Favorite Ozarks Books – 15

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Dahlia's Gone, Eleven Point, Favorite Ozarks Books, Katie Estill, novels, Oregon County

I ran across a chapter of this book in The Literature of the Ozarks, a book that I have written about before. I’d heard of Katie Estill, but somehow had overlooked her novels. So I went out and found myself a copy.

I started reading it a couple of days ago, and it’s a marvel. It begins (or very nearly so) with a murder, but it’s not a mystery, nor is it what one would call a “thriller,” although it does have plenty of police procedure in it. It also has some adult passages with adults doing, well, what adults do. So it’s not exactly a “romance,” either, although there’s love in it, of the most aching and true sort.

It’s set in a county that feels a lot like Oregon County, Missouri, with a river that runs through it (in the novel, it’s the Seven Point, not the Eleven Point as in the real-life county, but let’s not quibble over the number of points). And it has a triumvirate of main characters, three women, all of whom suffer and struggle in the course of the book, and who don’t particularly get along, and who discover that they have common aims and needs despite that. One is a deputy sheriff; one is a woman who has recently returned to the county after a time away; and one is a newer arrival. The murder connects them, divides them, and connects them again.

It’s a beautiful book that defies categorization, and it contains some lovely passages of description of the Ozarks landscape, of the interior thinking of its main characters, and of the mental and emotional negotiations they go through to achieve some answers and some peace. It was published in 2007, but the characters’ travails are as relevant today as they were then. You may have to hunt for a copy, as I suspect it’s gone out of print; but it’s worth the search.

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More Parks

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Ava, Branson, Bryant Creek, Eleven Point, Ozarks Symposium, politics, state parks

So the Missouri Governor’s Office has announced the creation of three more state parks in the Ozarks: Ozark Mountain, about a thousand acres northwest of Branson; Bryant Creek, almost three thousand acres in the deep forest southeast of Ava; and Eleven Point, more than four thousand acres in Oregon County, near Alton.

I’d heard of the Eleven Point acquisition already, and in fact I spoke about it (and the Echo Bluff State Park acquisition) at the most recent Ozark Studies Symposium. The local officials who opposed acquiring the Eleven Point land were, in my opinion, coming more from a political position than one focused on the long-term benefit for their county; as any county official in the Ozarks can tell you, parks draw tourists, and tourists spend money, with the added sales tax revenue more than making up for the lost property tax revenue. But you can bet that there will be a fresh chorus of opposition after this announcement.

Part of it will come from the timing. The announcement has an in-your-face quality to it, given that the term-limited governor will leave office next month. His successor didn’t win office based on policy proposals; his main argument for election was that he used to be a Navy SEAL. But his general tenor was of the small-government variety, and it’s hard to imagine him authorizing the aggressive acquisition of new parkland for the state.

The other part of the criticism will come from the source of the money. As the governor’s press release puts it with convenient vagueness, “Money for the purchases came from settlements reached with mining companies that had operated in the state.” More precisely, that money came from settlements that were supposed to mitigate the environmental damage caused by lead smelting operations in the southeast part of the state. Although the use of that money for these purchases is probably legal in the strictest sense, it’s stretching the definition of environmental mitigation about as far as it can be stretched to include the purchase of some scrubland north of Branson. Representatives from the Lead Belt regions will complain, and rightly so, that the money was supposed to be used in their area.

Still, it’s worth remembering that the Missouri state park system is just about the best in the country. Legislators who gripe that “we can’t take care of the ones we’ve got already” (I can hear it now) should remember that they are the ones who cause that lack of funding by their own decisions and party agendas. Although the details of this particular announcement make me sigh for the days when lawmakers from both parties would work together on a decision that was advantageous to the state overall, I have to recognize that we are not living in such times. I hope that a generation from now, people will take delight in these parks and leave the bickering over how they came into being for the footnotes of the historians.

 

The Environment and the Eleven Point

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Eleven Point, environment, favorite_places, Missouri, nature, Ozarks, parks, springs, Willow Springs

Anybody who has ever floated the Eleven Point River can testify that it is a wild, lonesome, and highly scenic stretch of water. It’s little more than a creek until Greer Spring comes in (there’s an image of Greer Spring in the background here, and I need to write about Greer Spring more).

What many people don’t know, including myself until I crossed it while on a speaking trip a year ago, is that one upper fork of the Eleven Point reaches back all the way to Willow Springs. It’s easily forty miles as the crow flies from Willow Springs to Greer, and given the twists and turns of the river, probably twice as much in river miles.

Not only is the Eleven Point a mere creek, it’s what hydrologists call a “lost” stream. A significant percentage of its water disappears as it flows southeast toward Greer, and sometimes the streambed is little more than dry gravel. Of course, that water doesn’t really disappear; it goes underground, into the many unseen rivers that flow beneath the Ozarks. This underground network of flowing water is what gives the region its many sinkholes and caves, as ground and rock give way to water.

In March, Ken Midkiff of the Sierra Club called our attention to a 33-tank petroleum storage facility in Willow Springs, very near the Eleven Point, that has little or no protection against contamination of the stream if those tanks should ever leak or seep. His article appeared in the Columbia Heart Beat blog. Now, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has picked up the story, in an article by Jack Suntrup.

Willow Springs, Missouri, is not the Chemical Valley of West Virginia, despite the somewhat alarmist comparisons. But on the “better safe than sorry” side, it only makes sense that the EPA should inspect this tank farm and prescribe whatever safety remedies it deems necessary. As the good folks of West Virginia have learned, it’s a lot easier to protect your watershed before a disaster than to try to clean up and restore afterward.

Here’s a map of the Eleven Point watershed.