There Are Some Things You Only Love When You Miss Them

There are some things you only love when you miss them. Maybe you loved them before, but you didn't realize it until they were slipping away. So it has been with me and Oklahoma. Oklahoma was hardly my first choice of places to live. It is poor, with nothing to do. The opportunities for personal advancement, or cultural activities, or even simple social events, are very limited outside of the two large cities. But there are hidden gems, and as I prepare to leave I went out to one of them. This is the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge. The picture was taken at the Quanah Parker Dam by the visitor's center.

I like this picture because I was able to capture the violence of the waves. The wind was whipping the waves into a fury. Farther away, off the coast of the US, there was a Nor'easter blowing. We don't get snow like Boston or New York or Philadelphia, but the winds were still howling and the waves were beating against the dam.

This was the first time I'd ever seen the spillway in operation. Usually, the water lapped sullenly against its concrete minder, barely even cresting the outflows that allow the streams to flow through the barren scrublands. Today, water was pouring through every emergency spillway available. The spring rains had come early.

The manmade dam and rock steps stood steady against this assault. They had been built in the 1930s, by desperate men laboring for the WCC. The masonry was superior to any haphazardly organized federal program today, showing actual craftsmanship despite the emergency nature of the WCC's creation. But what struck me as the most moving were those rocks down by the water's edge. Those rocks are some of the oldest in North America, stretching back to when life was barely protozoan. They had stood for nearly a half of a billion years, and now water, their great enemy, was cutting cruelly at them. Still, they stood, resolute and solid, as reliable as anything on the planet. This land has old bones, and old bones do not die easily.

One is tempted to say this is an unstoppable force and immovable wall problem. But any engineer will tell you that the weak point is the artificial dam. The pressure of the lake water is immense, especially on a day like today. The ancient rocks have no intention of giving way, so the great edifice of human engineering will be the first to crumble. There will come a day, not too far in the future but so far away, when the dam will break. It is the nature of dams to break, given enough time. Then the water will run its ancient course, and the ancient rocks will look down on its subdued foe with a distant smile.

Ah, yes, Oklahoma, you have driven me to anthropomorphize rocks and water.