Unheralded Turkey Creek may yet have its day, at least with the outdoor crowd

Timothy Amundson first encountered the tunnel a few years ago, while riding his bike each day from the Westside neighborhood to the West Bottoms, where he was helping set up an exhibition at an art gallery.

“I noticed that the entire ride was downhill, yet it was completely dry,” he says. “I kept thinking: This is where water should be. There’s no way that this low-lying ground would have formed without water flowing on it.”

Around the same time, he also was working on a different project: prairie restoration, south of Kansas City. This, too, opened his eyes, and he noticed that a creek flowed alongside the highway.

“I was like, ‘That’s the creek that should be in the West Bottoms. Where the hell does it go?’ I realized the last place you see it is by the Rainbow exit, so I just parked my car off that exit and just started walking. I came out on the most awkward side of that tunnel, and it was just breathtaking to me. The water happened to be high right then because we’d had a couple of days of rain, and there was this thunderous sound. It was so bizarre and so unnatural to see this creek just turn a 90-degree angle and go underneath a bluff.”

At that moment, Amundson’s obsession was born.

The next week, he started researching the creek at the Missouri Valley Room of the Kansas City Public Library. He learned that the tunnel had been built as a flood-control measure in 1918. And he began bringing friends to the creek, acting as an unofficial tour guide as he enthusiastically pointed out its unique features.

One of those friends was artist and musician J Ashley Miller, whose compositions involved his custom-designed guitar “chariots” — a wagon wheel positioned to play the strings of an electric guitar mounted in front of it. After several visits to the creek together, the pair agreed to collaborate on a music video for Miller’s new group, Quadrigarum.

Turkey Creek was an easy fit for Miller’s aesthetic: Quadrigarum had previously recorded videos in a public park downtown (making use of a hovering drone) and in the cleared-out lobby of the Kansas City Power & Light Building, in the hours before the building was taken over by a property development company. Miller says performing at nontraditional venues — in some cases, trespassing — allows the group to explore “the emotional subconscious of a location.”

Sometimes that subconscious amounts to a place’s original identity. Other times, what comes to mind isn’t the past but a distorted future. “There’s a lot of horror that comes from being in that place, but it’s as much fantasy as horror,” Miller says of the tunnel. “I feel like in a weird way our generation really embraces the post-apocalyptic aesthetically. It’s not a turn-off for us.”

Thus was born “Waterror,” the music video that Miller directed on location in the Turkey Creek diversion tunnel, a few dozen feet beneath a high-traffic stretch of Interstate 35. In it, a long-haired man in neon utility overalls staggers against the current of a small but powerful waterfall, a microphone in one hand and a signal flare in the other. Several musicians in similar attire sit beside the water or stand on the hillside, playing drums, synthesizers and a couple of those chariots. The music is droning yet urgent, with the singer’s primal screams floating over a hypnotic, dissonant soup of electrified instruments set against the sound of water rushing toward the black tunnel in the background.

Given Miller’s lack of permits to film on the property — which he and Amundson had determined was owned by one or more railroad companies — there wasn’t a lot of time for on-site rehearsals or second takes.

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“A lot of it was just feeling,” Miller says. “Spending time there, listening, allowing for the immersion and the improvisational aspect to happen. We had the ideas of how the piece would sound, and it did not work in rehearsal. But as soon as we were in the environment, it was perfect.”

Also unrehearsed: singer Drew Roth’s firing of a flare gun toward the ledge where Amundson was holding a camera.

“Drew is the channel for the human emotion,” Miller says. “The rest of the band is dealing with very abstract, architectural, environmental kind of things, and interpreting all these different forces that are at play, and then Drew brings the human element into it. And that’s where it gets transcendent, I think. His part wasn’t written. That’s just him being in the water.”

Hidden as it seems, Turkey Creek is more than a footnote in local history.

Following massive floods in 1844 and 1903, a diversion tunnel was proposed to protect railroad beds and surrounding neighborhoods. Construction began in 1918, using steam shovels, dredges, air drills and dynamite to blast through a bluff and direct the creek into the Kansas River, about a mile south of its natural outlet in Kansas City, Missouri. The project channeled up to a million gallons of water a minute. A 1922 edition of Popular Mechanics called it “the largest sewer in the world.”

In June 1951, neighborhoods on both sides of the state line flooded, following a series of storms that inundated the watershed and overcame the levees, causing widespread evacuations and millions of dollars of damage. When an oil tank and a high-tension power line collided, a fire broke out that raged for five days, in part because the pumping station at Turkey Creek had failed.

The construction of the highway system buried much of Turkey Creek from view, and in 2001, a cover story by The Pitch (“Dishonorable Discharge”) revealed that Johnson County wastewater engineers had been pumping as much as 260 million gallons of untreated sewage into Turkey Creek every year. In order to skirt environmental regulations, the treatment plant had designated Turkey Creek as functioning “essentially as a storm sewer.”

Greener days were in sight: Johnson County parks and recreation officials had already begun devoting hundreds of thousands of dollars to converting their segments of the waterway into the proposed Turkey Creek Streamway Park. In 2005, the Unified Government Board of Commissioners in Kansas City, Kansas, unanimously approved the Rosedale Master Plan, which incorporated a section of proposed pedestrian and bicycle trails along the creek.

Overland Park and Merriam completed four miles of trails along the creek, including the 15-acre Waterfall Park at 5191 Merriam Drive, and in 2007, a group known as the Turkey Creek Coalition began working to determine trail alignment and develop a 10-mile Turkey Creek Streamway corridor plan.

But a connected trail is still several miles and several million dollars short of completion. Last March, the Mission City Council voted unanimously against committing matching funds to a design and preliminary engineering study of the trail. According to the Prairie Village Post, “a portion would have been funded with grants including $1 million in federal money, but the council gave up that grant in 2014 when it decided not to include design money in its budget.”

In spite of slow growth and occasional setbacks, Tom Jacobs believes local interest in new nature and recreation trails is at an all-time high. Jacobs is the environmental director of the Mid-America Regional Council, a nonprofit that deals with transportation, environmental and other public policy issues in the region.

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Between 2013 and 2015, Jacobs says, the region added 143 miles of on-road bikeways (bicycle lanes and marked bike routes) and 146 miles of off-road trails (shared-use paths).

“It’s extraordinary,” he says. “Whether it’s in eastern Jackson County, Indian Creek Park, Turkey Creek or any other outdoor space in the city, you see people doing all kinds of things — running, biking, taking their kids for a walk, bird-watching. These are places that are used, they’re loved, and they’re valuable. They become an intrinsic element in terms of quality of life, somewhere people can go just to appreciate where they live.”

Turkey Creek was part of MARC’s original green-beltway proposal in 1991, and the organization’s MetroGreen division sponsored the initial discussions among city governments to advance trail planning. Today, MARC continues to work with local governments, urban planners and engineers on issues of water quality, trails, recreation, habitat protection and other land-use factors. (Many documents related to Turkey Creek are viewable at marc.org.)

Jacobs developed his own appreciation of Turkey Creek by viewing it from I-35. “I was talking with a biologist who was visiting from the Army Corps of Engineers, and he was pointing out the different bird species along the creek,” he says. “You’re looking down on this place as you’re driving on the highway, and yet it’s a remarkably intact biological ecosystem.”

Jacobs points out a section of Merriam Lane in Kansas City, Kansas, as a good example of a “complete road” — with lanes for cars, a lane for bikes, and a walking path, ideally in close proximity to a natural resource like Turkey Creek. While much of the planning occurs on a government level, he cites the value of volunteer groups who lead stream cleanups, tree planting and removal of invasive plant species. Organizations such as Bridging the Gap, the Heartland Tree Alliance and Kansas City WildLands make a positive impact as well, he says.

“Some of the best remaining natural areas in our region are along these streams and creeks,” Jacobs says. “By creating greater access to these resources, you’re able to turn it into something that’s of real value to the community. It’s just another way to strengthen and knit our communities together.”

My Turkey Creek tour began in the parking lot of Strasser Hardware on 910 Southwest Boulevard, a street plagued for decades by flooding. Amundson and I stocked up on bags of the store’s free popcorn and headed south on I-35. Along the drive, Amundson pointed out where the creek winds along either side of the highway.

“I’ve actually been kind of excited about Ikea being here, because it provides a strange locational context for the creek,” he said. “Telling people that it’s right by Ikea somehow makes it more legitimate than saying it’s right below I-35.”

We left the car at an office park near the 87th Street exit and walked along a series of drainage ditches behind nondescript commercial buildings and storage sheds. Many of them looked abandoned or wore “for sale” signs; it was hard to imagine they had much of a future. “It’s kind of mind-blowing how much environmental destruction had to happen [to make way] for these things that lasted maybe 20 years,” Amundson said.

Eventually the paved drainage system gave way to a more natural-looking waterway, with rocks and trees and birds. “It doesn’t really even look like a creek until this point, but by the time you get to the end of the creek it’s remarkable how much water it gathers,” he said. “Even in just this small patch of prairie, you’ll see red-winged blackbirds and other wildlife that you wouldn’t find elsewhere in an urban environment.”

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Farther downstream, we parked by a bridge off Merriam Drive and climbed down a steep bank to an area that looked more like a small river. Amundson said he called this spot “the library” because of its quiet and natural isolation from roads and people. It was here, as we admired the natural watershed, that he expressed a grudging respect for the flood-control innovations and transportation measures of the past century.

“This study has kind of driven me out of the simplistic, Marxist view of capitalism and really made me face some of the hard truths of why it was so necessary to build these roads, and how beneficial an infrastructure can be to mankind,” Amundson said. “But it’s hard when you’re in these places. I don’t care who you are or how cynical, there’s something about seeing even a small waterfall that causes you to feel something that’s in the romantic realm.”

In 2013, Amundson founded the Turkey Creek Institute for Phenomenal Awareness, an umbrella organization for his photography, research, art and educational projects about the creek’s presence in the city. (He plans to exhibit some of these efforts in April at the Front/Space gallery, in the Crossroads.) But his immediate aim is modest.

“Right now,” he says, “my goal is just to get people to say its name.”

After a couple hours of driving and walking along the creek, we headed at last for the tunnel, which meant driving over railroad tracks, through tall grass and down roads I wasn’t sure my Saturn could handle. I could see the Rosedale Arch in the distance, completed around the same time as the “world’s largest sewer,” but even that landmark looked a little strange in this context.

We drove until we reached a tree trunk lying across the road. Amundson thought it might have been placed there to deter drivers following the May 29, 2015, disappearance of John Shead. According to a witness, Shead had been driving his pickup on a ramp near the tunnel when it was pulled into the fast-moving waters of the creek. His body was recovered a week later in the Missouri River, near Lexington.

As we approached the tunnel on foot, the same background sounds from “Waterror” began to fill my ears. But the creek’s terminus was more scenic and peaceful than what I had imagined, at least on this sunny afternoon. Even if it’s hard to imagine a public park this close to critical flood-control measures, it was easy to see why Amundson and others believe so passionately about bringing the creek out of obscurity. I thought of a poem by Robert Frost that I’d seen on a plaque at Ravenna Park, the site of a successfully restored creek in Seattle. I pulled it up on my phone:

How else dispose of an immortal force

No longer needed? Staunch it at its source

With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown

Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone

In fetid darkness still to live and run —

And all for nothing it had ever done

Except forget to go in fear perhaps.

I started to read a selection out loud to Amundson, but when I looked up I saw that he’d moved ahead and was crouched in some weeds, closely examining something. He’d been hoping to spot a sign of the original waterway, the creek he’d seen on old maps.

“There it is!” he said, and he pointed to a trickle of water that had gathered since the recent rain. “It does this every year.”