K. Lawson
Water ruined me. Water bubbling over rocks, carving caves into the rock bones of Missouri. Water frozen in icicles a hundred feet long. Floating on quiet water with a spinning leaf beside me. Jumping into cold water on July days. Drinking pure, sweet glacier-cold spring water. The river was freedom and at the same time stability. I spent hours alone but never lonely with water whispering to me, holding me, playing with me, teaching me. I was ruined for the real world from an early age.
Southern Missouri is one of those regions that determinedly resists civilization. While we have our cell phones, our satellite TVs and our computers, daily life is still slow and patient and quiet. Like the river, we can’t be pushed. During the sixties, I was a barefoot urchin playing in the woods of Shannon County along the tiny Jack’s Fork River in southern Missouri. My parents and the bank owned the patch of woods where we lived and worked. We expected to continue to live and work there for a very long time. As people do when they find a place that suits them, we attached ourselves to the place as tightly as lichen to trees. We planted flowers and bushes. We made plans. The Rock House was home base. No less a force than the American government interrupted our plans by declaring eminent domain, and making a park out of our home. This application of eminent domain was one of the first used to acquire recreational property. Today, as we watch the expanding applications of eminent domain, my tale can be considered a cautionary one. Some can point to the park that resulted and see what was gained. My purpose is to show a bit of what was lost.
After a forty-year exile in neighboring Howell County, Kay Lawson is finally back in Shannon County. She and her husband of thirty-two years are building a house—a rock house--on a pine topped hill at the end of over a mile of country road and private drive. She is the English department at tiny Eminence High School and teaches one evening per week at the Cabool Campus of Drury University. She regularly writes school related articles for the Shannon County newspaper, the Current Wave, and is working on her next book, which she labels “a trashy murder mystery” set in the hills and hollers of the Ozarks.
Mrs. Lawson’s two children often visit the new place, but they have expressed doubts about their mother’s obsession with Shannon County and rock houses. Mandy, who is working on her masters in anthropology, is anxious to explore the old home site and graveyard on the new property though Kris, the more pragmatic son, reminds the family of the lessons to be learned from Pet Sematary and other educational movies.
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As we round each new bend, I strain to see if this is the Round Blue Hole where I learned, among other useful things, how to swim. Finally, we are there. The spring is on our left. Thirty years ago a pipe stuck in the fissure made filling water jugs easier. Now the water flows unhindered over mossy rocks and drinking it is not encouraged. The chill of this spring and others keep the Jack’s Fork water crisp and clear.
The shape of the swimming hole has changed little, but I am disappointed to find campers lounging on my gravel bar. I had hoped that this place would be abandoned and we might camp here, but not this time. It isn’t mine anymore. We paddle once around the Big Rock in the center of a deep blue basin and bounce over the ripples and on down stream. We will sleep on a spit of sand beyond Jam-Up Cave after we swim for a while and cook some chili and sausage over a campfire. My shoulders are sunburned and my muscles ache from paddling. I look at Barry’s face and see that his nose is a little red and that he looks as tired as I feel. He assures me that he is.
As I go through the motions of helping to set up camp, I still find myself drifting back. Even after we have eaten and are lying in our tent looking through the screen top at the stars, I feel as if I’m still on the water. But this river carries me back to memories I thought were submerged long ago.
Shortly after I was born my dad paid fifty bucks for me and took me home to our big rock house near the Jack’s Fork River. I grew up around, in and, for short periods, under this trickle of water. We were ten miles from town and over a mile from our nearest neighbor. We had no phone and more often than not the contraptions that we optimistically referred to as cars would not start.
