Nestled in the foothills of the Ozarks in northwestern Cherokee County, Oklahoma, the Farmhouse on Clear Creek sits on land that has been in my family for almost fifty years. Although I did not live here full time growing up, I have known this place all of my life.

2023 will mark 50 years of my knowing this place, and 15 years of living in a house we built on a bluff overlooking Clear Creek. To acknowledge that remarkable run, I want to record some stories here. Readers will meet some of the characters and critters who have helped define the place, there will be a continuing theme of things that go wrong, and, overall, an appreciation of how wonderful this place is, chiggers and all.

This is the place I’ve known the longest, but there have been other places. There is a line from a poem I like that reads “We were never anything all the way*,” and, while the farm is important to me and this site is dedicated to it, I’ve done quite a lot of other work, some of which can be seen here in the form of words and images, and some of which involves chainsaws or tractors or paintbrushes, and which may be written about. I don’t call myself a farmer or a writer or a photographer or a carpenter or a woodsman or a mechanic or…anything. The farmhouse is a real place with real stories and people behind it, but in the context of this site, it is also a base from which a lot of other work has sprung. Never anything all the way.

Chris Dykes

Lost City, Oklahoma

From the poem “Street Corner College” by Kenneth Patchen.