Life's most persistent and urgent question is,  What are you doing for others?   

Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. I had one too. His actions moves me to act and his words and phrases will resound throughout these thoughts.

When can we begin to act? What can the collective dream be of our marginalized right here in Ottawa County? Those who have faced the losses of their homes and possessions they may have found floating in that fowl water trapped in their living rooms, their piano forever ruined. Every item pulled out by hand to the road, stacked up with the sheetrock all of the dreams that home had had in the remodel, the new color in that bedroom, the joy of Christmas mornings all flash to homes no longer there.

There are times when stashing all those emotions and the actual grief of the losses of the stuff we grew up with all gone, wiped, no, actually gutted from the structures that had been home. I have gutted a fish, but my home? I have never had to do that. Where we are and who we live beside, the ultimately shared lives, as we reflect we know we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

This community knows that memory, so many know what that means to suddenly have the Southern Baptist Men walk in and start with their expertise getting that sopping wet carpet out to the street and then the sheetrock. If they were able to find you and your home. Otherwise many of your neighbors know how that works. They have muscle-memory of it.

And all those muscles need to be put to work right now. The only time you have to take actions to stop some of the next floods. Who floods you? We already know from court decisions most of you are flooded by when all actions by people in power, organizations in charge of making power, do not do what you need and release water before it is held too long and begins to back up onto the lands and property of those upstream.

Going home to Grandma's changes after a flood, the markings on the wall showing how quickly your children grew up, gone, the antiques, the heirloom quilts gone and the dollies and crocheted what's its in a pile of mush scooped out with a shovel.

There is a lot of "why bother" rampant around here. The silence of our friends. Perhaps it is the guilt of knowing you suffered and they did not, and said nothing, never walked across the street to lend a hand. Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

That can change now you can speak out for them, to stop the next flood. 

Life's most persistent and urgent question is,  What are you doing for others?    

So on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Remembrance: I kick it.

That means walking more streets, listening to your stories, and your questions, and letting those of you with businesses or are living in the floodplain participate in the flood survey LEAD is conducting.

We are distributing postcards for all of you to send to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who is the entity that will approve or modify the multi-year license renewal the Grand River Dam Authority has submitted, with provisions that may put you and your neighbors more at risk of flooding in the future. I am forever believing. I have a dream. I and we must never lose infinite hope.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

There is power in trees. They can heat us in the winter they can cool us in the summer. They can lift our spirits, they can transport us to different places just by the sound of the wind through their leaves. They can connect us with the past to the loved ones who we may have sat with beneath their branches.

"Trees ... carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.” ― Anne Michaels

Now we are learning they may power the future through hydro voltaic energy and creating wood-based generators for low-power devices, completely from wood.

I live on the prairie, at the edge of a gully. When I built this house there were no trees. But having lived in the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains, I planted 50 loblolly pines and created a piney wood forest, so when the wind would blow through them in the winter, the sound of the mountains could be heard and in the summer, the heat made them truly smell like the mountains.

Then if you have trees, you get more trees because the birds rest in them and deposit the seeds of the other trees that came next, the hackberry, the redbud, the persimmons and the wild plum. They are all around me, and the walnuts from the forest service and the single cedar my dad planted saying that no man lives to stand in the shade of that slow growing tree and he didn't. Trees came here from friends, the redbud out front from Eve Schnakenberg, the single oak from Annabelle Mitchell, the only English Walnut from Margarette Garner, daughter of the last Chief of the Cherokees before statehood and the little grove of sassafras my dear friend Jon Sixkiller had helped me get established in the side yard.

I had long ago understood that seven kinds of wood create a lasting fire, so having this diversity is pleasing and has seemed righteous and when looking out at these friend given trees, their lives are remembered and the friendships have remained alive long after some had left this earth.

“When you’re outnumbered by trees your perspective shifts.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner

Living among the trees is deeply rooted in me, as a Cherokee from my father's family, our native lands before forced removal were forests filled with a diversity of species, but my mother was forested, too, having grown up in the heart of the Ozarks near Lead Mine and Eldridge, near being the key word, surrounded by the indigenous species of hard woods located there near the Niangua River. The oak and walnut, the cherry were woods that grew there and later became hand fashioned furniture now found in my home.

During this fall and winter, I have had the true pleasure to climb into the jeep and drive right here in Ottawa County to the Ozarks we have just over the Spring River. It feels like going home to see the land change and the trees surround with the road curving and the blacktop ending and the dirt roads taking me up hills making my jeep provide the grip needed to get to the top. These roads take me to meet the kindest people, country folks and what takes me there?  Water of course.

For me, these days it is mostly water, quantity or quality. In and around it is either TOO MUCH water, as we discuss and perhaps cuss the past and dread the floods of the future in and around Miami, and just into our Oklahoma Ozarks, it is water quality, as we seek to determine whether Indian Health Service or the DEQ will check the drinking water wells they are pulling water from, hoping the Boone Aquifer under Picher hasn't wandered their way to taint their water source.

People are opening the doors

But not enough of us are knocking. You are welcome to help us with either of our survey projects for the Wells or the Flood. You can help by encouraging others to participate and if you haven't yourself yet: you have a drinking water well and live NE Ottawa County or if you know someone out that way, we could use your help. We are finding some people have gated their property, or have not been home when we knocked on their doors.

Water Quality again brings us back to Tar Creek and her color made us all wonder why she was so prominently green this last week. Questions and no answers yet. We are grateful so many people are caring about Tar Creek and paying attention to the treasure that flows right through us.

Quality and Quantity. Water connects us while the trees shade us.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” ― Charles Dickens

Dickens' A Christmas Carol is read on Christmas Eve and told in countless ways in film. My son and I dug deeper and found that Charles Dickens had written other Christmas stories. I randomly chose Nobody's Story to read aloud and found it could have been written today.

A simple man figured out the system and how it stays the same with the Haves in charge and the Have-nots stay without power or possibilities to gain even safety or joy.

When reading something written 170 plus years ago, I expected to find unused language and uncommon terms but was surprised at the descriptive given to those in power: the Bigwigs.

The story reminded me of the way regular people living in and near Miami OK might feel about the "stateliest people thereabouts" who had wanted to save Nobody the trouble of thinking for himself, perhaps we might imagine the Bigwigs as those who operate the Pensacola Dam.

The Nobody in the story wanted his children to be taught, so they would have knowledge to know better and avoid the mistakes he had made. The Bigwig family had misgivings about that. As such Nobody watched the demon Ignorance taken his children toward suspicion and cunning.

The Nobody appealed to the Bigwig family explaining laboring people would benefit from mental refreshment and recreation, some escape from hard work and worry, but his innocent request provoked them so that he was left wondering.

Then a pestilence arose among the laborers and spread and people began to die, the air was poisoned. He stayed where he was, continued working, lost some of his dearest. Desperate, he asked for pure water, light and air. His Master lost loved ones too and blamed Nobody and the others living in poverty for not living more healthily and decently.

Nobody explained they needed the means to improve their lives, better education, respite from work and the Bigwig family heard and changed the circumstances for a time, never admitting to have had anything to do with it having been lacking before.

"The story of Nobody is the story of the rank and file of the earth. They bear their share of the battle they have their part in the victory; they fall; they leave no name but in the mass. The march of the proudest of us, leads to the dusty way by which they go. Let us think of them this year at the Christmas fire, and not forget them when it is burnt out."

How do we change this up? Our Nobodies vs. the Bigwigs? We will try everything. The City of Miami and over 400 of you Nobodies have attorneys doing their jobs for you. Now I am asking you to value your experiences, your memories and what you have lost.

The Nobodies are SOMEBODIES to me! Valued and able.

The Bigwigs have reigned power over others by using their power generating as a means to justify our backwater flooding. But there is a Commission that can approve or disapprove their next license over how the lake is managed for the next 50 years. That license application will be submitted by GRDA by January 1 to FERC.

Now is the time for your cards and letters to pour into the only federal entity that may be able to protect your property and your status as Nobody is on the line.

We have been practicing for this for months. If you need a stamp or addressed postcards we would be glad to help you out.

Clear your head of the joys of Christmas pasts and dwell back long enough to capture some of those harsher moments, make a list of the feelings you experienced and the items of value you lost. All of these words can be crammed onto the pages, onto the cards you flood FERC with.

No one believes in you like I do.

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

P.S.  Should you require it:

Attn: Secretary Kimberly D. Bose
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
888 First Street NE Room 1A
Washington, D.C. 20426
 

The season lies about us and remaining on my list are those closest to me. The dear and most cherished, the remarkable cogs that turn what we have into gold at the LEAD Agency, our volunteers and the amazing board who knows what we've been thinking. I am hoping they and you all have peace, warmth and joy.

You will still probably receive phone calls, knocks on your door and short bouts of appeals as we end the year with our outlandish hope for the future for this corner of the state which has endured in spite of the risks and held strong throughout.

Find patience and join in the belief we have that we can open the flood gates that hold in what flood us. You deserve peace of mind and our band of brothers and each of you who have signed those postcards and filled in our Flood Survey have moved us closer to being heard by the only federal agency with power to protect you and your homes and property.

We and you will be working next on our list of resolutions, but am giving you a hint that high on that list is my resolution to do everything I can to save this town and I believe you will go to sleep better each night if this makes it on yours, too.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Jennifer Little, the gift LEAD Agency got for Christmas arrived early enough to capture the seasons of joy and the stark reality of our environmental risks that impact us. She is a professor at the University of the Pacific and teaches photography and other courses there.

The children's choir sang and at times we were allowed to sing along. The hometown came alive and mothers held their phones up in anticipation of the moment the lights would come on.

I brought a harsh dose of reality to the Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony. The Jeep Cherokee was dressed up with her Christmas lights and DONT FLOOD US signs made perfectly to fit by the professionals in town, while wearing my festive red apron. The apron was packed with the postcards depicting Miami in flood stage. And conveniently pre-addressed to the only federal agency that could protect us from the lake level rise that will doom  much of the city in the future floods that will come quicker and harsher.

Many people took time and composed messages that evening as we all awaited the magic moment when the lights would be turned on. It was a lovely time.

Saturday morning started like many other Saturdays, but the first Saturday of the month can find a transition occurring in Picher, Oklahoma. A disestablished town comes back to life for a brief time and this Saturday brought our DONT FLOOD US message as both the Grand Riverkeeper and the Tar Creekkeeper lined right up to be part of the story. The floats filled with tiny children were both in front of and behind us and the delightful moment came after what seemed like hours when we began to move forward. Some children on floats were placed in Christmas packages and we had the advantage of seeing their mothers first pack them in with warm blankets.

As for mothers, our team this year were mothers and sons. Mine with me and Martin Lively our Grand Riverkeeper with his mother, Lois. We wore our reindeer antlers and tossed all of our peppermint candy canes much too quickly and found ourselves left with only kind wishes and many Merry Christmas'es as we traveled the length of the parade. Such happy faces, so many friends, and several YES DON'T FLOOD US of recognition rang out as we passed by people who knew exactly why we bore those words. We parked along the road and became the crowd as the rest of the parade passed us by and got to experience the delight of becoming the crowd watching the Picher Homecoming Christmas Parade. What a treasure to be part of and take part in the joy of it.

We looped back and caught the tail end of the Quapaw Christmas Parade as most had called it over and stopped to congratulate the Quapaw Environmental Department on their Santa's Workshop float bearing the Netta Street sign that we had  lined up beside before the Picher Parade began, right aside the actual Netta Street!

All these happy moments allowed me to know that  the Miami Christmas Parade was hands off. Enjoy the lights, the floats, and strike up the bands.

Even though there is an urgency in stopping the flood waters from coming and coming quicker than ever before, it was out of a great consideration of the right of a City and her people to have some moments of JOY that the ever harbinger of dread failed to show up.

It was my privilege to give everyone the night off from a harsh reality, one night, since the reality you live with, the seriousness of place might feel daunting. You have shared much with me during these decades and these memories flood over me.

It seems as if I adopted all of you. I grieve with your struggles and celebrate your coming home and the countless occasions of life we have shared. Yet there are wrongs you all have faced and still ride with silently and perhaps not yet grasping the environmental justice site you dwell in and the consequences it has brought to you.

The metals that rest in your yards, that float down Tar Creek only to be deposited in your yards, what floats in the air that you breathe is the same as me, but not to the extent. I go home. Over these 45 years, I go off duty when crossing that Neosho bridge and go home to clean air, soil that has no contaminants.

Service to this community was not assigned but became a duty. To serve and while allowed, know that then surely, "the future will take care of itself," as Andrew Carnegie would say. I just want to do my part in ensuring the future you get will provide for you and your family a safe, dry place to live. These efforts will continue when Monday comes around and duty calls. It all gets easier with more hands lifting and if you get 'round to it, signing one of those postcards, filling out the flood survey, telling your story.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
 

I knew it would be hard.
The questions on the Flood Survey need to be answered but the heartache and disgust of what past floods have left behind here are heavy.

Whole neighborhoods have felt these losses and those neighbors in some cases don't even have each other anymore. Their homes no longer habitable are gone. All those front porches removed, leaving behind front sidewalks to nothing.

This community has experienced the force of a tornado many times without the wind. Just the destruction of what water can accomplish.

And the word destruction caused me to re-listen to Bob Dylan's  A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall. There is a line I hadn't taken time to hear when  he declares he will go out before the rain starts falling and go "where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters" and I wonder about the poison flooding our water that we have not fully considered until now.
The reality of what has happened, noting the years and the costs flood through answers the brave souls who have agreed to complete the Flood Survey provide.

The knock on your door is coming. Please be gracious and be open to the experience but know your answers will provide data this city has never had the heart to ask for before. But the City is a living being too. And has decided not to curl up and wait for the next high water event. The City is using all means to save itself and by doing so, save you and your property from sure to come disaster.

We cannot stop the rain, but now that we have started knocking on doors, we cannot stop listening and recording your answers and listening to the frightful moments you are reliving with us.

We understand we are asking hard questions and those who have been answering are proving just how hard they are.

A question at the end is asking each if you would want to volunteer to help LEAD in our work. A reply that is helping is for you to contact one other person and alert them of the urgent need for their time in answering the survey. Do connect us to someone you know. Grease, ease our way to another open door.

These pages of questions may be cathartic. When I was little, well really since I am still not tall, when I was young and felt nauseous, I always felt better after I "threw-up." As a school counselor all those years, I also learned that spoken words, sometimes words long unspoken can hide inside us and make us linger and harbor feelings that we stuff way down. But once spoken, free us and allow us to breathe again.

Last week just before the only holiday devoted now to foods and the joy of overeating them, our small team approached the last dam we had learned had been constructed on Tar Creek. We brought our tools to help pry the construction apart. The heavy stones had been laid and layered with sticks and soil and shored together with the smaller stones and braced with the large flat sheets of rock that must have been pulled from the bottom of the creek's bed. We were methodical. We went to the middle and worked both ways to allow water to flow ever more freely. The cloudless sky gave a glow to our work that slowly began to fade as the hours passed. There was more to do, but we had cleared the way for your Tar Creek to pass through here more easily on her way to load our Grand Lake with ever more heavy metal sediments.

There is no need to flood ourselves, right? Let's keep a watch on this creek and report any dams you see constructed. You don't want to allow that bad water from the chat piles and the deep wounds the mining caused the aquifer, to be refrained from passing through and more quickly backup and find your property.

That would be bad enough, but do not allow the work done by these thoughtless ones to stop it and let it fester as it blends with the properly attained waste water permit Commerce has to discharge into her adding dangerous bacteria, too.

It was hard work to deconstruct yet another dam. But it was only discovered because the eyes on the creek, the Man on the Log noticed and we were alerted. We would still be waiting for the Oklahoma Water Resources Board's referral to the Army Corps of Engineers who then would turn the responsibility over to the keeper the Grand River Dam Authority to manage it for you.  Keep watching. Keep calling. Say something.

When we walked away that afternoon, I turned changed out of my rainboots and turned my mud covered vest inside-out and put it back on and knocked on another door.

The urgency is real. Your answers are too.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

What is LEAD Agency doing right now? We are deeply into surveys.
 
The word survey can be both a noun and a verb, since a survey can be a thing for a person to complete by answering questions or one can conduct a survey by asking the questions which will be answered.
 
Surveys can consist of a series of queries that will result in a whole stacks of answers to then have assembled, correlated and crunched into data that will in our case let the city, the county, or the tribes know how people, who may include the readers, feel about flooding or actually what those who have flooded have experienced. How many times and the ultimate question, what do you want or need help doing or what kinds of financial assistance would make your flood experience become a nightmare you won't have to experience again.
 
LEAD's survey team is assembled and will be spreading out in the previously flooded areas of Miami and outskirts to include Dotyville and Eastgate.
 
A survey takes time. Your time and our surveyors. If they miss you, they will leave a note letting you know they have tried to find you at home. If you find one of these, respond when you are able and schedule a convenient time for your surveyor to return. The team will offer you a flashdrive with LEAD's Flood Map and ways to deal with the risks we face living in a superfund site. Your flood story may become part of Air-Water-Work oral history project.
 
The other survey we are conducting also deals with water. Not what floods, but what is drawn from the ground from the individual drinking water wells of residents living north of Peoria, OK, to the Kansas border and east to Missouri's. These wells will be sampled either by Indian Health Service or the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality. The plume of mine water in the Boone Aquifer tainted from lead and zinc mining may be moving and these agencies want to check each well for heavy metals we know can be harmful to human health. What LEAD Agency is doing is a quick survey of these residents asking if they want their wells sampled and if so to assess who will do it. If a person with a CDIB card owns or lives in the home, Indian Health Services will conduct the sample, otherwise, DEQ will collect it. It is a slow process, but all of the people we have met understand that water is life and they want to make sure their water is safe, so it has been a 100% positive if their dogs allow us to get to the front door!
 
I would like to say, the delight for me personally has been to have doors swing open and people to step out onto their front step to meet for the first time, or as today, find a parent of my former students and learn what's happened since their children were part of my life, with some celebrations, but also some, sadly, tragedies.
 
These surveys bring us together. Each allows your choices, your answers to be recorded. Think of these as equalizers. None are better than another. We believe the answers will empower our city, county and tribes to speak more clearly on your behalf. Both of these surveys give you a voice to be heard, to be valued by local, state and federal agencies.
 
Over the summer I had a rare occasion to speak not for myself but to be the voice for Tar Creek, to express what had happened to her, what beliefs and regrets she could be feeling. Aaron Gibson was a graduate student twenty years ago who did his thesis on chat in our superfund site. He never got this place out of his mind. He had the idea to make a short 3 minute Super 8 film, and he created what I believe will become a classic, entitled:          Take Care, Tar Creek.
 
He sent the link to view it this evening and I turned up the volume because Tar Creek, didn't speak loudly. But her message was clear, this stuff she carries is loaded with the lead essential to the war effort, that has poisoned our children and can harm us. Everyone near a creek, stream or a river must speak up for that water because essential elements may lie beneath. "There is in each of us, the right to life and what's been forgotten is water its self is life." Tar Creek affirmed we should all mobilize to protect our water, ending with the message that we must holler loudly, that, "This is your moment."
 
I believe it is yours. Holler loudly and complete these surveys.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Red Dirt and Brownfields was not a place but a time.

A Geography professor, a filmmaker, an author, a photographer and an activist met unscripted to speak about a damaged place from their various perspectives. Each knew deeply, saw into, and knew the work that brought us together would not be completed in our lifetimes.

There was a great humbling repeated as each of these accomplished individuals quoted or referred to a thing said or done with my name batted about as if it was something worthy of remembering.

Red Dirt because the event was held in the heart of red dirt country, on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. Brownfields because someone chose to change it up and use the generic term for wounded place, known globally as a Brownfield where countries do not have the Superfund designation we use for sites in the US.

Each of the panelists brought notes and clearly had prepared with great thought what they would share with the public that evening. Myself, a few props and photos on the screen. But pulled together the way they knew our place, our water and our issues and how their work had made a difference and how we need their assistance into the future in the fight for clean water and environmental justice.

The quote above our panel read:

“Architecture is the thoughtful making of spaces.”--Louis I. Kahn

Todd Stewart had taken photos and returned for a number of years as Picher faded from life after the tornado and turned these into a book. But he had returned again to help us with our Endangered River designation, photographing the children’s excitement when they found the frog eggs in Tar Creek, just as the “Boys of Summer” came jumping into the place they had chosen to swim. They kept returning there and as we discover a month later, the water stagnant and no signs of life because they had dammed the creek and stopped the flow.

It was Kathryn Savage who happened to be with us that day and jumped in with us to tear the dam apart, she who had come to see this damaged place while completing her book of essays entitled,  Ground Glass.

Laurel Smith spoke with great expertise on what restoration means and when we might know it has begun or been achieved and her students’ connection with our untitled most neglected Brownfields: BF Goodrich and the workers oral histories and now the flood of stories we will be collecting from you. And our friend Bob Nairn there to answer the HOW it all can be done questions we should have anticipated coming.

Daniel Simon, the editor of OU’s World Literature Today hosted the event. But in the latest issue, dedicated to the people of Ukraine, the issue available that evening were these words that stood out to me: “The city clings to us: we have to protect it like a child. A writer does this with words. ~ Evgeny Golubovsky.

And further when Anna Streminska says, “Language, the word itself, has become a weapon.”  These words take me forward to the work LEAD’s Flood surveyors begin in earnest this week. They will be engaging and asking about the city and how it clings to them, wraps itself in water and immerses them and all they possess and how it was for them, the times, the dates, the loss, the ways they ready for the next round. Your language will become our defense, these words perhaps weapons that can be hurled to an agency in power over the powerless.

For who can stop the water? Water goes and flows where it is allowed and can be held and released, or held and kept as the weapon to use to force a capitulation from a city that must be protected. The protection coming? For whom? For You.
Postcards, your choice who to send your words. We will furnish the stamps paid for by a neighbor, one you may never have met. We will bring the email address to send words, your messages to protect your city, the city that is wrapped by water when the flood sets in on her.
A cousin of mine and her family came to our Night Out. It brought her to tears afterward, telling me our grandmother, who she was able to spend countless hours with, hours I never had the chance to spend alone, not even one, that our grandmother would have been so proud of my work and how the humanities and other disciplines bring their support.

What I am proud to do is to ask you to join this work.

That work: the hope we must have in a future or face being paralyzed into accepting wrongs left untreated as the way the world will have to remain.

Let’s get to it. We can’t Stop the Rain, but let’s aim to stop the flooding.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”                                             ― Maya Angelou

This town has produced famous artists and film makers, actors and musical performers, a world famous ballerina and brainy medical researchers, our most important asset is the commonality of making this place home.

I love to read and having our very own hometown bookstore with Chapters makes it easy to find the next page-turner. We have a budding fiction novelist Vanessa Lillie. But who will be writing the next Tom's River or Coal River or even Radium Girls?  What will ours be called? Slow Death by Drowning? The Lake That Swallowed Us?

Who is going to write the best selling mystery of how the whole town was slowly killed not by a person but an entity. One with the power to slowly kill a town by drowning it, bit by bit, home sweet homes -properties, lands taken out of production, crops and cattle lost. Wild-lives lost.

Will the central characters be the cast of mayors and their efforts first to sit down with the killer and try to make friends? or the lawyers who work to stop the evil act?
It could be a love story. I think it is a love story. About people who loved each other and longed to keep close by.

Will the writer weave in the tribal story? We have several that ought to be part of the Grand epic story you are living. Tribes forced from their homelands only to have their treaty-ed land be too soggy to use, perhaps unless they learn to grow rice in the often flooded fields they now have. Or the whole contaminated mess on tribal lands that bleeds down Tar Creek into your yards and shows up in the fish in that lake.

What about the Grand way people help each other when the flood waters are coming? The acts of kindness and strength used to save the heirlooms or the new refrigerator?

Maybe there could be some mention of the act of filling sandbags and the first time those become a thing in a person's life?

Inventory of losses, now that would be a chapter, but what about those Baptist Men and the sudden wave of them making mountains of sheetrock appear in your neighborhood and then that quickly gone to their next town in yet another flooded community.

But what if we had a spy who went to the yachts and the fancy dinners and got to sit next to people in power and heard them laugh when we are struggling to move grandma again. Or someone who knew the someones in power and through the decades tried to convince them we matter and our pitiful lives count.

Who is that?

Our main characters: come on forward, do the interviews and get this blockbuster to the printers while there is still some life left in this town. YOU are the main characters. Your lives matter. If your town was on fire what would you do?

What can you do now? You can start writing your own story. In the old days you might get your Big Chief Tablet and get started, now, use your I-pad, your computer, your old fashion pen and paper. Write like your life and property depended on it.

Tell your grief, your harrowing story of loss. Put the details in. Make a copy. You will keep one for the family bible for your ancestors to read and the other, bit by bit of your story we are going to send to the only entity that can save this place. We are going to send your story, actually YOU are going to send your story to not a person but an agency you are going to send it to FERC because while you were sleeping the creepy part of this story has been daily edging closer to you. The real threat that our Grand Lake will swallow your town is closer to becoming your new reality.

We put up that billboard on Main Street. Where are the next ones? This whole town has numerous billboards, everyone of them should be saying we matter and deserve to exist. Get with it. Find the fight, be part of it. And while you are getting your gumptions up, remember to vote and vote for people who will fight for you.

Lots of time you are yelled at, I am asking you all to yell. Don't just complain. Gather your wits and fight. You have the best team of lawyers doing their part. Tell your part. What do you give up each flood? How much does it cost you?

LEAD will be knocking on doors soon, or you may find us calling you, you may get our survey in the mail, take some time with us and answer these questions, they may wet your whistle and help you get your story ready.

Words are our weapons. Right can win. You must not be silent. Do not suffer in silence. Write like it matters. And then look around and see who is going to write the best-selling novel?

I think it lives in one of you.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

What right do a group of fellows have to violate the Clean Water Act and dam up a natural flowing stream? No right. It is against the law.

They poopoo'd the kids last year and this year, "Boys being boys" was said. "Oh, I did this sort of thing while I was a kid, myself."

These same kids would have marveled as children at tadpoles and seeing the tiniest little fishes in the water and reached into water to cup them in their hands.

But damming our Tar Creek ruins the chances for the tiny ones to survive. Over and over the rocks have been removed and stacked to make the dams to trap water for selfish reasons.

Hiding under each of those rocks were the possibilities for the future of the tiny species that have rights to survival. These tiny ones are part of an ecosystem that is trying its best to not only survive in the most difficult water, loaded with heavy metals. But when these rocks that provide cover and protection, are removed. There goes their hope and the life in the stream that would provide the precious food for the songbirds you might love to hear or see. What we were reminded of by Tom Whipple during the Tar Creek Conference, the birds need food or they can't live here either.

Men who build dams. Go back to school, learn to build houses, or bridges, learn to be game rangers. Get a life so the rest of the lives you have no regard can move on and have theirs.

This last dam was discovered after our 3 inch rains by a person I have referred to as The Man on the Log who watches the water, for  changes and he noticed the water's level had risen and that the water was black. Black water brought back memories of all those dead fish found in the water in Tar Creek, get this: those were 10,000. How could they be there in those numbers? We thank the years of work Bob Nairn and his teams of OU students and the passive water treatment systems he had constructed to capture some of the mine water discharge and passively treat it before it enters Tar Creek. Bob's efforts diminished the color enough, the orange wasn't showing in the waters after those joined up with Tar.
The loading from Commerce had been caught and treated, but the flow coming from the mines still spills and spoils our water.

The man who stood sentential on Tar Creek years ago, saw something was wrong. He knew the change in the water was substantial. He insisted Black water is not right.

Not anytime. Not even to generate the colors of the season. Black and orange. Black water and the trees along the banks still orange from the decades of flood waters high on the trees, laden with the metals we know have and still are contained in our Tar Creek. This is no way to mark the calendar, to decorate this season.

Some Halloween. Black water and orange trees. The ribbon of black water ran through our silent neglectful town, dressing it for the holiday.
 
I was tricked. I believed it was simple. Just some backwater, aged by the fallen leaves and held still and trapped, and would on release dissipate and clear. The Man on the Log knew I was wrong.

After we had breached the dam the black water kept coming. Each access point going north it continued to be blackened water, until it wasn't.

The reports went to DEQ Hotline, Oklahoma Water Resources Board, the City of Miami. DEQ will determine who has released the black water and they will get a talking to, or a fine.

OWRB will refer to the Army Corps of Engineers and they will refer this all to your buddies GRDA and they will pull on their big boy britches and come over here and police our dam, take it down and then But the harm that was done to the ecosystem in a damaged creek is done. The little ones that might have been there trying to get life going again can't get that life back. And the creek gets another setback. Just when you were all saying, it is looking so much better. Black and dead is not better.

As the late John Lewis would say, "We have been too quiet for too long. There comes a time when you have to say something. You have to move your feet. Now is the time."

We would like help restoring the harmed environment. Then you can get back to writing your stories to FERC and studying our Flood Map.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Action is the bridge between thoughts and reality ~ Richie Norton

I'd like there to be a future. Of course there will be a future, tomorrow will begin. But what kind of a future do you want?

I would like one for you. Safer, healthier and less fearful of flooding.

To get you there, we have to face some facts and we have to be brave enough to challenge the impossible. We have to stand up to bullies. We have to want a safer environment for the generations who follow.

And you must believe you and your neighbors deserve it.

For 45 years I have crossed the Neosho Bridge to work first as Indian Counselor for Miami schools and since retirement as executive director for LEAD Agency.

The Neosho River bridge built in 1901 operated as a toll bridge and my grandfather and 4 other men were the owners. There were great ties with Ottawa County in our family history. Some of those have proven to be part of my motivation to keep crossing the Grand Neosho. The other motivation has been you. The hundreds, thousands of you who walked through my office door, first at Will Rogers and later at Miami High School, those who became Indian Club members, perhaps not native, but delighted to learn and be part of learning the culture of your friends and classmates. Later many became members of the Cherokee Volunteer Society, or your teachers allowed class assignments to lead what you learned to serve others. Hundreds of you received presidential service awards for your efforts.

I am calling on each of you to consider doing another act of service. It doesn't cost you anything, there is no toll to pay to do it.

Simply walk backward in your mind. Pick any of your remembered floods. Pick up a piece of paper and write down how any of them effected you. While you are doing this, I am mindful it may bring back feelings you have held back and suppressed. When you have finished, you may return to it and add a few more details. Perhaps your dog's name, perhaps the color of your most comfortable couch. How long your mother worked on that "rag rug" and whose clothes were used to make it. Nudge on your memory. Admit your feelings.

Then I am asking you to consider writing it in an email that will go to the only federal agency that can do anything to protect you from another flood in the future, FERC, the agency that is in the process of re-licensing the Pensacola Dam. Will anyone read your story? Do your words matter in the large scheme of things? What if they got three thousand stories? Ten thousand stories?

And what if you don't take time to dredge back in your memory? What if the lawyers for the City's efforts don't work to stall or hold back the lake rise?

You may have to pay the toll. Of higher costs for flood insurance, more risks of flooding each time the rains return. And the list of losses each flood takes from you.

So pick up a simple pencil, or sit at your computer, start putting your story together, work on it, add the emotions you have stuffed all these years. Revisit the losses, go walk the property you had to leave, build this story. There are already journalists wanting them. FERC hasn't asked for them. But all of these remembrances need to be shared.

The bullies who want to be in charge of your life don't want these stories told.  But you were brave as young people. You took on the world. You spoke up to bullies and you know how to do it. As adults you have settled in and perhaps raised a family, worked a job, perhaps in a business that periodically flooded or could not get to your job because of flooding.

That's what happened to me. I remember being the last car to go over the Neosho bridge one time, the road beyond already lapping at the edges. The farm just on the other side had a few pigs and I heard one screaming, actually it was "wee wee weeing" fearfully swimming in that water and was sucked under the road in a culvert, muffled but came out the other side loudly hoping to be helped, but there was no way to help.

We are not helpless now. We are armed with our stories. Use our Flood Map, it clearly shows the danger you face, and where you sit in the FEMA flood zones, but also how many chat piles sit there too, giving our floods an added toxic touch.

Let us know when your stories are ready.


Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Arrogance is a map of a road that leads to bridges that are out.
~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Hope and Restoration resounded in Richard Zane Smith's words: Draw our minds together as one so we can work together and give thanks to our Mother, the earth and to all our life providers.

Have you ever held a surprise birthday party and then waited to see if the parties would all show up?

That is exactly what hosting a Tar Creek Conference is like. Thank you for coming, for buying a raffle ticket or donating items for the silent auction. This year's 24th brought all the parties into the room and gave us time to see and hear each other. Not enough time. I and you still had lots more we wanted to say, questions to ask. But we tucked them back into our pockets, stayed civil and used our programs to tell EPA they were not done enough and they had not been protecting either Miami or the lake we used to love.

The work must continue and the pace ramp up. And with you in the room, sitting on the front row, while some of you ended up sitting in the empty seats that brought you seated next to federal and state agency professionals, you were the public they are all there to serve.

I couldn't have been more proud of you. And then the next day, I couldn't have been more disappointed not in you. You came to hear what DEQ/Michelin would tell us about the project they are launching in the BFG neighborhood to begin to deal with the shadow of doom we fear laying beneath your homes: the benzene. To allay our fears, to allow you to know you are being protected, that your lives matter. The DEQ staff who only the day before had proclaimed their openness to hearing from you were not there. They had gone. That team, assigned to deal with Tar Creek had listened and stayed until they were called home. But team two, they didn't come. They sent a light blue one-page handout and a short video. Three read from a script. They gave their phone numbers, but the only number I got down was J. Paul Davis 405-702-5100, but Erin Hatfield 405-702-7119 and Michelin: Connie M. Bryan 405-562-6800 were on the handout.

We were all disappointed and the room seemed to be in shock. But the mystery woman who came just before we reached that part of the agenda, sat on the front row near the tech table had her notepads open and promptly left when the last handout was placed on the tables. Did you know her? Was she satisfied? Will she use those numbers that had been posted with her questions or was she representing the companies who have stalled cleanup ALL THESE YEARS?

If we are going to move industry in the case of BFG, we also must move the agencies who represent the environmental issues that affect us. They have to know you want their help and deserve it. Consider remembering the benzene which may not be under your home, but could be under the house your future daughter-in-law will live. The EPA Region 6 representative assured me we can expect them to in some way to follow up on the other parts at that site that raise concern: the pond north of the plant and the dump across P Street that we have long thought should be investigated. LONG OVER DUE

But we learned it was all complicated.

The chat piles that sit and marinate in flood waters and then spill down through our neighborhoods, agricultural fields and across the college lands. Consider flooding in our beautiful Rotary Centennial Park and the pollinator plants who suck up toxic water that attract the pollinators who may be harmed, too  and the yards you so earnestly had remediated by EPA/DEQ. The rep from DEQ announced these properties can be re-sampled if you are concerned.

These floods can be controlled and your EPA needs to sit down with FERC and GRDA and get FEMA in the room. They have lots to talk about and work to do for you.

 Keep calling, keep gathering. Wear Don't Flood Us shirts on Main Street,  in the parks, and wear them down on Steve Owens, walk into Nott's with them on and stand in line for the best deli sandwiches in town.

There are times to be quiet. But show up and wear a shirt as you do your shopping and let's say what we want, what you deserve. Some conference shirts are left if you want to show concern about those chat piles, and LEAD has a number of free Flood Map flashdrives and will help you learn how to use all the features on the map.

And we must remember to keep putting our minds together as one.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Together we have thought and pondered. We have tuned up our voices. And practiced believing our lives matter. There have been alignments and possibilities and even hopes for the future. But sometimes it may be as easy as filling a chair, it could be that even a set of silent sentenials could set the trap.

Are you in? Will you take your morning coffee with us Wednesday? We will be gathering at the Calcagno Family Ballroom in the NEO Student Union and we will sit down together and listen. The efforts EPA and DEQ have accomplished will be set out for us. We will learn what the Quapaws have been doing.

We won't get a break because Kate, the woman who has worked with LEAD Agency for the last 2 years will fill the screen virtually showing all of us gathered together just how at risk we still are. After these decades of work by EPA, the corridors Tar and Lytle flow through and down, she will show you images that will take your breath away. Chat piles lay there as quietly guarding the sky line and resting at the edges of these waterways, but then Kate adds the layer to the map, the FEMA flood layer and there you see those chat piles sitting, marinating in those waters, dissolving, releasing loads those fine particles of heavy metals. NONE of which have been measured to my knowledge. What has been calculated so earnestly by our friends at OU has been what comes discharging and charging into Tar Creek as seen from the bridge on 40 Road: None of the rest of these chat piles' contributions are included.

How did we miss this? How have they failed to deal with the obvious? Move the piles that poison those downstream. When was that going to happen? What decade of work will it begin? Kate takes us downstream as she moves our eyes to where the water flows next. We skirt by Commerce without seeing a single home at risk, and slide past North Miami, and right into Miami. The peninsula of the city practically encircled by water. We know this happens, but to SEE it, to look closely as we see beneath the light blue and the yellow colored bands, we see homes. Those homes are flooded by those waters. These are our neighbors, perhaps even your own home is seen. It is a shock, so many. But listen to the numbers: 95 structures are in the 2% or what used to be called the "500 year flood" and hold on in the 1% or "100 year flood" there are .... 1480 structures. Are you paying attention? NOW get this: 253 structures are in the floodway. THEY are going to always flood.

This is serious.

But Kate backs us up and shows us again that flood water is contaminated by the chat piles and when it floods, it brings that bad water and dissolved chat and lays it out on the yards and parks and college grounds and that is absorbed and accepted by these properties, until it is dug up and removed by OU4, which is the operable unit that remediates yards contaminated with lead. Ben Loring asked a question just a few weeks ago on a conference call with these agency professionals about re-contaminated yards. When will they be checked. The call went silent.

Finally our friend from DEQ asked was there a particular property he was interested in? Kate takes up back to the map, there she illuminates the pink/purple dots on the yards that have tested "clean" and those others that had to have their soil or driveways removed and replaced. Not nearly as many pink dots as illuminate Commerce and North Miami, but there.

What she does next she is able to do because of the work Gina Manders did in 2007 with the help of Juli Mathews Ford. Kate turns on the colors. Many of you know these colors. Blue dots were homes that got permits to rebuild after that terrible flood. Red dots could not rebuild. Each dot filled with memories of struggles and losses.

Losses we know now didn't have to happen. There are a lot of wrongs that have happened here. And these people who are sitting in that room with me have a right to be wondering, just how this can be.

Kate is going to hand it over to a gentleman from an organization called Buy-In and he is going to introduce a survey that we will invite you to complete. All that righteous anger can be channeled by completing a series of questions, many of you have never been asked. If you are not coming, it is ok, if you live in areas prone to flooding, we will mail these surveys to you, or we will come knock on your door or call you on the phone. This is your turn. Tell how flooding has affected you and your feelings about what can come next for you and your property.

The Tar Creek Conference hadn't even made it to lunch on the first day. We will save you a seat. Come spend 2 days. Change it up, be the change you want to see.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The sky was clear, the wind calm, the sun shine bright. We hadn't a clue the Queen would die just hours later.

The morning was still along Tar Creek, it was ours alone. The beauty of the way the water lays in between the banks hides what lies within it that may lurk to harm those who enter.
We assessed the need for the work that would commence and the strategy to take it on. Today's team brought simple tools to nudge and jostle apart the child-made structures holding back, deterring the flow of Tar Creek's water. One area had been contained long enough it appeared to be black water and farther downstream the top of the trapped water had begun to scum over.

There is something beautiful about clean, clear running water and we were not seeing any of that. We cared for each other, and our safety as we gently cared to take the tangles of rocks apart, one at a time times four. We made easy progress as a team and there was suddenly a sound from the water. It began to gush through and passed us. This sound was what had been missing. There had been no sound of running water. It had been still, noise-less until that moment.

We worked on turning first one and then the other just a bit here, some that way turned back toward the banks. Keeping them close to the site they were plied from. Watchful for life, hoping to see any, no frog or fish eggs. Until suddenly the adult turtle discovered us and quickly left, and nearby beneath a rock, a single small snake wiggled, not too unlike the centipedes which were seen.

We delighted in the vibrant colors of the wildflowers along the banks, the yellow, the purple, the red Cardinal flowers, the butterflies, the bees. The pure beauty of the white clustered bouquets, and then we walked through the yellows higher than my head with the sun amplifying their glow I simply got lost inside and had stayed captured for a while with them.

There is no reason to stop fighting for a Clean Tar Creek. This place is a treasure to behold. The length of her flowing through the neighborhoods, who wouldn't want a beautiful water running past your backyard? The open access areas attract us as children. In fact it was children who first took me to the area that brought these new generation of children to claim it these last two years. I have photos of then 8th graders who brought me to their playground and through the trails to these special places. In fact their photo and their inspiration greets me in my office every day. Their belief then, their realization harm laid there with them in their playground startled and gave them purpose to want to protect and inform the young ones.

Join in this effort to reclaim your creek, the community playground it should be again. Seek access to the people who have the power if driven to use it to more quickly fix this polluted treasure. Some of these in authority will be in the room for you, for your access to them during this year's Tar Creek Conference Oct. 12 and 13.  Where? where else? At NEO which lies in sight of Tar Creek, and is most at risk during her flood stages.

It takes very little effort to move these agencies to action. Just a few words from your city attorney on a phone call actually brought the Department of Environmental Quality into town with their boots on to walk your Tar Creek to see the use by children.  They came to access the need for an investigation of just how unsafe it is for children to be in. How safe is it? Could it be safe?

These answers had never been asked by governmental agencies. They thought the deeming it a "superfund" title would scare the "be-jeev-ies" out of you all and because of that they could take 40 plus years to even see if your kids or you as a child could be harmed by being IN it. DEQ finally created warning signage, the city posted it, the children pulled it down almost at once. Rather saying, "Oh my? NOT MY TAR CREEK!" And denied the notice and left parts of the sign that DEQ picked up this week as evidence that they had tried at last and that message hadn't worked at all.

We know it didn't work as we walked along passed the left behind socks and different types of underwear randomly found along the trails. The telling that some of those who gather might be older was the beer can, still unopened there at the BNSF bridge. Kids would never have left it unopened.

There is a lot we didn't know all these years. We didn't know the Queen' death would be how we remember our dam busting day.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim