In reflection Mike Masterson

There are days when all I feel like doing is enjoy my back porch while reflecting on all that’s transpired since returning to my native Ozarks in 1995. So please just humor me for a few minutes today, or jump to another story (can’t say I’d blame you).

Aside from the array of continuous God Nods in my life, including the one that brought me home, it’s difficult to remember so many Northwest Arkansas events and issues I’ve tackled.

During my first year, as executive editor of the Northwest Arkansas Times, our staff worked together to disclose many facts behind the hairbrained scheme (already state-approved) to create a landfill atop Hobbs Mountain above the White River, which feeds the region’s water supply. After a lengthy exposé and editorials, that project was abandoned.

When I discovered just how badly the previous leaders at our newspaper had treated Fayetteville mayoral candidate Dan Coody on the eve of the election he’d narrowly lost three years earlier, we wrote and published a lengthy and unprecedented apology. Coody later was elected mayor.

There were numerous stories and editorials that consistently revealed the UA’s new chancellor’s initial decisions to close the vaunted University of Arkansas Press, then to fire 32 UA Physical Plant workers. Both actions wound up thankfully being dropped after the lights came on.

Then came the mismanagement at the Area Agency on Aging of Northwest Arkansas office based in Harrison. That led to a week-long series exposing just how bad things had become in that vital agency and the resulting resignation of the former director and his employee/girlfriend.

We wrote about bacterial contamination of several natural springs in Washington County and the dangers of the city’s abandoned water plant which was finally torn down.

There was a story about the disease from fowl droppings called histoplasmosis circulating in Northwest Arkansas. Lots of people never knew they’d contracted the lung ailment until small scars in the lungs showed up in X-rays. In some cases, the scars initially had been mistaken for possible TB until doctors discovered the truth.

We wrote in-depth about the activities of the late controversial Madison County Sheriff Ralph Baker, as well as many stories on prisoners escaping from the county jail in downtown Fayetteville. Washington County has a new criminal detention facility south of town and another for juveniles.

One of our reporters, Pamela Hill, was selected as the nation’s top police reporter based on her sustained hard-hitting stories about law enforcement matters.

After a nine-month break from journalism, I began writing this column in 2001. Initially I wrote four times each week. That was cut to three after a few years and has stayed there since. Believe me, my friends, as with any passion in life, writing continually is a labor of love and I was fortunate, as former UCA journalism professor Dean Duncan of Brinkley once told me, to have found my career passion at an early age.

In 2001, my first year as a fulltime columnist, I learned about the island of vegetation-choking aluminum sludge, a byproduct of water treatment, that had arisen in Monte Ne Cove on Beaver Lake. The Beaver Water District denied it was responsible for the sludge below their treatment plant.

Lots of readers closely followed more than 200 columns I’d come to write over four years about the 1989 death of 16-year-old Janie Ward of Marshall during a teenage beer bust in the forest outside that Searcy County community. Despite sharing volumes of facts about what to me clearly described a homicide, and thousands of words about how badly the state had mishandled her autopsy and “investigation,” nothing substantive came from the special prosecutor assigned to investigate. After a second exhumation and some truly stunning misbehavior, the state led Janie’s case back to “undetermined.” Everyone involved in the travesty slapped backs and headed home. Hardly a satisfactory job of revealing truth.

Since then, the columns have ranged widely from exploring life after death, to defending those being unfairly set-upon, to praising those who deserve it. I’ve spent time and energy digging for facts about such projects as SWEPCO’s ill-advised (and eventually abandoned) proposal to carve a mega-transmission line from Benton County for 50 miles across the Ozarks to a pasture near the Kings River, as well as the ongoing proposal to rebuild the leaky Lake Bella Vista Dam rather than eliminating it and setting beautiful Little Sugar Creek free to flow once more.

And how could I ignore the huge story of an ongoing struggle to preserve the water quality of the Buffalo National River, our country’s first to be so designated? Controversy spread far and wide after our state agency responsible for maintaining “quality” (cough) environment quietly permitted the Cargill-sponsored C&H Hog Farms to operate atop karst-fractured ground at Mount Judea, just six miles from the Buffalo. That wrongheaded decision has sparked a federal lawsuit and continuing outcries over the potential pollution of such a pristine national treasure.

So have gone the days of my life over the past 20 years. God willing and the river don’t die, it will continue. If you’ll keep reading.