For the town of Osceola and the river that was

On Global Earth Exchange Day June 17, 2017, a group of eleven gathered at a table in the Osceola, Missouri, park shelter house nearest the water of Truman Reservoir, Osage Arm. A few weeks earlier, water backed up from Truman Dam had risen high into the park. The benches where people were now sitting for their talking circle were under water then. Those present spoke about what the place had meant to them. Some remembered when the free-flowing Osage was the people’s river, where many town-folk moored their rowboats before the U.S. Congress, through the Army Corps of Engineers, made it a restricted area, before the Corps removed the 20% of the town below the “take line” for flood control.

One of the group members recalled practicing yoga poses on concrete slabs from a lower-elevation now-vanished shelter house. Another told of arrowhead collecting and fishing along the shore. One man remembered collecting Osage River water for the baptism of a son born before the lake filled behind the dam. One woman recounted a gathering at the lake shore to launch lights over the water to honor the memory of a younger brother recently deceased.

People recalled the “wounded place” left when the lake destroyed the breeding grounds of both vertebrate and invertebrate native species. One couple, in residence in Osceola less than a year, looked forward to the accumulation of memories as time goes on.

After time for individual reflection, nine group members reconvened to work together to make the outline on the ground of a Radical Joy bird out of driftwood left behind by the recent high water, and also a nest from smaller wood debris. The participants’ ages ranged from 13 to 85. The 13-year-old group member, looking at the completed sculpture with its sharply angled head, said the work was more pterodactyl than bird.