Talihina

And I'll be getting out as soon as I can fly.

Life goes by under Talihina skies.

Life goes by under Talihina skies.

Life goes by under Talihina skies.

Life goes by under Talihina skies.

[singing] Parades, parades of colors and lies.

Soft face and masks dissolve into the night.

I can't remember, but it was early late afternoon.

And what the situation was, as best we understood it at that moment, was they were following a group of drug folks that they thought was going to be making connections in Dallas with someone that's gonna go to Colombia and pick up cocaine and bring back to a place in Southeast Oklahoma called Talihina, Oklahoma.

That's what we knew at the time.

So we pick up the surveillance, and that we're surveilling a, it's a, a pickup, a large pickup.

I think things could have gone a lot worse if I had come between the young one and a full-grown one.

In late February of 2003, I was involved in a military training exercise in the Ouachita National Forest near Talihina, Oklahoma.

Our team had been dropped into the area under night conditions.

I was positioned in an observation post with a clear view of a simulated enemy camp.

In 2005, a group of local women, Ruth Sands and Lavelle Rose and Katie Cogburn among them, started a craft festival at the community center to bring some money into the valley, and they put Bigfoot storytelling on the program because that's what the valley was known for.

And by the third year it had a conference attached, and now it draws thousands of people every October to a church campground on Highway 144, and the money goes to college scholarships for kids from Talihina and Smithville and Clayton and Battiest.

The people who go there tell stories at the campfire.

Most of them are from the Kiamichis.

He was deer hunting on Weyerhaeuser Timberland east of Hanovia on a permit, and he'd walked in from a logging road before daylight on a morning in November and climbed a ridge to a spot where he could see down into a hollow that had a spring in it.

He'd hunted the spot two years running.

He was 29, and he'd grown up in Talihina and hunted those mountains his whole life.

He said he sat on the ridge from first light until about 8:00 and saw two does and let them go.