Now Comes the Hard Part

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Bagnell Dam, Big River, Black River, Bourbeuse River, Clearwater Lake, economics, flooding, Huzzah Creek, Jacks Fork, Marble Hill, Meramec, Missouri, Mountain View, Neosho, Ozarks, Piedmont, rivers, Seneca Mo, Steelville, Table Rock, Wappapello Lake, West Plains

Ozarkers, and those who follow the Ozarks, have been stunned by the widespread flooding that occurred after the past weekend’s heavy rains – more than 10 inches in many areas – and the road and bridge washouts that have happened as a result. (Follow “Love My Ozarks” on Facebook if you want to see the latest crowd-sourced photos and videos.)

The Black River near Hendrickson, photo by Peggy Carlstrom posted to the Love My Ozarks Facebook group.

If you live in a region of narrow valleys and steep hills, you get used to occasional washouts, and even the occasions when the little creek that runs through town gets out of its banks and floods Main Street. That creek, after all, is usually why the town was there in the first place. But this “rain event,” as the TV people like to call it, was historic. Instead of one town getting the big flood from an intense storm cell, as is usually the case, this time the whole region suffered. Seneca, Neosho, Mountain View, West Plains, Steelville, Marble Hill – towns from one side of the state to the other took the hit.

The flood-control dams at Clearwater and Wappapello, and the combo flood control/power generation dams like Table Rock and Bagnell, did what they were designed to do and held back the floodwater until they reached maximum capacity, and then had to begin releasing water through their floodgates and spillways. The resulting downstream flooding will no doubt be less than it would have been had the dams not been there, but creeping development in downstream areas also means that the damage to property will be more costly.

Meanwhile, as the Big, Bourbeuse, and Huzzah all pour their waters into the Meramec, folks in the lower regions of that river gear up their sandbags to protect as much of its valley as they can, a valiant effort regardless of whether the flooding on the Meramec is exacerbated by earlier human actions. The governor has already had his mandatory photo-op filling some sandbags and has activated the National Guard,  but the real work – and by that I mean the work that will tell the difference whether the towns of the Ozarks will survive in the long term – will begin in a few weeks.

The Jacks Fork near Eminence, photo by Morgan Paige Nash in the Love My Ozarks Facebook group.

Most of the small towns of the Ozarks have a tenuous hold on prosperity to begin with. One economic blow can have immense consequences for the people who live there. When the Wal-Mart in Piedmont closed recently, that closure took more than $200,000 out of local tax revenue, a blow that cannot be remedied in any short or medium term. And in a region that is already disproportionately populated by poor folks and retirees, one can’t just fix the shortfall by raising taxes. All over the region, governments and businesses will be cleaning up the mess, and then they’ll be faced with the decision of whether to try to start over or just give up.

But Ozarkers are not good at giving up. They are, as the saying goes, three kinds of stubborn. So over the next months and years, I hope to do my part to help the region the only way I can, and the only way that makes a long-term difference: by visiting the area and spending some money down there, particularly with those mom-and-pop businesses that don’t send away a chunk of their earnings to the National Headquarters in some distant location, but recycle it into their community as small businesses everywhere do.

 

Two Books

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Aaron Ketchell, Arkansas, Branson, Brooks Blevins, Missouri, Missouri State University, murder, Ozarks, religion

I’ve been reading a couple of books this month–Brooks Blevins’ Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South and Aaron Ketchell’s Holy Hills of the Ozarks: Religion and Tourism in Branson, Missouri. I’ve followed Brooks’ work for a long time, but Ketchell’s book is new to me.

Ghost of the Ozarks is the story of one of the strangest murder trials in Ozarks history, a 1929 case in Mountain View, Arkansas, in which the supposed “victim” showed up during the investigation but whose identity was doubted by the prosecutors, who went on with the trial despite the presence of the “victim” as a defense witness. Holy Hills of the Ozarks examines the religious foundations of Branson’s entertainment tourism industry, starting with Harold Bell Wright and working from there to 2007, the date of the book’s publication.

Both are academic works, so I can’t recommend them for casual or light reading, but they’re both terrific pieces of scholarship. It’s reassuring to know that the shelf of books in Ozarks Studies is really quite impressive, once you start hunting around.

And More Parks!

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Missouri, parks, Rock Island Trail, state parks, trails

The announcements just keep coming. Yesterday the governor announced progress in the creation of a second trail-type state park following the old Rock Island railroad line across the south-central part of the state. I have written before about this trail-in-progress before a couple of times, and I think it’s going to be a wonderful addition to the network of hiking and biking trails in Missouri.

Although this announcement doesn’t really tell us anything new, beyond the fact that the land transfer is going as intended, it’s still good to hear that progress is being made. One of the things southern Missouri has in abundance is scenery, so news that more ways are being developed to make that asset available to people is always welcome.

Good times at Washington U.

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Alpha Delta Phi, books, Eliot, Missouri, St. Louis, Washington University

Every year, the men of Alpha Delta Phi at Washington University choose a Missouri author to read and discuss. This year I was happy to be selected, and here’s a picture of us after my talk! They are aptly known as the Eliot Chapter of their fraternity. We talked for more than an hour, and they had some great comments and questions. Thanks especially to Tarun Chally (third from left), who was my contact person/organizer for the event. And despite the general glow, we aren’t about to be transported into a spaceship . . . just standing in a brightly lit foyer.

The Wayback Machine

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art, books, Ed King, memory, Missouri, publishing, University of Missouri

I had an odd jolt this week when I saw a name in the obits and thought, “That sounds familiar.” I suppose that’s a by-product of aging.

When I was a master’s student, my advisor sent me over to the University of Missouri Press for a class/internship in academic publishing. I suspected then, and still do, that it was some sort of payback, in the “do me a favor, and I’ll send you some free labor” way—I’ve done that myself as a teacher. There were four of us students, as I recall, and our tasks were to proofread, read the manuscript pile, and perform the general publishing grunt work.

Our supervisor was the managing editor, whose name was Sue Kelpe, and she oversaw us effectively, although like managing editors everywhere she had the air of someone who had twenty pressing tasks waiting for her at all times, so our conversations were usually swift and surgical. I had some familiarity with blind proofreading from my newspaper days, when we did it for our major advertisers, so I often took that task. One person would read the proofs aloud while another followed the manuscript; the reader had to pronounce every punctuation mark, every capitalization. Some of my fellow students hated it, but I always found it a weird but calming task, this microscopic tour through the text, although I was never the perfect proofreader because I would usually be revising the work in my head at the same time, cutting extraneous words, replacing dead verbs with live ones.

The director of the press was Ed King, whom Sue treated with respect bordering on awe, and who didn’t deal with us passing lowlies a great deal. Occasionally he would glide through our workspace, exuding distinguished geniality, and exchange a few words. But mostly he was elsewhere, his office or meetings, although everyone knew that the U of M was his press, and the selection, design, and overall feel of the books were his.

So this week I saw Ed King’s obit in the paper and remembered droning on to my proofreading partner in the sunlit space in the press’s offices, and what I learned there about care and precision. And I walked over to my bookshelf to take down a book from that era. I noticed its design—impeccably elegant if a little old-fashioned, perfectly proportioned, a book designed to last—and it occurred to me that no obituary could be as insightful, as honest, or as  honorific as that finely crafted book.

Favorite Ozarks Books – 7

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A Country Year, books, Jacks Fork, Missouri, nature, Ozarks, Sue Hubbell, Texas County, writing

I heard a presentation on Sue Hubbell’s A Country Year at the Ozarks Studies Symposium in West Plains last year, from Brian Hardman of the University of the Ozarks, and that presentation reminded me I had been intending to dig out this book and re-read it (I’m pretty sure I had read it years ago). But nearly a year passed before intention became act. Another reason to love books—they’re so patient with us!

A Country Year may remind you of Walden in its seasonal structure (spring to spring), or of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for its devoted entomology, but those comparisons only go so far. For one thing, A Country Year is a quieter book, not as rhetorically extravagant; much of it was originally written for general-interest magazines, so the needs of the intended audience figure into that choice to some extent.

But something else that interests me about A Country Year is its practicality; it’s a working book, not the ruminations of a comfortable observer. When Hubbell writes about jacking up her truck to grease the wheel bearings, she’s not doing it to experience the rusticity of common tasks; she’s doing it because the truck needs greasing, and nobody else is around to take on the job. Real poverty runs through this book and informs it at every turn. For that reason, A Country Year speaks to the Ozarks experience in a particularly meaningful way. A transplant herself (who has since moved away), Hubbell wryly comments on the urbanites who relocate to a scenic patch of Ozark countryside, only to learn that their rural utopia comes with brown recluses and intermittent mail service.

A Country Year embraces both beauty and struggle. It’s unassuming but firm. And in those respects, it resembles a lot of the country folk I know.

 

Close to Home

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Civil War, Fredericktown, historical fiction, history, human nature, Missouri, nostalgia, Ozarks, slavery

I belong to a Facebook group that shares thoughts about local history in and around Fredericktown, Missouri, the small town that figures in the setting of my novels. Most of the posts to this group are of the “who remembers that quaint cafe on the corner?” or “does anyone recognize the man in this photo?” variety, but yesterday, one of the members posted this sobering reminder that the little town we bathe in nostalgia also participated, like the rest of the slaveholding part of the country, in the great evil that tore the country apart. It’s disquieting to remember, yet with only the slightest effort, such reminders are all around. A recent moment’s idle curiosity into the origins of some old-time songs led to some intense discomfort at the astonishingly racist lyrics of turn-of-the-century popular songs. And I recall a time, some years ago, when I was editing a manuscript of the journals of an early citizen of the Arcadia Valley, reading with horror his childhood account of a lynching on the railroad bridge over Stouts Creek. The horror was particularized because this was a bridge I had idly viewed from my car window hundreds of times.

The task for anyone interested in history is to see it whole, not just the parts that reflect well upon our forbears. I’m reminded of that whenever I give a talk about Missouri during the Civil War, because just about nobody of that era comes out well in the moral light of the present day. People will tell me with an element of pride, “My family never owned slaves” or “My family owned slaves, but treated them well” as though those conditions made them exemplary. Let’s face it, owning a human being pretty much rules out the “treated well” claim, and the overwhelming majority of Missourians didn’t object to the practice of slavery, whether they owned slaves or not. Apart from a handful of abolitionists, and the slave families themselves, most Missourians accepted the practice either explicitly or implicitly, with even those who were against slavery holding only the vague hope that it would wither away somehow in the future.

What does this tell us? Not that our ancestors were evil, necessarily. But that they were flawed, and that they countenanced evil things…..just like us.

A Hundred Years of Parks, More or Less

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Conservation Department, Missouri, National Park Service, nature, Ozarks, parks, state parks

The National Park Service was established in 1916, a hundred years ago, and the Missouri State Park system has jumped on the bandwagon to celebrate as well. It was actually sort-of created in 1917 as part of the state fish and game commission, but the first actual park wasn’t created until 1924.

But who’s counting? It’s always a good year to celebrate our state park system, round numbers or not, and the parks department is doing so by offering prizes for people who get a “passport” and have it stamped at their locations. Will I get my passport stamped at all 88 locations by the end of October 2017 and thus be eligible for the best prizes? Probably not, but what the heck, it’s only five bucks and a fun challenge to take on.

The Missouri Legislature has not earned much of a reputation for intellect lately, with various harebrained proposals that just keep coming. But many are mere posturing for political reasons. What really troubles me lately, though, are the short-sighted attempts to interfere with the state park system and the Conservation Department, including efforts to prevent the purchase of land along the Current and Eleven Point rivers. Thankfully, the Current River park has made it through, but there are still efforts going on to derail the Eleven Point purchase. The opportunity to put this kind of land into public use comes very rarely, and once lost may not be regained for generations. I understand the concern of local officeholders about the loss of property tax revenue, but that’s a problem that can be solved. Most ironic is the argument that “we don’t have enough money to maintain the parks we currently have, much less additional ones.” And whose fault is that? The same kill-the-government legislators, of course!

If we want to see our state park system enter its second century with a positive outlook, we need to insulate its operations from political intrusions and see that it gets proper funding. Our park system is the envy of most other states and should be kept that way.

April in Missouri -for the Literary-Minded

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Blank Slate Press, Bonniebrook, Branson, Columbia, creativity, Kansas City, Missouri, Missouri Writers Guild, St. Louis, Unbound Book Festival, writing

There are lots of literary events going on in Missouri next month, some of which I’m involved with, some not. If you enjoy reading or writing, climb in the car and take a spring road trip!

First, there’s the Afternoon of Authors with Blank Slate Press event April 2, from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Central Library in downtown St. Louis. I’ll be joining two other BSP authors to talk about writing and to read from our work. I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll read from my most recently published book, This Old World, or from my work-in-progress, which I’m getting close to completing. I’m also looking forward to sharing some time with Cynthia Graham and John Ryan.

Next up will be the season-opening open house at the Bonniebrook Gallery, Museum, and Homestead near Branson on April 16. I don’t think I’ll be able to make that event as I have work-related travel, but I’m eager to get down there sometime this spring or summer. The open house runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and will include exhibits, craft demonstrations and vendors, presentations, and musical performances. Here’s a link to an earlier post about that event, including a schedule.

Then the following Saturday is the Unbound Book Festival here in Columbia. This is the initial year for that festival, and it looks very promising.

Finally, at the end of the month, is the annual conference of the Missouri Writers’ Guild. This year’s conference is in Kansas City, and includes workshops, master classes, opportunities to meet with editors and agents, and nonstop networking! I’ve been going to the MWG conference for years and always come away with something valuable, whether it’s an insight on craft, a new thought on marketing, or an important contact. Anybody who wants to take his or her writing to the next level needs to check out this conference.

So change your oil and buckle your seatbelt! It’s time to hit the road for literary adventure.

 

Excellent Resource

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Arkansas, Civil War, history, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Ozarks, Springfield

Someone posted this link on Facebook a while back…..I had not run across this site before, despite having done a lot of research into the Civil War in the Ozarks. It’s a wonderful resource! Well organized, good looking, and informative.

Congratulations to the many organizations that contributed to this website. It’s a great example of inter-governmental cooperation – federal funding, administered by the state, and managed by the Springfield-Greene County Library. I just wish its county-by-county coverage ventured farther east!