Eufaula Revisited

I had an opportunity to revisit my grand-dad's place just south of the town of Eufaula some time ago, over the Memorial Day weekend and again over the July 4th weekend.

I hadn't been back there in years. The last time I was there was in the 1992-93 time frame, when I took my grandmother to visit her sister-in-law, who was living on the property at the time. It was still in pretty good condition then; everything was recognizable and relatively intact.

Well, now 18 years or so later, things have changed.

First off, my step-uncle, who had moved in to my grand-dad's house, ran the place into the ground. I never really knew him, so I'm going off what other people told me, but he apparently had a drinking problem, and sold off everything of value to finance his habit. Finally, one day the house burned down. He notified my mom with a phone call that went something along the lines of,

"Well, the house burned down. Can you make sure they send the insurance check to me?"

"Insurance? What insurance?"

And that was the end of that. In exploring the wreckage of the house, my brother noticed that certain things you'd expect to find in the debris weren't there--no TVs, no stove, not hot water heater, no washer or dryer, etc. And so the remains were just left there.

My great-aunt moved to a place in New Mexico some years ago, so her place was vacant for some time.

It was agreed that the other of my grand-dad's step-sons would be responsible for the property taxes. However, a few years ago my mother received a notice from the McIntosh County Sheriff's Department that the property was to be sold the next day at auction for non-payment of property taxes. She managed to make it in just before closing time and pay the four years of back taxes to avoid losing the property.

She found that someone had been 'squatting' in the vacant mobile home belonging to her aunt, and allowed him to stay for a very small rent (something like $150 a month) and a promise to keep up the property. Well, he wasn't very good about paying the rent, and even worse on the upkeep, and finally (and recently) he was forced to leave.

This was the condition of things when we went down there on Memorial Day.

'Someone' in the family had sold off half of the property, specifically the western, and more level, half, where my grand-dad's house had been (and where my tree still is; I suppose I should have gotten a deed for the tree, including all property within the drip line of the branches, but 6 year olds don't usually think of such things). So that side was off-limits.

The driveway leading up to my great-aunt's place was so overgrown my brothers had to use chainsaws to open it up enough for a car and a minivan to make it in. The mobile home was trashed; a lack of maintenance had led to water leaks and the floors are now so rotten you're in danger of falling through. The place was overrun with ticks; between me and my son we removed more than 30 of them once we got back. When we left, we locked the gate, though in reality the gate wasn't much of an obstacle, given the badly weathered and cracked condition of the gate and posts.

On the 4th, we went up there, outside of city limits, to shoot off some fireworks. Like most Oklahoma cities and towns, Eufaula has a ban on them for some reason. This makes little sense; Roswell, NM, a much drier and therefore fire-prone environment than found in the overwhelming majority of Oklahoma, has no such ban. On the 4th, Roswell is enveloped in a huge cloud of smoke from the vast numbers of firecrackers, rockets, fountains, screamers, poppers, mortars, and assorted other fireworks being discharged within city limits. But I digress.

We went up there, and the gate was open; the chain had been cut (though in reality all one really needed to do was to give the post a good shove and it would have fallen over). A window-unit air conditioner that had been there was now gone as well.

In another sense, however, it was absolutely amazing how 20 years of neglect will allow a property in southeastern Oklahoma to become overgrown. Nature, in that area at least, is very agressive about restoring the native vegatation to everywhere it had been cleared. I helped put in the mobile home in question, when I was 12 years old; being the shortest, I got the unenviable job of climbing underneath with a short shovel to dig trenches for the plumbing and septic lines. I also helped put in the wellhouse, and clearly remember pouring the foundation. It's on a slope so steep that the downhill corner had to be raised 36 inches to make the floor level.

It took about 20 minutes of searching to find the foundation of the old wellhouse. There were trees growning right up against the foundation, trees that are now 5 or 6 inches in diameter. The years have also worn off the inscribed initials on the corner, at least enough to where they're now illegible, though you can see something there in the concrete.

Elsewhere up and down the hill, my grand-dad's next-door neighbors, Leon Drew and his son, Leon Jr., are long gone, though someone else now lives in his house located far too close to the dirt road (if you put your house too close to a dirt road, the dust from anyone driving by floats in to your house and coats everything, which is why you want to site your house quite a bit back from the road). The house where the one kid who was in 7th grade back when I lived there, and rode the bus with me, is gone; even the regular (meaning non-mobile) home at the bottom of the hill is gone, completely overgrown and invisible. The microwave tower at the top of the hill was damaged in one of the ice storms we had a few years ago, and has since been replaced with a newer and more sturdy tower, and the nearby cliff, which had a great panoramic view of the lake below, is now so overgrown as to be inaccessible.

The spring is still there, and the blackberries have continued their spread along one of the property lines. But overall the whole place is a testament to the futility of human endeavor; that if we do not take the time and effort to maintain something, in fairly short order it will deteriorate and be reclaimed by nature.