Man made lake

"I’ll never forget the day, They took my home away, To make a lake that God did not plan. Though it has been many years, I still recall the tears, Shed when they made Flagstaff Dam."

Jeep Wilcox

http://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/songstorysamplercollection/47/

Eminent Domain
The power to take private property for public use by a state, municipality, or private person or corporation authorized to exercise functions of public character, following the payment of just compensation to the owner of that property.
Federal, state, and local governments may take private property through their power of eminent domain or may regulate it by exercising their Police Power. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires the government to provide just compensation to the owner of the private property to be taken. A variety of property rights are subject to eminent domain, such as air, water, and land rights. The government takes private property through condemnation proceedings. Throughout these proceedings, the property owner has the right of due process.
Eminent domain is a challenging area for the courts, which have struggled with the question of whether the regulation of property, rather than its acquisition, is a taking requiring just compensation. In addition, private property owners have begun to initiate actions against the government in a kind of proceeding called inverse condemnation.
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/eminent+domain


 This story, can't remember when I heard it for the first time, always intrigued me with a mixture of horror and astonishment. The images of whole towns under water made me shiver. I kept looking for more information, description, people describing the process, but all I got was the same words over and over again. 

The accepted script, how the decision was made, how the process of eviction was carried, how the land was acquired and  then used. But the people, I kept asking myself, the people what about them? how did they feel, what did they do to stop the water?

Did the scream, did they protest, did they dispair?

What got me was realizing that it was not quick and painless, it was a prolonged process that took almost twenty years. Legal actions and then the preparations that constituted of making the area ready. 
   

Fraying and reconstructing

 http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/mind-blowing-3d-book-sculptures


I documented the story of my family (the fragments I manage to revive), in a small book I named – Chasing Memories. In it I tried to convey ‘the facts’ but at times had to use some of my imagination to keep them glued. 

While doing my research I read with horror the documented accounts of whole communities uprooted from their lives, not by the whims of nature but by the iniquitous acts of other people.  

I think that disaster is a disaster is a disaster, no matter where and how it hits, but there is nothing as devastating to one’s soul, as being betrayed, and singled out, by the same people he entrusted to keep just and order.

The followings are some stories that touched my heart. These are my humble tries at fraying their unified two-dimensional presentations by using fiction to fill in the gaps.

Shattered lives

When she turned fourteen, on a Saturday night in June of 1938, my mother and her parents were forced to leave their life behind and for the next ten years became people with no land.

The story about that night was never part of the family narrative. It was not passed on in family gathering, was not rehashed on cold winter nights or told as a bed-time story to wide eyed children.

This story got folded with some old black and white pictures and other odds and ends and put on the top shelf where it gathered dust for over fifty years.

***

When I pulled the old story from the top shelf my parents were no longer alive. Neither was my aunt that on the top shelf of her bedroom closet I found the fragments of the story tucked between old pieces of lace, some embroidered napkins, and a carefully folded, faded dark blue suit.

The questions in my head were stacking high and fast, a fertile ground for the growing frustration and seeds of anger that were starting to sprout.

“Why did not they tell me?”

“Why the deep secrecy, the un penetrated silence?”

“Who will give me the story back? Fill up the gaps, bring back the dead?”

***

There is no pride in being unwanted, in being tossed away, locked away from your life, your possessions taken away and even worse, your identity. You look around and other people, your friends, are still carrying their identity, their regular life. They avert their eyes when you look at them and you realize that, you become transparent, you become a threat.

I know that now.

.

 Forgotten but not entirely lost.

 

 

http://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/james-e-mckinney_118417401

I am thinking of a theme to energize this writing challenge, and I remember the last piece of fiction I wrote in the previous winter. What started rather innocently as a way to use a given prompt became a short story about abandoned town in Alaska. I have never been there, and the only images I had seen were from postcards and several websites.  And yet there was something in the story of that town that touched me in a way that was surprising. The moment when life is shattered and people left without a stable hold on their life I find fascinating and tantalizing at the same time.

Over time the story has a way of amalgamating around few chosen (by whom?) details. Those are repeated in front of different audiences to the point that they acquire a quality of a two-dimensional poster, and many details and fragments of people lives are lost.

Why do I care?

Because somewhere, in these stories, is my family’s lost tale.

This tale, that I managed only recently to pull out of almost total forgetfulness and yet so many parts will never be back. I cannot breathe life into the two-dimensional details; I cannot find the people behind the names,   behind the cold facts.

 To revive amalgamated stories is to tear them apart, tag at the loose ends, look for discrepancies, and search for what is missing rather than what there is. At times, the only way to revive a dead story is by using fiction.