Miners and Artists


My father came from the mining town of Picher, Oklahoma, which is a forgotten, weathered place in the northeast corner of the state. It’s a hardscrabble area known more for its poverty and lead-tainted water than much else. The water is tainted because the region was recklessly mined in the last century, owing to the enormous lead and zinc deposits there. The mining camps that sprang up—Picher, Cardin, Commerce—struggled to become towns, but no more thought was given to that by the mining companies than to the lives of the miners they so recklessly expended. Then in the ‘fifties the mines played out, the mining companies pulled out, and things really got tough.

What the companies left behind was a region raped, with water-filled mines and lead leaching into the water table. I don’t think I need to discuss the effect that that can have on an adult, let alone a child. This places those towns in the center of the Tar Creek Superfund site, the Environmental Protection Agency’s longest-standing such site. The clean-up job they have before them is beyond comprehension.

My grandfather worked two of those mines, that is when he wasn’t brawling or moonshining. My grandmother tried to hold the family together, and succeeded–no easy task in a town where in the 1920s the murder rate was about 100 per year. I still return to Picher each summer with my sons, to climb the tailing piles or walk through town or play a little ball on the local diamond. My point? Anytime I think I have it tough as an artist–a novelist–all I have to do is think of Picher.

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