Some have asked me where the inspiration for some of the locations and physical features in my stories come from. The answer is: from my memory. I spent a great deal of time wandering around the countryside near my hometown as a boy and young man and some of those places were and are, dear to me. Slate Rock Bluff, the Low-water Dam, Three Bridges, Swinging Bridge, Punkin Center and their like will, mostly, never be seen again. Most of them were covered by the lake before I moved away. Even the roads used to get to them are gone now and the only way to get to them is by boat. With them covered by water, I wouldn't even know when I was floating over them. Three Bridges still exists and while the road has been improved, they look different now. I heard the Swinging Bridge was destroyed by a wind-storm and it's been so long since I was there that I doubt I could even find its location now.
Another place that lives in my memory is the cave below the bluff at Monday Hill. The hill was homesteaded by my Dad's uncle, Bob Monday, back when Indian Territory was opened up to settlement. He already lived there, being a tenant farmer on Indian land, which was the only way a white man could be a legal resident in Indian Territory. The cave was shallow and wouldn't have provided much shelter during the winter, but was good enough to keep the rain off your head during the rest of the year. Over the years, many people had scratched graffiti into the rock walls, some of them dated back nearly to the Civil War, and were quite interesting. Anyway, the way the river has flooded in recent years, I'm pretty sure the water covers it a good part of the time. There was a really neat way to get down the bluff to it, though. There is a very large crack in the dome of rock the hill is on and someone laid a couple of telephone poles end to end in the crack, making it possible to walk down through the dead leaves and scree that lined the bottom while hanging onto the poles. And, no, you couldn't slide down the poles like you would the banister on a stairway; too many splinters. One of the kids in my old Boy Scout Troop made that mistake and got laughed at all the time he was trying to pull his pants down to get at them. All in all, it was a pretty bloody sight. We were out there for a 'coon-hunt' and he was miserable the rest of the night. I've got to say that sitting up on top of the hill by a campfire, listening to the dogs bay until they caught wind of a raccoon was enjoyable.
For those who have read my books; I have included several of these locations in more than a few of my books. Oh, and there was another place that I have used several times. It doesn't have a name. The old story is that it was a cave on the Verdigris River bank used by the Daltons and was large enough to drive a wagon into. The government blasted it sometime just before statehood, leaving nothing but a jumble of boulders. I don't advise crawling around on them as it is too easy to slip between the boulders and break a leg. There was another entrance to the cave above the bank and a local man crawled into it when he was a teenager. I was told that he found several wagon wheels, a couple of rotten, wooden chairs and a table inside. When he told his father about the find, his father told him to cover the entrance so no one could get lost in the cave. Once the young man realized that the cave was a dangerous place for anyone to enter, he did as his father told him and covered the entrance with a few small logs, several sheets of tin roofing, a couple of wooden barrels full of trash and dirt. by the time I saw the place, everything had more or less rusted and dissolved into the surrounding dirt and was only a flat spot in an unused field.
Yes, many of the locations I use in my books are gone forever, but not forgotten. At least, not by me. Anyone who tried to find them using the turns that I describe in my stories would quickly find himself lost or sitting in the middle of the lake.
I have to admit that many of my stories are based on what I wish still existed, or things that I wish had occurred differently. My readers seem to find them enjoyable as they keep buying my books; and isn't that a measure of success?
Thank you,
Derek A. Murphy
Author of Congruencies, A Taste For Blood and others.
Available on Kindle
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