Alas poor Picher

I first saw Picher, OK almost 10 years ago on a road trip with Kent to see his mom in Oklahoma. Picher is was just over the Kansas state line on 69 Highway, and any glory days were clearly long over.

It didn’t change much in the three or four years we continued to take that route south. It was nearly abandoned with most houses either boarded up or quietly decaying and falling into heaps. The mining museum had clearly seen better days – to me, it looked like a one-story American foursquare house turned into a museum, or maybe it had always been a museum. It was never open when we drove past it. I would have stopped for a tour because I got so curious about the town.

Even then Picher was considered a ghost town, although I would have described it as being on life support. People still lived there and you could stop at a tiny store or two if you needed to pick up a soda or something. It seemed like the residents hadn't given up on the town, and there were signs along the road that urged residents to keep the lead out of their heads by washing their hands. 

The lead came from the zinc and lead mines in the town. This Wikipedia page describes the toxic metal-contaminated mine tailings and talks about the real danger of the roads just flat out collapsing. The article goes on to say that Picher is one of just a few places "evacuated and declared uninhabitable due to environmental and health damages caused by the mines."

I had looked forward to driving through Picher on Saturday. I wanted to see if the little town had been able to come back from the brink of death and decay; I was kind of rooting for them in the face of such absolute devastation.

But there’s no town any more. The sign announcing the city boundary is gone, although the speed limit remains. There are no houses, they are all torn down. The few remaining storefronts I remembered from 2005 are either shuttered, falling down or gone. All you see as you drive 30 MPH through what’s left are sad little driveways leading to empty concrete pads in the middle of overgrown weed-filled yards. There’s still a water tower although I don’t know why. Any water in it must surely be contaminated beyond use. But it’s there, along with the mine tailings that look like small mountains. No people, no dogs, no signs that at one point in time, Picher had a population of almost 15,000.

Apparently things just went from bad to worse after we quit driving that way to Oklahoma. I'm not sure how I missed that the town got hit by an F4 tornado in 2008, or formally voted to dissolve in 2009. I guess if it weren't for bad luck, they'd have no luck at all.

Now the land where Picher was is part of the Quapaw Indian Nation. I can’t imagine why the Quapaw would want a place so contaminated and unlivable. Maybe they can work some sort of miracle or maybe they will leave what’s left as a somber reminder of how we can really screw things up.