Editorials

You can't get there from here...

Posted by: Waterboy on July 6, 2010 04:16:10 PM -05:00

"You can pretty much make it on your own in this world if you’ve done the right things by 16. Or at least you think you can. He could." An excerpt Steve Smith's latest story... 

“He’ll never make it past the 11th street bridge.”

I was loading my airboat into the water at the boat ramp adjacent to the Tulsa Rowing Club building back in 2002. A tall woman with tan, wiry, long arms and without a hint of Okie accent spoke those words matter of factly to her fellow rowing crew mates as though I wasn’t even there. Why do people do that? I wondered if she knew something I didn’t. She was sure she did. Her attitude transcended age, education and wealth. I had heard a similar remark from a scruffy looking toothless kid on a noisy four wheeler when I had left the other end of the river below Keystone Dam on my first downstream trip. He was more direct when he sneered in perfect Okie, “Ya ain’t gonna make it past them rapids”.  Never saw him again. Never saw her again either.  

Challenging me is a sure way to assure my success.

I have made it up and downstream this river many times, in many different craft, at many different water levels since those remarks were made. My advice to both of them would be that occasionally one should challenge their beliefs just to make sure they remain valid. Certainly a rowing shell could not make it past the rocky, shallow water under the bridges at 11^th street or the rapids at Newblock Park. Nor could a typical fishing boat make it downstream through the Shell Creek wetlands. But that doesn’t mean that no boat could make it through. In fact, the river was navigated at the turn of the 20th century by packet boats and ferries by captains who learned to read its many signs and memorized its channel location.

Recently some casual internet research revealed some more stories of our early day river.  As early as 1879 a group of engineers lead by a certain J. D. McKown (http://www.ausbcomp.com/~bbott/winrr/bupper.htm) explored the Arkansas River from Wichita (the Little Arkansas River) to its confluence with the Grand and the Verdigris rivers, eventually ending up at Little Rock Arkansas. His objective was to report to the Corps of Engineers as to where dams should be placed to enable commercial steamboat travel. (Interestingly, the Tulsa area was not even mentioned. It was nothing more than a few Indians and traders at that time.) Apparently, building railroads and bridges made more sense.

Going back farther in time, the area around the Keystone Dam shows evidence that Mammoths inhabited the area and dined on a now rare, but locally plentiful, tree. http://www.thegreatstory.org/arkansas-river.html. I love this woman’s understanding and appreciation of this part of the river. I hope it becomes contagious.

My latest float was uneventful but mentally uplifting. I traveled down the lower stretch from Sand Springs to Tulsa with my youngest son who now is a solid 16yrs old.

You can pretty much make it on your own in this world if you’ve done the right things by 16. Or at least you think you can. He could. The 11,000cfs flow was enough to carry us along slowly but we had to work to make it to Tulsa in 3hrs since, once again, there was a steady Southwesterly wind at our faces. We had planned to stop on the Refinery Islands and take a break, but as we approached I locked eyes with a rather large, solid rust colored coyote, better known as a Red Coyote. I didn’t think there would be room for all of us on that small island so we stopped at a little sand bar near its tail end.

Red Coyotes are probably a hybrid of the now extinct Red Wolf that once populated Texas (http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu/tmot1/canirufu.htm). It’s rare that any wild animal allows itself to be seen by humans (I don’t include Red Foxes in this group as they are rapidly becoming a common sight around Tulsa). 

In all my years around this river, this is only the second Coyote I’ve come so close to and it was in the same place 5 years ago. They feed on the Nutria, rats, rabbits and even fish that abound in this area. We rounded the turn at Newblock, crossed the noisy rapids and fought our way over large white caps into port at Elwood’s. That was good work. The next few days after our trip the river got scary high peaking at nearly 74,000cfs and 13ft at the 11^th street bridge. Fun to watch, from the shoreline or bridges.

I spoke with a county commissioner from Payne County this week in the store where I work. I confessed to him of not knowing where that county lay. He told me it was the home of the premier football team in the state. “Well, if you had said Cleveland county I would know where you’re from,” I answered. We both snickered but I had lots of questions for him. Half of the Arkansas River in Tulsa flows through his county in the form of the Cimarron River and Salt Creek. This is where our river gets its distinctive reddish brown color and salty taste. The Salt empties upstream into the clay soil of the Cimarron which then merges with the Arkansas to form Keystone Lake. This river was mistakenly referred to in early times as “the Red Fork of the Arkansas River”.

Bill Deering is his name and he owns land along the Salt Creek. I asked him about the condition of that river and he relayed that old timers told him that before intensive farming changed the river it had been narrow and deep.  The river used to flood regularly and carry nutrient rich sand and silt out to the surrounding land. That is why the land was great for farming. But the water flow has steadily diminished and the process has reversed. Farmers irrigate with water from the river or the underlying aquifer. The nutrients wash into the river now only to be carried downstream. Now the Cimarron is choked with sand that is slowly migrating downstream and filling up Keystone Lake. This link describes the process and shows some of these rivers, http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.lunet.edu/mcneely/cimarron.r.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.lunet.edu/mcneely/prairie%2520fish%2520discussion.htm&usg=__yzCyUMy517u8iC8nPlzS42-H8cg=&h=1200&w=1600&sz=421&hl=en&start=13&itbs=1&tbnid=ihnkQyRd40CoRM:&tbnh=113&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcimarron%2Briver%26hl%3Den%26tbs%3Disch:1%26prmd%3Div

That helps to confirm a story that was told to me by descendants of an Oilton family that had producing oil wells in the area around the turn of the century. I love these family stories that I picked up from riders on my airboat, though they are often hard to substantiate. Since there were no railroads from Oilton to the new refining centers at Tulsa that Josh Cosden had built and no suitable road transportation, their family came up with a novel way to send their crude down to Tulsa.

They lashed barrels of crude oil into rafts and floated them downstream like timber companies were doing with their product. The packets of oil would often hit snags and break up dumping crude into the river but enough of them made it to Tulsa to be profitable. It wasn’t long till the railroads extended into the area but it was a good example of the frenzy that the oil discoveries in Red Fork and Glenpool had created. If Deering’s friends are correct then the Cimarron would have been capable of moving those rafts downstream into the Arkansas.

There was no EPA at that time. Spillage of product was just considered the cost of making a fortune. Another passenger’s family story exemplifies that. Once the oil was being refined in Tulsa, the refineries would actually leak product into the river through poor quality piping or upsets in the system. This man’s grandfather bought commercial water pumps during the depression at bargain prices and set up pumping operations downstream of the refineries. He would then pump river water into large settling tanks and once separated, would drain the water out, barrel the remaining oil and sell it back to the refineries. No wonder the wealthy at the time built in neighborhoods like Brady, Owen Park, and Maple Ridge which were upstream and uphill of the river and the refineries.

Stories I give no credence to are those that express fear and conspiracy about the river with no factual basis. Last week a woman from Prattville assured me that the Keystone Dam is built on a major fault line and that the government has seismic stations throughout the area to monitor the fault. She also alleges that the water in the lake and consequently the river is filled with deadly bacteria that cause deadly rashes from even momentary exposure. Finally, she says the old timers who built the dam talk of a hole in it that they expect to cause its failure.

-A search of the internet finds no such fault. There is a Keystone Thrust fault up in Utah that is geologically a mystery as to its nature but nothing extraordinary here. We have many minor quakes throughout Oklahoma every day but dams are built with this knowledge.

-I am very happy the government monitors any seismic activity if it gives me more time to react to a potentially damaging quake. Why isn’t she?

-Any and all lakes have bacteria that are dangerous to humans. Even city water parks are subject to them. It is primarily the still waters where they occur. Sandy rivers are much less likely to harbor them though. Yeah, nature is dangerous. We should outlaw it.

-Lastly, old timers are notorious for their amazingly accurate memories and context. Oh, wait a minute…that might need some more thought. Anyway, all dams leak.