Lock

There's a reason the lakes in this story have an octopus in them and not a serpent or a plesiosaur or a turtle, and the reason has a date on it.

On the second of June, nineteen eighty-two, the Daily Oklahoman ran a small item on page five about two boys who'd been fishing the Verdigris River with their grandfather near Lock and Dam eighteen on the McClellan-Kerr Navigation Channel, which is the barge canal that runs from the Port of Catoosa outside Tulsa down to the Arkansas River and on to the Mississippi.

The boys were Brian Collins, who was eleven, and Jerry Potter, and their grandfather was a man named Rio Cleveland, who said he took them down there all the time.

Brian told the paper he'd been walking along the bank and looked over at the water and saw something he couldn't make out at first.

He said, "There's a little bit of everything in there, and it's hard to tell what'll turn up." That's the whole item.

Two boys, a dead octopus, a wildlife man shrugging.

Lock and Dam eighteen sits on the Verdigris between Oologah Lake upstream and the Arkansas River, and it's not a long drive from either Oologah or Tenkiller.

The barge canal opened in nineteen seventy-one, and it connected northeast Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico by water for the first time.