kiowa county

KYNDALL BENNING

We used to swim dead cities, climb the rocky mounds that rose alongside them like gravestones. Each peak a small victory of shoes grappling with crevices between settled sediment where scorpions scuttled and snakes slivered. Each crest also of the same image, of Lake Altus-Lugert spread blue beneath us for ten miles.

Lake Altus-Lugert is a reservoir on the North Fork that branches from the Redbed western bottom of the state, from Oklahoma’s nature-built boundary line, from the Red River of the South. It’s built on two towns decimated by tornadoes and abandoned by their own people. It’s built on hotdogs and holidays, tanned and white and red-backed people camping and hunting and cooking on its banks.

The woman I traveled there with, my former stepmother, Cynthia, showed us how to hunt for arrowheads in the surrounding land her family has always lived on, had us hike to find them after it rained. Water washed away the topsoil, exposed treasures of the past. Cynthia’s mother told us of nomads – likely Kiowa – hunting bison in the same land I’ve grown to love. She spent time with words and histories carved into every smooth and pointed surface on those rocks, on that identity etched into her cheekbones and braided into her hair. We learned that those small sharp tools reflected a life where harmony still existed between man and earth. That her “Minnow Ranch” in Lone Wolf is native land retained by native people.

It’s hard to imagine land as untouched by modern machinery as those mountains and waters in Kiowa County. It’s harder to learn that Lake Altus-Lugert died twice like the cities it drowned.

In 2012, only a year or so after I left it, Lake Altus-Lugert was hit by a golden algae bloom at the height of a severe drought. That toxic outbreak killed nearly every fish in the lake, left it empty and lifeless. Left it so unlike that place of endurance I’ve always known.

In 2014, just barely recovered, the lake was struck by another wave of that same deadly golden algae. Mounds of limp fish floated towards the shores I used to dance along, covered the banks in the scent of rotten fish flesh.  I learned that golden algae kills gills slowly, makes it impossible for those fish to exchange water and absorb oxygen so that they die by asphyxiation. It dyes blue lake water yellow and copper, shows us how the world ages alongside of us and because of us.

The earth is not supposed to die with us. We drill deeper into its soils and its waters, looking for oil instead of arrowheads.

As I watch the world wither, I worry that I am like those other white people who abandon and abuse land instead of living off of it. I never hunted wild turkeys with Cynthia’s family, choosing instead to read under yellow leaves while the distant sound of those birds’ loud calls was muffled by the echo of guns. I was a fairly decent fisher, liked trying new bait for my hooks and testing out every which way I could cast my lines, but I was unwilling to skin and gut the fish once they were caught.

I lost my Papa to skin cancer and his farmlands to oil fields. I never learned how to garden, can only break down snap peas with real authority. I have yet to return to Lake Altus-Lugert because I’m afraid to discover what has become of it.

Still, I read headlines of articles and Facebook posts from Cynthia’s family. The lake has swelled again, desperate to take over the next closest town, no longer waiting for a tornado to hit the town first.

The Quartz Mountain range keeps the chaos contained, but Cynthia’s family still has to evacuate Minnow Ranch. The lake’s rivers rise 19 feet, cover land and trees I once climbed.

Now instead of fly-swarmed fish scales floating above sunken cities, I imagine roots and rocks and hundreds of arrowheads burying themselves beneath the new tide, like treasures recycled by time to be re-discovered by other barefooted children. I feel renewed in this new image, one I can conflate with Lake Altus-Lugert becoming alive again.

Amidst the apparent end of Earth at humanity’s hands, I can pretend I’ve found a future for Kiowa County.

Kyndall Benning (she/her) is a writer from Oklahoma especially concerned with questions about family, place, and self. She is currently working on a memoir about these topics. She also recently graduated from the University of New Mexico (UNM) with her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing. Afterwards, she briefly returned to her home state and found Kiowa alive again. This is her first publication.

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