MOON STILL SHINES ON NEW 'MOONSHINE STILLS'

SALLISAW -- Sequoyah County is loaded with history and mystery and
myth -- and meth. Mysteries lurk in the murky bottoms of the Arkansas
River to the south, where places have names like Paw Paw, Big Skin
Bayou -- I do believe there's a Devil's Slough -- and in the caves and
hollers up north, where places have names like Long, Short, Reeder
Ford, Polecat Creek and Copic Slab. Moonshine Road, which runs a dozen
or so miles west of State Highway 82 north of Vian before dropping
down to Gore, did not get its name because it sounds quaint.

It's straight as an asphalt arrow close to Vian, then, on west, it
gets as crooked as a sun-baked water moccasin on some hidden bank of
the Illinois River. Untaxed liquor stashed in the trunk or not, the
road makes you want to drive fast! It's those ghosts, whispering,
"Floor it, man! The law's on yer tail!" Judge Isaac C. Parker and his
U.S. marshals in Fort Smith, Ark., ran ne'er-do-wells over into
Indian Territory. The lazy ones just crossed the line and holed up.

Myth shrouds it all. What outlaw haints haunt those hills and hollers?
What undead bandits' boots trudge the bottoms?

People still seek out tiny Akins, northeast of Sallisaw, to pay homage
to Sequoyah County's most famous outlaw: Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy"
Floyd. He robbed banks and gave some to the poor.

The underdog hero is still respected as a Robin Hood despite the
murder and mayhem he committed in the early 1930s. He's buried in the
Akins Cemetery not far from the county's most famous sheriff, E.W.
Floyd, his brother. Used to, certain kinds of boys -- myself included
- -- grew up in Sequoyah County proud of two strains in our blood lines:
Although we couldn't prove it, we probably had some Indian in us, and
had at least one outlaw in the family tree (actually, I can prove the
outlaw part.) Meth is taking the fun out of it. The methamphetamine
epidemic is knocking the outlaw down to size.

Some meth labs are like moonshine stills. "They set up camps out in
the remote areas, in caves and overhangs," said Alan Loyd, an
investigator with the Sequoyah County Sheriff's Department. "A lot of
them are booby-trapped and a lot of them have guard systems of some
kind." The bill for cleaning up the toxic chemical residue from an
average lab, he said, can run to $5,000 -- payable by the landowner,
not the meth cook, not the state, when a lab is busted and a mess is
left behind. The same goes for motel rooms and houses rented on the up
and up, and lake cabins and other out-of-the-way places like barns and
smokehouses, where meth makers slip in and squat long enough to cook
up a batch and leave a hazardous materials site. The property owner
has to pay -- and the owner, often an elderly person or couple living
in an isolated farmhouse, is in danger from the poison, Loyd said.

Such are the realities that awaited folks slow to get the selfish,
self-destructive gist of meth mania when it hit in the mid 1990s. Now
people get it, he said.

Everyone can picture the hidden trip wire leading to a shotgun or
something worse, set to scare or maim an ax-wielding revenuer. It's
the stuff old movies are made of.

Booby traps set up around meth labs aren't just to foil the law, Loyd
said. They're there to thwart rival meth cookers -- and that ends any
romantic comparison to gentleman moonshiners of yore.

"Grandpa made moonshine, and there was honor in the system," said
Loyd, his long, braided ponytail, handlebar mustache and missing right
middle finger announcing: "You do not want to mess with me."

He went on, with no hint of reverence in his voice, just the facts as
everyone knows them around here and everywhere in eastern Oklahoma: "Junior
grew marijuana, and there was honor in the system -- there was still a code
of the outlaw."

Then he lowered the boom, letting meth collide with myth and demolish
it: "There is no honor in the outlaw anymore. There is no code," Loyd
said. "Meth is total destruction to everything it touches. "Used to,
when Grandpa did his time, his friends would feed his cows and fix his
fence or whatever -- because of the outlaw code. Now they go and steal
everything you have -- and your children are not exempt. You had
people who made moonshine and grew marijuana that had jobs and
families. The code does not fit with meth. With meth, people use
people and there is no way out." Violence stalks meth users and cooks,
he said.

Take the meth-addled man found wandering the streets of Muldrow awhile
back claiming demons were taunting him. I'd say he was right. Take the
Sallisaw man who shot his wife in the face and was holding a bloody
Bible, praying the demons out of her, when deputies arrived. Take the
couple who set their mountain home on fire, opened the front door,
then hurried out the back door, breathlessly barring it in hopes of
trapping the mountain lions they imagined were trying to kill them.
They made it easy. They called the law themselves.

Bad whiskey was the moonshiners' embarrassment, or worse, if somebody
accidentally sipped corn poison instead of corn liquor. With meth,
it's all bad whiskey.

"There is no Robin Hood mentality to the manufacture of
methamphetamine," Loyd said. "They don't take and give. It's easy to
romanticize the outlaws when you have a take- and-give policy. With
meth, it's 100 percent take, with no good. It's not helping anyone.
It's destructive, to them, the community, the property -- everything's
totally destroyed." One you get that, meth loses whatever romantic
glow the outlaw code, "Pretty Boy" Floyd and Indian Territory banditry
might lend it. "This outlaw bit," Waylon Jennings noted in his own
setting, "has done got out of hand. What started out to be a joke, the
law don't understand."