as my forearm and I am not exaggerating, one apricot and one apple-cheese.

Headed west as far as Saint Jo, which bloggy buddy Trixie blogged about a while back, then took off north on a farm-to-market road to and through Capps Corner and Illinois Bend, places I hadn't been in years. The Illinoise Bend Community Church was settin' up for a tent revival. True statement.

I’d forgotten how strikingly different and beautiful northern Montague County is from the flatness of the Red River bottoms on the north side of the Oklahoma line, and the rolling plains south of Highway 82. The land is breaky, with what used to pass for mountains back in the day. Good timber and pasture.

Between Capp's Corner and Illinois Bend, I looked off to the left and wondered, "Why is there a golf course way out here?" since it seems so landscaped. No. There were cows and calves out there. Somebody had grubbed out the brush, decades ago it looked like, and kept it clean, but left old timber along the creeks. Probably overseeded the native pasture with ryegrass, I'm guessin' -- but it was a beautiful sight to behold.

Scooted north into Oklahoma, across the "new" (1994) Taovayas Indian Bridge across the Red River ("new" because I wrote stories about it when they were putting it in, which reminds me I also wrote news and features stories out of Muenster, Saint Jo, Capps Corner and Illinois Bend, back in the early '90s, collecting datelines like Comanches counted coup).

At State Highway 32, I turned back west and hit U.S. 81 at Ryan, Okla. Decided to head south again, to get a look at Ringgold, Texas, which was supposed to have “burned down” in some of the recent wildfires.

Close to it: Several slabs, lot of burned vehicles, one old couple sifting through the remains of their house and the post office looked like it was in a new trailer – but I don’t know that the post office burned down. Ringgold looked like hell and smelled like it.

Back north on Highway 81, stopped at Terral, Okla., site of the annual Terral Watermelon Jubilee. Yep, I wrote stories about that in the ‘90s, and, the watermelon get-together was grist for my very first paid-for piece of writing not for a newspaper for which I was working. State tourism magazine took my 2,000 or so words and whacked it to around 700 words – but still paid me $100 dollars, so I was happy.

Stopped at a roadside store in Terral for a Coke and at the counter asked the guy about a new Copenhagen countertop and window ad I’d been seeing everywhere in Texas and now at this store in Terral:

For some new cut of Copenhagen, with a cowgal, behatted and bejeaned, with a finger hooked under her belt, seemin’ to be pulling the front of her britches down to regions that were not fit for mixed company when I was growing up, or even in the dadgum ‘90s when I was spending half of my nonsleeping, nonworking life in Texas dance halls chasin’ women. Hoo wee.

“That new?” I asked the guy behind the counter, peckin’ on the ad.

“Yep,” the guy said. “Old man was in here the other day, saw it, and grabbed his heart. I said to him, I said, ‘Don’t that make you wanna go dancin’?”

“Dancin’ ain’t what comes to mind when I looked at it,” I said.

“Well, there was a lady present at the time, so I had to clean it up.”

“Welp,” I said, “it’s damn near enough to make me want to dip again.”

“Yep,” he said.

“Yep,” I said.

Back in the truck, I see the door to the place is slamming and unslamming in the wind. I jump out and follow the directions I’d seen posted on it on my way in: “WIND WARNING! Close the door behind you,” it said.

A note about U.S. Highway 81: It follows the path of the Chisholm Trail (note on link: hardheaded Okies insist that the Chisholm Trail carried that name only in what is now Oklahoma, not all the way up from South Texas). Glancing on either side of the road, it does seem like a natural draw.

No doubt about where I was as I headed back north; Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain – and where dust and smoke were flyin’ sideways from out west in Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle, both of which had erupted in flames again the day before.

Hard drivin’ with sustained winds in the 40s and gusts higher than that. Bleak, too, with an overcast sky and big rain drops on the back side of a cold front mixing with the dirt and smoke – but just for a little bit until the rain cleaned the air, or I drove north out of it.

Back at Ryan, I drove through slowly looking hard at everything, trying to remember whether it was Ryan or Ringling, Okla., not too far away, where one New Year’s Day I had to cover a double-homicide: a boyfriend killed his girlfriend and her baby, in a particularly gruesome manner, the details of which I’ve forgotten.

Damned if I didn’t win a state journalism award for the two stories I wrote that day. Shit. A woman and her baby get dead and I get an award. The world sucks sometimes.

North, at Waurika, I slowed down and considered driving downtown because the annual Waurika Rattlesnake Hunt is this weekend (did stories on that), but decided not to – although the chance of getting’ to eat some non-Lenten-violative snake meat was tempting. The dang Chisholm Trail Historical Museum was closed.

North of Waurika to Addington, Okla., where I did a story about two airmen who burned up in some kind of freak accident involving a firefighter training exercise and the malfunction of a newfangled firefighting vehicle – I think, since details have fuzzed up in my mind over the years.

North of Addington at Comanche, Okla., I remembered being here with a once-good-but-now-lost friend who was servin’ with me on the board of directors for a longstanding annual cattle show. We were in Comanche to either weigh steers or to pick up the scales and haul them back to Texas, or both, I can’t remember. That’s the only time I’d ever been in Comanche before.

At Comanche, I stopped and bought some polished-rock bookends for Dr. ER and for myself a chunk of Oklahoma coal (from a mine around Coalgate, in Little Dixie, the man said), and a chunk of sulfur (from somewhere in Texas, the man said). Now, with a match, I can smell what hell smells like, I reckon.

North of Comanche, I started “drawing a yellow line”! That means I’d never driven that way before. Several years ago, I bought a road atlas for the purpose of using a highlighter to mark every U.S and state highway I’d driven on in every state. The atlas succumbed to an unfortunate spitcup incident and was disposed of. The phrase “drawing a yellow line” continues in the ER family lexicon.

North to Duncan, where I saw the perfect mix of Oklahoma cowboys-Indians-commerce: The Chickasaw Nation's Chisholm Trail Casino, Cook-Out Café and Smoke Shop. Yeehaw! As cool as the Chisholm Trail Church of Christ down the road.

I drove into downtown Duncan for a looksee and spied a used bookstore, Books Galore. Not. Crappy Books Galore.

“Howdy! How’re y’all?” I said to an old couple behind the counter.

“Still alive and kickin’ – just not as high as I used to!” the old man said.

“Har, har,” we both said as the old lady ignored what the old dude said, because he probably says it to every stranger who comes through the door. But I got a laugh out of it.

“Y’all got any Oklahoma history? Any history books of any kind? But especially Oklahoma history?” I asked, because a scan of the store revealed nothing but cheap paperbacks, standard-issue romance, Westerns, pop psych, pop religion and such.

The lady rustled around the stacks behind the counter and held up a book: “We got this. But it’s $15 dollars!” It was “Our Oklahoma,” by Muriel Wright, Choctaw, descendent of a chief, and Oklahoma historian extraordinaire, from 1949, not in too good of a shape, so I declined and high-tailed it. Of course, I’ve regretted not buying the dang thing ever since.

The rest of the trip passed without incident or interest, other than the fact I continued to “draw a yellow line” through Marlow, Rush Springs and Ninnekah, to Chickasha, through which I’ve passed many times, and where I’ve eaten ribs and bales of French fries several time at Jake’s.

The H.E. Bailey Turnpike passes through Chickasha, but I stayed on the road less traveled, Highway 81, through Pocasset and Minco to Union City, where I took State Highway 152 east to Mustang, then Highway 92 north to Route 66 at Yukon (home of Garth Brooks), to the Kilpatrick Turnpike around the northwest side of OKC and finally back to the house – after detours for a Coke at the Sonic for Dr. ER and a fresh bottle of Dickel for myself, to wash the road dust out of my throat.

And I still got three days off to go! :-)

--ER