Aquifer: A Novel Read online

  Aquifer

  A Novel

  =/=

  Gary Barnes

  Blue Spring Press

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One – Doc

  Chapter Two – Birth

  Chapter Three – Clayton

  Chapter Four – Camp

  Chapter Five – Barber Shop

  Chapter Six – Two Rivers

  Chapter Seven – Cheyenne Mountain

  Chapter Eight – Crash Site

  Chapter Nine – Opal’s Café

  Chapter Ten – Alley Spring

  Chapter Eleven – Barber Shop

  Chapter Twelve – Round Spring

  Chapter Thirteen – Sink Hole

  Chapter Fourteen – Chytrid

  Chapter Fifteen – Chitwood Home

  Chapter Sixteen – Soda Fountain

  Chapter Seventeen – Sheriff’s Office

  Chapter Eighteen – Rymer’s Ranch

  Chapter Nineteen – Chitwood Home

  Chapter Twenty – Current River Slough

  Chapter Twenty-One – Current River Fishing

  Chapter Twenty-Two – Chitwood Home

  Chapter Twenty-Three – Blair Creek

  Chapter Twenty-four – Rocky Falls

  Chapter Twenty-Five – Blue Spring

  Chapter Twenty-Six – Gimp Foot

  Chapter Twenty-Seven – Shut-Ins

  Chapter Twenty-Eight – Nesting Chamber

  Chapter Twenty-nine – Sheriff’s Office

  Chapter Thirty – Crash Site

  Chapter Thirty-One – Fears Cave

  Chapter Thirty-Two – Nesting Chamber

  Chapter Thirty-three – Sheriff’s Office

  Chapter Thirty-Four – Nesting Chamber

  Chapter Thirty-five – Lab

  Chapter Thirty-Six – Swimmin’ Hole

  Chapter Thirty-Seven – Meramec Caverns

  Chapter Thirty-Eight – Sheriff’s Office

  Chapter Thirty-Nine – Nesting Chamber

  Chapter Forty – Town Meeting

  Chapter Forty-One – Blue Spring

  Chapter Forty-Two – Jack’s Fork River

  Chapter Forty-Three – Eminence

  Chapter Forty-Four – Lab

  Chapter Forty-Five – Sheriff’s Office

  Chapter Forty-Six – OperationTrot-Line

  Chapter Forty-Seven – Town Meeting

  Chapter Forty-Eight – Rock Quarry

  Chapter Forty-Nine – Crash Site

  Chapter Fifty – Time Bomb

  Chapter Fifty-One – Conflagration

  Chapter Fifty-Two – Blue Spring

  Chapter Fifty-Three – Valoura

  =/=

  Blue Spring Press

  P.O. Box 173

  Provo, UT 84603-0173

  This book is a work of fiction, though references to major springs, caves, rivers and other natural formations are entirely factual (as are their exact locations), with the exception of the underwater cave at Blue Spring and the spring at Johnson’s Shut-ins. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Gary A. Barnes

  First Edition December 2005

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information contact Blue Spring Press, P.O. Box 173, Provo, UT 84603-0173

  For information regarding special discounts on bulk purchases or for general questions and feedback, please contact us at [email protected].

  For Trudy Lynne Tyler Barnes

  Acknowledgments

  I could not have produced this book without the help of many people, and I am very happy to acknowledge their contributions and express my gratitude for their assistance. Michael Taylor, anesthesiologist; R. Scott House, Ozarks Operations Manager of the Cave Research Foundation; Gary Clayton, U.S. Special Forces; Shiree Best, Stacey Meldrum, and Caprice Fiene for their encouragement, suggestions and proofreading; Richard H. Cracroft for his proofreading, editing, encouragement and much appreciated feedback.

  Special thanks to the National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior, the Ozark National Scenic Riverways; the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park; and to the Cave Conservancy of the Virginias amended for the Ozarks by The Nature Conservancy.

  To my wife, Trudy Lynne Tyler Barnes, who has been steadfast and unwavering in her love and support of me and this book, I express my deepest gratitude.

  Aquifer

  CHAPTER ONE

  Doc

  Ozark Mountains - Southern Missouri

  Summer - 1954

  The 1948 forest green DeSoto was already six years old as it made its way down the narrow, tree-lined, graveled road. Though it was only traveling twenty-five miles per hour it left a massive trail of dust behind as it snaked through the hills toward the river in the valley below. The Ozark Mountains in Southern Missouri were mere foothills in comparison to their towering big brothers the “Rockies” further west, but the driver of the DeSoto thought they had never been more picturesque than they were that day.

  “Doc,” as the locals called him, had come from St. Louis where he had been a physician at St. Luke’s Hospital for eighteen years. Juggling the heavy demands of his three-pronged career - chief of staff at the hospital, teaching at the St. Louis University Medical School, and attending to the patients in his private practice - had all taken a heavy toll. He had felt weary and was tired of the fast-paced hassles he once enjoyed. Erroneously, he had believed that those activities were crucial to his success.

  Doc frowned as he painfully remembered the price his family had paid. His wife had practically raised their three children by herself. It seemed that he was either on call at the hospital, attending some faculty meeting at the university, or spending time with patients in emergency situations.

  He felt guilty about the tremendous burden he had placed upon his wife during that foolishly busy time of his life. Though it wasn’t funny at the time, they now laughed about the time that a neighbor thought that his wife was a single mother and had come over to see if she needed help with the yard work that had gotten seriously out of control.

  Fortunately, those hectic days had ended five years earlier when Doc resigned from all three positions. Abandoning his hectic life, he moved his family from the big city to Ellington, a small farming community in the Ozarks of Southern Missouri.

  Prior to the Civil War, Ellington had been called Barnesville - having been settled by Thomas Barnes in 1837 when he moved his family from North Carolina and settled along Logan Creek in Southern Missouri. The area had been acquired from France as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Barnesville grew rapidly and became an important trading center along the Ozark wilderness trail. During the war, however, Barnesville shared the same fate as many of the surrounding towns – the Union Army, determined to rid the area of Confederates and their sympathizers, burned it to the ground. The Union Army then erected Fort Barnesville nearby to ensure that the Confederates could not retake the area. Following the war, Fort Barnesville was dismantled and the town of Barnesville was rebuilt on acreage owned by Sina Ellington. A few years later, the town changed its name to Ellington.

  Life was much slower in Ellington and Doc took to it well. More importantly though, his hillbilly patients accepted him as one of their own, as if he had lived there all his life. This was unusual, since outsiders, especially those from the “City,” were generally looked upon with distrust.

  Doc found that life in the Ozarks was vastly different from his life in St
. Louis. Simple things like running water, indoor plumbing, electricity and central heating were almost non-existent in the cabins of most of his backwoods patients. Still, he loved being a country doctor and thoroughly enjoyed working with his patients – except for the occasional unpleasant tasks like the one he was about to perform at the Sutton farm. He was bearing news that he knew would be received with mixed emotions.

  The Suttons were sharecroppers whose dry farm straddled both banks of the Current River, about a mile downstream from the ferry Doc was about to board at Owl’s Bend, and lay halfway between Ellington and Eminence. As was typical of most families of that region, the Suttons had a large family – thirteen children, the oldest of whom was only twenty-two, and the youngest was not yet one.

  Though the Great Depression had ended with World War II, no one would have ever known that by observing the lives of most Ozark families of the early 1950s. The Suttons were no exception.

  Otho Sutton barely had two nickels to rub together. He and his oldest sons worked hard all year farming, cutting timber by hand for railroad ties, and doing anything else they could to keep body and soul together. Life for them was a constant struggle. Their farm provided most of the necessities of life, but certainly none of the luxuries. The few things they needed which the farm did not provide were obtained by bartering.

  The hard work wasn’t restricted to just the men folk. Otho’s wife, Armenda, and the older girls made everything the family needed. They hand-sewed clothing and quilts, milked the cows, churned the butter, and ground the wheat or corn into flour which they used to bake their bread. They slaughtered their own chickens and pigs, and cured their own ham and bacon. The cooking was done on a large cast-iron wood-burning stove - making summers in the kitchen almost unbearable, but during the long, dark, winters it kept most of the house quite comfortable.

  Twice a year Armenda set up the twenty-five-gallon, cast-iron caldron which hung from a chain secured to a tripod straddling an outdoor fire in the weed-infested, gravel and dust patch they called the front yard. Assisted by her daughters, she rendered a pig and mixed the fat with lye produced from fireplace-ash to make her own soap.

  Armenda taught her daughters in all the arts of food preservation; teaching them about drying, smoking, bottling, salting, jamming, and pickling. They even water-glassed eggs, in spite of the fact that they never had a shortage of setting hens.

  Any food they needed which they could not gather from the forest or grow on their farm, Otho and his sons got by going down the hill to the Current River, which ran through their property, and there, they caught it - fish, crawdads, turtles, eels; or they went into the woods and shot it - squirrel, rabbit, possum, coon, deer. Poaching was something that only rich people did. When you were hungry, you ate what came along, regardless of the season. That was the code of the woods.

  Armenda and the girls scoured the hills for mushrooms, dandelions, sumac, lamb’s quarters, and other assorted “greens,” along with nuts, berries, honey, and anything else edible. In fact, there wasn’t much that they didn’t consider edible.

  Cash money was the hardest commodity to come by. The Suttons scrimped and labored to save up enough money to pay the $12 annual rent on their home and farm. Somehow, though, they always managed to earn the money, but it was usually just in the nick of time. To say that they lived in poverty, however, would not be entirely accurate – truth is, they didn’t have it nearly that good.

  Doc chuckled to himself as he thought of the Suttons. As was true of many of the families he attended, the Suttons staunchly resembled the stereotypical caricature image of backwoods Hillbillies. They were poor, uneducated, backwards and proud; yet Doc had a profound respect for them. The Suttons were hard-working and honest. Times were hard for them but they struggled to be independent and beholden to no one. The fact that Doc liked the Suttons made this visit particularly difficult for him.

  State Road 106, or “the highway” as it was called, was perpendicularly dissected by the Current River. There was no bridge where the road and river met. The graveled road simply fanned out onto the gravel bar which formed the riverbank, making it impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. Doc slowed the DeSoto to a stop at the ferry landing. The landing was only discernible by a stob, or steel spike, two inches in diameter, which protruded about three inches above the gravel near the river’s edge.

  The introduction of the ferry had been a relatively recent innovation. The natural ford at Owl’s Bend had been used since settlers first entered the territory nearly 150 years earlier. The crossing point was considerably narrower and much shallower than the river’s deep channels which ran for several miles both above and below Owl’s Bend. This, of course, made the river’s current much swifter, providing the power necessary to push the ferry from bank to bank. The low, solid bank on the east side made for easy access, while the west side had a narrow, “S-curved” road cut into the hillside that rose sharply from the river’s edge.

  The small community of Owl’s Bend - consisting of a one-room schoolhouse, a tiny postoffice, and a handful of cabins - was built atop the hillside along the west bank of the Current River. Almost directly across the river was a cave from which saltpeter had been mined during the Civil War to manufacture gun powder. The powder mill had long since been dismantled, but its namesake lived on; hence the crossing at Owl’s Bend became known as the Powder Mill Landing.

  The bedrock and hard-packed gravel of the river bottom allowed teams and wagons to cross the Current River in relative safety. To an automobile, though, the natural ford was an impassable barrier. To help supplement his family’s income, a fellow named Tom Nash built a ferry at the crossing around 1930 and dubbed it the Powder Mill Ferry. He charged ten cents to transport a car from one side to the other. But that was twenty-some-odd years earlier. Doc would have to pay a quarter. He honked the DeSoto’s horn to signal the operator on the other side that a fare was waiting. Then he got out of his car to stroll along the picturesque riverbank. He even skipped a few rocks along the river’s smooth surface while waiting for the lumbering ferry to make the crossing.

  Current River was not particularly wide, as rivers go, not more than a couple of hundred feet across; nor was it particularly deep, as demonstrated by the teenagers wading and splashing near the shore. Its waters; however, were crystal clear, revealing a riverbed composed entirely of gravel and large flat rocks. Fed by thousands of springs along its winding path, the water was bone-chilling cold. The springs insured that the river’s temperature was kept at a constant fifty-four degrees, year-round. Aptly named, the Current River’s many treacherous under-currents, whirlpools, and white water rapids had claimed the lives of numerous, unsuspecting swimmers, though most of its victims had been doing things that they had no business doing, because they weren’t particularly safe.

  Having heard Doc’s horn, the striking young ferry operator, Roger Fears, who could have served as the inspiration for “Little Abner,” immediately placed the ferry into motion.

  The rickety wooden ferry was small, barely accommodating two cars at a time. It was not much more than a flat-bottomed barge. Long tethering cables at each end anchored it to a pulley which rode an overhead cable spanning the river. On board, the tethers passed through another set of pulleys, one at each end of the barge, allowing both tethers to meet in the center of the ferry. At that point they wrapped in opposite directions around a windlass, a horizontal drum or spoked barrel, similar to a ship’s steering wheel, only considerably smaller. Roger spun the windlass clockwise, shortening the tether at the bow and simultaneously lengthening the tether at the stern. This inclined the ferry’s nose slightly upstream, causing the river’s current to lazily push the ferry from bank to bank.

  Ozark ferries were constructed of rough hewn timber cut within a few hundred yards of the ferry landing. They were designed to ride high in the water while drawing a very shallow draft. To assist in maneuverability and speed regulation, an oar-board was fastened below
the upstream gunnel. Oar-boards were usually made of a single two-by-six board that ran the length of the ferry and positioned underwater, about four inches below the upstream gunnel and fastened by steel brackets. In this manner water could flow both under and over the oar-board, thereby forcing the river’s current to push the ferry from one bank to the other. Current-powered ferries never achieved much speed. Crossing a river even a hundred feet wide often required several minutes.

  Slowly the ferry approached the shore where Doc, who had returned to the DeSoto, sat patiently waiting. Just before impact, Roger spun the windlass in the opposite direction, straightening the nose. The ferry’s inertia carried it slightly up onto the shore, beaching it precariously. Immediately Roger jumped off the front end, dragging a mooring chain which he wrapped several times around the stob protruding from the gravel bar. Then he signaled Doc to drive onto the ferry, motioning him to pull forward to the far end. The weight of the vehicle pressing down on the floating end shifted the ferry’s weight, allowing the beached end to rise slightly, releasing the ferry from the frictional grasp of the riverbank.

  With the DeSoto securely stowed on board, Roger unwound the mooring chain from the spike. Dragging it with him, he jumped back onto the ferry, dropped the chain in a heap and grabbed the ferry-pole, a fifteen-foot-long, three-inch-in-diameter, stout, wooden pole. With his brawny muscles he shoved the end of the pole deeply into the graveled riverbed and pushed against the pole to completely free the ferry from the shore’s grasp, slowly nudging it into the river’s swift current. Then he spun the windlass again, only this time tilting the other end of the ferry slightly upstream. Again the river’s current leisurely carried the ferry back across the river.

  Arriving at the other side of the river, the DeSoto disembarked the ferry and continued up the graveled road as it ascended the steep hill in a lazy “S” curve. At the top, the car turned left onto a much narrower tree-lined dirt road. The trees formed a canopy overhead allowing the thick forest to swallow the vehicle as it vanished out of sight.