People work toward retirement and some of them reach it.
Tim Kent retired this week with a simple, well attended event which included cake, which in my mind is about as good as it gets and was gifted 2 original pottery  pieces made by Quapaw member Betty Gaedtke.

After his twenty years with the Quapaw Nation's Environmental Department the Tar Creek Superfund site under his leadership gained national news as he lead the tribe's efforts to be the first Indigenous government to gain a contract with EPA to do cleanup on their own tribal lands.
Tim is a quiet man, not easy to anger, but steady and true to the words he offered at the gathering, always humble recognizing the work of his staff but also the honor he had felt having the opportunity to work for the Quapaw Nation.

Ken is featured in Making a Difference at the Tar Creek Superfund Site, Community Efforts to Reduce Risk and repeated his method of success at the site. "There are three components to consider about these sites: politics, science and policy." I give Tim Kent a lot of credit for using his 3 sided stool method and EPA's engagement with the tribe but he went on to say, "Making big changes takes money, and EPA has less money every year. You have to be the squeaky wheel, but you cannot be as squeaky as your senator can be. That is what it takes. It's worked for us." He never raiser his voice but he got EPA and the tribe to the table, and kept them there.

Retirement came to Dan Riley too this month.
He didn't get a cake. He had worked his whole life, the last ten years with Fed Ex after having worked also for UPS, and for the county. He had sold John Deere Tractors in Kansas and raised cattle, raised wheat, and raised a family. Bailing hay was how I came to know Dan Riley and to learn how really special it feels to work the land. I bought a tractor a number of years ago from him and just a week after retiring does he go on a vacation? buy a brand new comfortable chair and put his feet up? No, he comes to see my 4240 John Deere and tend to his needs.

There was a joy I saw when that guy peered into the side panel. It seemed like a brother to him. After a couple of trips to town, he had gotten the 2 front tires, 2 new2 batteries, the oil changed, Freon added, the seat pumped up to just my size, all of the zerts greased and the Hydraulic fluid checked, then he moved on to ensure the 3430 Kubota and the 2155 John Deere got the attention they deserved, too.

I watch, observing where and how zerts are serviced, learned how to operate a new air compressor and how to pump up the seat in that 2-storied tractor with basically a ladder on the side to climb to get into the cab. That 4240. I can see what draws Dan Riley back to it.

My brother Clark Frayser is a "car guy" with vintage Jaguars and a 60's Austin Healey, but he is not a Dan Riley kind of car guy who actually races his vintage mustangs and even placed second at Hallett Last month.

Not knowing if Tim Kent has tractors to tend in his retirement, I do know that biking has been a really big part of his life, even if he got bucked off his bike recently. He is up and doing and will surely do like Dan Riley and will be finding the things that starts his engine, knowing some of that will bring him back to assist the tribal efforts to make a difference at Tar Creek.
I am reminded of the lines from the poem To Be of Use by marge Piercy:

"The thing work doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident."

     The people I love the best jump into work head first...
     do that has to be done, again and again
     The work of the world is common as mud...
     But the thing worth doing well as a shape that satisfied, but were made to be used.
     The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

A gentleman and I spoke this week. There are times when a mere pencil and the spread open spare envelope are not enough to record the thoughts of a person who has virtually the answer to several of the lingering questions left to be solved in Ottawa County. The words were flooding by me as my slowed down  spellchecker of a mind tried to figure out the correct spelling while the facts were getting left way behind.

My meager notes start out with a reference to a place on the north side of the BF Goodrich plant, where the deep soil should be sampled for the residue benzene that required an outside contractor to remove the floor after it gave way to deal with the line that must have been releasing those chemicals for years. The thing no one wanted to talk about was kept  hushed. How many others are left who will tell the things that were not told? And why does it matter and why don't we ask now while we can? while there are still those who can retell those happenings.

After taking a breath, his words on his work history took us over to the Eagle-Picher laboratory and the kinds of acids sent down the drains there right before he turned us to Tar Creek, the mine workings with the limestone formation and the flow going straight to Tar Creek and ending up in our Grand Lake.

He remembered the hope that John Micka and others had had about adding fly ash and how it might be the answer to containing the metals from being released into the aquifer. But he found fly ash is loaded with arsenic when sampled and we know it certainly could contain mercury. What kind of mess might we have made worse? The hope lives on to find the "what" that will be done to fix that flawed flow Mr. Micka so wanted corrected for us.

And without even asking he took me to the Roubidoux. Is it protected? Have all of the deep wells used by the most profitable mines been closed properly?  Workers were witness to the wrongs done here. The days are over. The bosses long gone. The time for loyalty is past.

Twenty-one years ago, LEAD Agency honored James Graves with one of our Mike Synar Environmental Excellence Awards for " leading the charge on ways to solve the problems with abandoned mine shafts."

It was during those years that James served as one of the Ottawa County Commissioners and had a long time involvement with what was known as the Picher Mining Museum.
 
Mining made a great impact on James. He told me about his father who had been a miner and had gotten sick with what was known locally as "Miner's Con"(Any of several lung diseases caused by inhalation of mineral particles or coal dust). He had gotten so sick that while he was sitting with  him, his dad coughed up his own lung.
 
Much of the way Mr. Graves relates a story allows my brain to construct his story into pictures. That image of his time with his father truly sat with me and has been an image time has not diminished.
 
After all these years here he is offering the low-down on the questions we as a community long to have answered. We will listen to him. We will listen to any of our people longing to give these bits of truth to the puzzle solvers, the question askers, the justice seekers.
 
There is a great honor in receiving this type of trust. To be given the grains of truth that might lead to better cleanups. This county has been damaged and every bit of it deserves to be healed and made right.
 
It is not wrong to want this. It is right.

What's  next?

As the Stories on Tar Creek come in as our registered voters line up to sign the initiative petition for the Clean Water Ordinance so do their memories of otters and horseback rides, graduation parties and fishing, cornfields and more fishing. These pleasant moments may also jostle and reveal those what-elses lying there hidden as we strive as a community to seek a return to nature as it was given to us to enjoy and now to protect.  We are finding our voices. We are hearing you.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Maryann Hurtt, Poet and friend to LEAD Agency has published a volume of persona poems, actually giving voice to the events, people, places and creatures who call Tar Creek and this area home.

Dedicated to the Tar Creek Monster, who as she writes “was the initial inspiration for this book.” Her poem begins with that line, " I didn't always look this way."  I know that feeling. After crossing that Neosho River for 43 years, it is certainly a thing I can truthfully say. My career in Miami started when Max Buzzard, then head of the Indian Education program listened to his Indian Parent Committee  recommendation to hire me as Indian Counselor. Lee Whitecrow and Kay Condren, were two of the members and I regret not remembering the rest of the slate who approved my application.

Crossing that river and then for the last 10 years in the Miami School system, I was required to cross Tar Creek to get to work at MHS. I have been crossing those waters all these years.

When I retired in 2002, it would have been simple to stay home on the prairie, but life has kept me crossing those waters since. Was it the water that kept me, like Maryann Hurtt would say, she was drawn to water? It was really the people and the needs for justice that kept me coming.

It is personal. Each of us have our own story. Mine? The children I got to see make it through school, or not make it through. Some succeeding beyond expectations, some longing to find peace and solace by making it through a single day. Now seeing them figure how to face another day often in pain or in  dialysis. Some now leading in elected positions, a few-some made professional positions.

Maybe it is the puzzle, the questions that need to be answered that keep me crossing these bridges, why are our community members sick? Why do so many die much younger than the national average age of death?

We figured out one of the reasons that made school hard for some of our children, why so many were identified with special needs, why so many needed Ritalin or some other prescribed medicine to help them deal with their ADD or ADHD and be more compliant and more able to listen and learn in school. It was and has been the exposure to lead for generations. That discovery is what got EPA to cross back over those bridges and come back to Ottawa County to reduce the numbers of our children being lead poisoned. EPA keeps sending the funds cross those bridges to remove contaminated soil from residential yards, playgrounds, parks and daycare, soil that was loaded with lead from our Tar Creek name-sake Superfund Site.

The last half of the years here have been spent in part encouraging EPA to keep coming because our kids are worth every penny spent to protect their futures and their grandchildren's children.

Once Upon A Tar Creek, Mining for Voices by Maryann Hurtt is a volume with our stories, generations of our stories are waiting for you to discover, to hear. This book should be read out loud, so our voices are heard. From the miners, to the Quapaw Indians who were wrongly institutionalized and ripped off. "Miner-con" and the military road came through these tribal lands, when ore was discovered, wealth was made and taken.

Ms Hurtt's poems are not her stories, they are her words written with our voices, our memories, our stories woven such you will long to read the next barely before you finish the first.

Maryann knocked on LEAD's front door and interrupted the last few minutes of a Toxic Tour with health professionals and students.  Maryann keeps coming back, returning to revisit our orange water and hopes to see her Tar Creek monster one last time, wondering what words told will be haunting her to write her next volume of poems.

What would she write now? She would be seeing the people lining up to sign the petition for Clean Water, empowered and passionate people wanting that orange to go away, the monsters to sleep and our lives to improve.
"I didn't always look this way." I was a young woman when I first came cross your bridges and now I am not. But now I am believing it was all worth it.

A creek is a terrible thing to abandon and now she has friends. Tar Creek will be saying what those who are my age know to be true, "she didn't always look that way."

Ms Hurtt knows us because she listens with heart and she has captured our voices and those who have gone from us already. Once Upon A Tar Creek, Mining for Voices is a treasure.

We are recommending this must read book!
 
Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim