"Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday"- Taylor Swift

At this moment in time there is little a single person in Miami OK can do to save this town from the flooding that will be coming. There is some desperation. But we have the law, we have right on our side and we have at this time a mayor who knows how to rally a town, and be the cheerleader with the simple mantra:
                                                   We have been flooded enough. We won't take it anymore.

What actually is a mantra? Think of it as our "motto" or a long slogan or nowadays we might call it our "tag" line.  Over a thousand people did just that signing their name right here in Miami, OK right before the streets, our doors, our schools closed as we hunkered down to keep our heads down when COVID descended upon us.  These same people still have had enough, just the thought of yet another flood brings back the fear, the defeat and the anger deeply held by a community threatened by high-water caused by nothing they had done wrong.

What if we used our own words to fight? 

                We've flooded enough.
                We won't take it anymore.

LEAD Agency put out these signs with businesses that had been flooded, while some were carried about the community. We captured only the first thousand. No one turned us down. Because who in this town would WANT it to flood again? Who benefits? No one. We all lose. And some of us lost much more than others.

Would you like our 1000 people to come to your business? Could we sit our thousand people's signatures with you like they sat with us when we went to Riverview Park and when we sat on the park bench, the park bench now only small children can fit due to the massive amount of sediment the floods have laid in the park.

Our 1000 signatures started seeing daylight out on the front steps at the LEAD Agency. All lined up neatly with just enough space between them that our cat was able to wind both up way and down the other without jostling anyone of our friends who were still speaking out 2 years after they signed their names.  Consider us on call. It is easy to fit us all on the empty front seat of my car. We can make this statement and repeat it. How else can we do it?

We could do it in a song. The song that is stuck in my head, and I hope you will forgive me for sharing it directly to yours, is Taylor Swift's Message in a Bottle. First, the chorus repeated in my head over and over again, in what has been coined as an: "earworm" or known as "stuck song syndrome."

Then only this morning, I listened to the whole song. Taylor Swifts' phrases STOOD OUT:

"I am reaching for you TERRIFIED  and"
"You are the reason I can't sleep."

So in my mind I imagined the ceremony where we all stood on the banks of our precious waterways, the Neosho River and our Tar Creek and we launched our very own messages in bottles that float past us and head toward the lake and will rest up in mass along the edge of the dam, the messages all written in our own handwriting, or printed in some way on scraps of paper, allowing the people who manage the dam to know that we are frustrated, scared, angry and demanding to be cared for and respected as teammates and members of a shared watershed.

"Message in a bottle is all I can do"
"Standing here hoping it gets to you."

This symbolic action won't happen. We won't pollute our very own water with thousands of bottles, but we can imagine that moment and in seeing it, we are stronger, more confident, activists for the change we are demanding. Put yourself there. Imagine the power you feel and multiple that by the friends and neighbors and the people sitting in the vehicles passing by you. And you will become the change agents we need to get us through any disaster yet to come.

And while you are standing there, remember this Crystal Moment as your own and maybe you will be humming that tune that got stuck in your head, too.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

 

Not being a hydrologist, sediment scientist, or hydro-geologist gets in my way of being the activist I long to be. Righting wrongs, spouting knowledge, showing the reliable data, establishing the model, and understanding how the sediment transport model might save the City of Miami.

Who are these experts who can don the cape of knowledge and explain it to FERC in the language that will translate into the actions that protect the lives and property of the upstream dwellers? There is a sudden fear that they are not coming.

It is possible we are going to have to take the dive into these documents, get our old high school chemistry and physics books out, seek out those who "aced" those classes and put our heads together as one. The questions as citizens that should be asked are not being asked. Do we even understand how to address and to whom any credible questions should be brought? Will they be answered and will the answers change the force of action that may drown a large part of this portion of the county?

How many homes are at risk when the lake level rises. Do they have to let it rise, can this be stopped? If so who can do that? How do all of us settle in with the sediment, the copious amounts of sediments that are being deposited and that are filling those lower stretches of the lake that will too quickly fill to capacity while we wait for the Army Corps to respond to the urgency backwaters can become.

GRDA released a Sediment Report and you can read it,  you can mark it up like I have. You can circle the charts #32, #36, #63 and study the marks on the curves indicating sediment sizes.

Sediment controls the physical habitat of river ecosystems. Changes in the amount and real distribution of different sediment types can cause changes in river-channel form and river habitat. The amount and type of sediment suspended in the water column determines water clarity. Understanding sediment transport and the conditions under which sediment is deposited or eroded from the various environments in a river is therefore critical to understanding and managing sediment and sediment-related habitat in rivers. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/southwest-biological-science-center/science/river-sediment-dynamics

You can also read and wonder about the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 stipulations in regard to the Pensacola Dam which includes special legislation applicable only to the Pensacola Project, and it significantly changes the scope of the ongoing relicensing for this Project. We continue to wonder how this applies to our National Defense, and how it in any way will be party to what floods us in the future or if indeed it could somehow protect us?

What I don't know is obvious. What I do know is we have needs and real scientists and those skilled in the world are welcome to take t hose dives with us to make this piece of the earth a bit more tolerable. Henry David Thoreau asked all those years ago: "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"

In the last year I have attended several of the Miami City Council meetings, and on the agenda have felt or heard so me kind of disgruntled regret on t he cost the city is paying the attorneys they have engaged to fight for the city in this regard. The city's attorneys are hiring the HELP we need. Their attorneys are fighting to protect the city with the exact scientific experts who speak the language and understand the biometrics of hydrology, how water works, how water floods and destroys dreams. I had also hoped that the EPA, t h e federal agency with "protection" as a middle name would jump in and assist us in understanding the FERC document dumps that come out. When EPA documents on the Tar Creek Superfund site are released they have furnished outside consultants to assist us in better understanding what is proposed so we can make educated comments. What if FERC had that same system in place and all the residents affected by this re-licensing effort could  be active informed parties who could speak up in t heir best interest and strengthen the City's standing in this legal fight to save itself.

What we need are those experts to give us all the cheat sheets so we all can speak with a single,educated voice and get ahead of the change that not climate alone will endow us with, but the force GRDA hopes to rule with.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Visiting scholars spent a couple of nights at LEAD Agency lately, both professors at the University of the Pacific, who were here for the first "snow" on the ground day this new year brought us. Jennifer Little brought her cameras and drone and went out following the light and captured the contrast of red water with the white of the snow. But when she reviewed her footage, the image of where mine water is discharging from a stand pipe absolutely captured the imagination of Gabriel Teo, who teaches film and animation at the same university.  They then reviewed the unique projects the Harvard School of Design had created and suddenly we dreamed of how these talents might blend and collaborate with this semester's graduate landscape studio students.

The first part of January brought the Sierra Magazine article written by Wendy Becktold which actually called me a "do gooder" saying, "The lifelong activist brings people together to heal the land." A week later on an eighteen degree day, I was faced with a drone that found me standing on a chat bar in the middle of Tar Creek right at dusk. At one point even asked to give a "Rock Star" stance. All are bizarre moments that should be happening to the new young activists who will emerge, I believe almost any day. I know they are out there. These budding environmental advocates, water protectors who long to be tapped, encouraged to speak up and out and this is what Micalea found herself doing when she reached out to her tribe and began communicating with their staff about the project, rather a capstone of her marine science education. She has developed a water project on the very stream running through her tribal boundaries and she is inviting other Ottawa Tribal members to come to the water on upcoming Saturdays for creek cleanups and experience the beauty that surrounds Tar Creek as they work together.

There is beauty with running water cascading over the rocks along the stream bed, the sound as it flows, the hope that lies within it, for the life once the superfund site is restored that will fully return. Crayfish, minnows, bass, tiny crappie want to return. Her tribal teammates will observe the beauty each of these upcoming Saturdays. They will note the types of trees, grasses, vines that grow in along the banks. All hoping to find evidence or even the chance sighting of their standard bearer, the otters.

They will look for signs of wildlife and identify the birds that they will surprise while they practice those skills we long to hone back into... of connecting back to nature again. It will be a pleasure to share time with this young budding environmental activist and those who rise to give her a hand as she leaps free from her graduate degree into a life of... my best bet? as another "do gooder."

What if any random person woke one morning and with her inspiration or that of Berkley Ulrey's monthly Riverview cleanups, decided to do an act of service or even begin a life of service, maybe as a career or the hobby or the calling  that won't quit calling  until up and doing begins? Those acts of Service that Martin Luther King Jr. Day inspires all across the country  jar and jostle righteousness out of the most impossible sets of people, maybe even yourself.

LEAD Agency now has a VISTA position open and are hoping service minded persons may seek to apply. Longing to be involved in assisting us as we investigate the multitude of issues any community may have, and more so within one of the largest superfund sites in the nation? Do-gooders are encouraged to inquire.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

There at the end of The World of Pooh, in "the Enchanted Place" chapter, there is a moment when the inevitable seems to be happening, when the boy is on the edge of saying he is about to leave his childhood behind.

Christopher Robin experienced the tenderness of a child's first love outside of parental love, the bond to a cherished bear. Can we reach back to ours? Who were they, what were their names, these lost loves. My mother and her only brother remembered her dolls' names when they were pulled out of the high cupboard in my grandmother's home seventy years since they had been cuddled. My little brother had a blanket that we all knew as his, "Me."

Pooh experienced the hundred acre wood and those that lived in it became his friends and adventurers. Just out the door of my home in only a few feet I can launch myself into the wilderness and do. The best times there are those without purpose, timeless pursuits of discovery. Each season bringing change and the beauty of the place.

Can places be loved dearly? Longed for? My prairie lands and the woodlands that follows the creek bed down in the gullies, filled with the native plants who have deep roots and the new species that do not belong edging themselves in, winding round and longing to belong themselves.

There on the prairie before it falls off the edge, I created an ecosystem of places I had loved by planting pines I could smell in the summer when the heat brought out the aroma of the Black Hills or the Rocky Mountains where I had lived in New Mexico and Colorado.

I had a dream this week that people, all sorts of people began to love Tar Creek and wanted to have birthday parties along the stream, they wanted to send rubber ducks down her, they longed to have Easter Egg hunts along the edge each spring. Graduation parties would take place and candle ceremonies like Tora Nagashi, the Festival of Recovery with floating lanterns which started in Japan after WWII when in 1946 so much of Japan remained in ruins. Perhaps our floating candles might be lit for the people who have lost their lives, from or during our current pandemic.

Tar Creek is getting some help in Kansas. EPA is working on her before she enters Oklahoma, for how can we do a real cleanup until the most upstream parts are addressed. As Piglet said to Pooh, “I used to believe in forever, but forever's too good to be true,” but cleanup has begun on Tar Creek because landowners began to believe the efforts could work. 
 
The landowners along our section of Tar Creek have begun believing. She is damaged, yes, but even naughty boys can be loved, right? So let's start having creek dreams and start longing to enjoy the new improved creek she will become, the enchanted place she will be.

There are tough times for Miami coming and it is hard to believe but the councilors must trust the City's attorneys to speak for you and the trees you all live in the shadows of in the fight for the life of the city during this GRDA relicensing process. https://www.grda.com/pensacola-hydroelectric-project-relicensing/ Catch up with the fight, encourage those who long to protect your homelands, your hundred acre wood, to keep you high and dry.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim