Interesting term: View Quake. I got it here. It’s what happens when you read a book that shakes up your mind, earthquake style, leaving an altered landscape.

I had an event like that about 11 years ago, when I read Roy Meyers book, “History of the Santee Sioux : United States Indian Policy on Trial.” There are other books that could have done it, too, but that happens to be the one I read after my 1996 bike tour when I got drawn into the story of the Black Hawk war and all the issues around it.

Before I read that book I thought I knew a few things about Native American issues. Then I found out my ideas had already been tried and had been found wanting. I might get around to explaining more of the implications of all that in my political blog, The Reticulator. Here I’ll stick to bicycling and history.

My freshman year in high school was at a school on the edge of the Santee Sioux reservation in northeastern Nebraska. It was also near where I started my first-ever, multi-day bicycle tour. This was in 1995, before I read Meyers book.

I had been trying for some time to get my wife interested in bicycle touring. Finally she suggested that I should just go, and she would drive the van. She even suggested a route — I should visit my boyhood homes, and end up where my parents live now. That was a great suggestion.

I don’t know where all my photos from that trip are, but I found some that my wife had taken.

Here we are, off on that first multi-day tour. I’m riding the hybrid-style bike that I used that first year, and my youngest son is following behind, going along with me on my nostalgia trip. This is Winnetoon, Nebraska — which is actually about three miles from where we had lived. Back in the late 50s and early 60s it still had a grocery store, and on Saturday nights the city fathers would set up a movie projector outdoors for community entertainment — like had been done in many other small midwest towns in decades earlier than that.

These photos were taken a few hours before we began the ride. In the background is Christ Lutheran Church, where my father was pastor. We are standing in the schoolyard of what had been the District No. 3 school. I had posted this photo on this blog before, but tonight rescanned it to get a slightly better version. Behind the church and home is a small creek which flows into the Bazile Creek, which flows north through the Santee reservation and into the Missouri.

This is the interior of that church. I think I only got bawled out from the pulpit a couple of times, along with my peers in the back row.

My father liked to come over and play the pipe organ, and occasionally I would come over here and start up the big bellows in the basement so I could practice my keyboard lessons here instead of doing them on the piano in the house. It would have been better if I had done a lot more practicing on either keyboard, and less avoiding of it.

Not to make light of the other good things learned here, but I must confess that I started looking forward to going to church when I realized that it was the place where some girls who didn’t go to that district #3 school would be, too.

This scene is behind that church. The church owned 40 acres from the days when the pastor also kept a few cows to feed his family. It was a great place for adventure, especially since a creek ran through it. The fence ran up almost to the back of the church, and at least once the burro decided to bray away at a time when there was an appreciative audience inside the church. It was back here where our burro would occasionally try nochalantly to kill me. Dad eventually decided to sell it, and used some of the proceeds to buy me my first real bicycle. So I have some excuse for putting all this in a bicycle blog.