For my dif/Fused Ancestry project, I’m mapping sites where I want to collect soil samples for my father. One of those is the Masonic Temple in Ardmore, Oklahoma. I won’t go into why that is an especially painful site for me. If you want more detail, read the section after the break below. I’ll just say that I need soil from that location.

When I looked up the temple today, I saw that it was torn down in 1990. I didn’t know that. Why not? Because time tends to stand still once we leave a place and never return. What happened in that building can never happen again because it’s pretty much a vacant lot now. There’s some fencing and what looks like construction materials being stored there. There are also big murals on the wall that joined the temple with the adjacent building. One of the murals is a variation on Rosie the Riveter.

We change places, and places change again and again. What was is no longer. In this case, seeing the empty lot, even just on Google Maps, is helping me release the past. I’m sure that feeling will be even more powerful when I collect soil from the site.

This is something I hadn’t anticipated about dif/Fused Ancestry, that it would be an experiential and visceral way of realizing time has passed, things have changed, places don’t have to be what they were forever, and we don’t have to be the same forever, either, because of those places. What better way to get that message through to the body than by digging in the soil and transforming it into art.

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Ardmore is the epicenter of sex and child sex trafficking in Oklahoma. A few years ago, the Department of Homeland Security had a presence in the area. They taught local residents how to identify trafficking and report it. In 2022, there was a huge bust at Lake Texoma, where my father and his best friend had properties adjacent to one another. Men, including powerful men, were caught in a trafficking case that involved a “party” at two hotels.

Oklahoma has one of the highest rates of sex trafficking in the country. I didn’t know that until I started researching the Lake Texoma bust. The crossroads area, where several highways intersect, is especially vulnerable, as are towns with transient populations, like colleges and military bases. My hometown had both at one point and the highway leading south from it fed into the crossroads. My father opened a business in my hometown called The Crossroads. Probably just a coincidence. After he died, I asked my mother why he liked that name. She said he liked it because the crossroads is where you summon the devil.

I have no evidence that my father was involved in any kind of trafficking beyond the ways in which he did so covertly with me. But it has been going on for decades. And it was facilitated by the availability of CB radios, which my father and his best friend both had. And he did have me talking to truckers on the highways down that way when I was in grade school. (They’d ask for me by my CB handle, Rainbow Unicorn.) And he did spend a lot of time down there alone with his buddies.

Since that bust in 2022, I’ve wondered if the temple was involved in trafficking in some way. Several lodges across the country have been caught up in such activities. I don’t think I’ll ever know. He may just have been involved in other criminal activity down there. He was always hustling. His whole life was a hustle until he got hustled by his own brother and died.

Images: 1. A photo of the Masonic Temple before it was torn down (credit: Mark Hilton). 2. A Google Maps screenshot showing the lot now, along with the murals on the brick wall of the adjacent building. There’s a butterfly you can take selfies in front of, a variation on Rosie the Riveter, and an image of an athlete titled “Ardmore Strongman.”