house, my cousin’s house, and my grandparents’ old farm, where I spent a good portion of my childhood. It’s been a good year for rain, and the fields are all green, the cottonwoods lush.
About six miles north of town, I turn onto Trimble Lane. When I was a kid, this part of the Animas Valley was a big, open field. Now there’s a golf course here, and Dalton Ranch, a community of McMansions stacked up between the river banks and the highway. I drive past them to a little turnout by the bridge and stroll towards the river. Turbid, electric-orange water, utterly opaque, sprawls out between the sandy banks, as iron hydroxide particles thicken within the current like psychedelic smoke.
At about that same moment, unbeknownst to me, Bill Simon, who probably understands the mining-related pollution problems in this watershed better than anyone, is scurrying down to the river a few miles upstream, at Baker’s Bridge, to take some water samples. “What struck me was the intense color,” he says, later. In the days to come, that distinctive shade of orange will strike a lot of other people—millions of them, in fact—too.
Within a few hours, the river through town is empty, an eerie sight on a hot August afternoon. The bridges across the river, on the other hand, are crowded with people milling about, waiting for the slow-motion disaster to unfurl in the dark green water below them. I amble among the little clusters of people, eavesdropping. Everyone is aware that something bad happened upstream, and that the result is headed our way, but their understanding of it is unclear. One guy says a hazardous waste truck tipped over on an entirely different tributary of the Animas, spilling its load. Someone else says a plume of cyanide is coming our way. People are angry, sad, befuddled. A television news helicopter flies over, which seems odd, since the nearest TV stations are in Albuquerque, and in my naïveté I can’t imagine why people way down there would be interested in our orange river.
In the six or so miles between Trimble Lane and the north end of Durango, the river drops fifteen feet or so in elevation, thanks to that old glacier that crept through here with so much force millennia ago. As a result, the river runs slow through the broad floodplain, taking any path except for the straight one, so the slug takes far longer to reach town than anticipated. The sun lingers on the western horizon, and the river is still green. I leave to eat dinner and when I return the crowd has grown even larger. My phone dings with various news organizations asking to use my photos. The slug still hasn’t arrived as darkness falls, and most of us go home.
Late that night, the slug sneaks into town, and by morning the river is like a bright orange incision slicing its way through green Durango. The sheriff has closed the river to any kind of activity, but it probably isn’t necessary. No one is going in or even near that water; we still aren’t sure what’s in it. Downstream, Aztec and Farmington officials shut off their municipal water intakes and start calculating how long they can continue to run their taps, water their lawns, flush their toilets on storage. The Animas and the slug join the San Juan River on the edge of Farmington, promptly turning it orange, too, before slowly sliding onto the Navajo Nation. Water—life—is cut off from hundreds of small Diné farms where crops are grown for sustenance and corn for ceremony. “When we heard about this yellow plume coming down the river toward us, we didn’t know what to do,” said Duane “Chili” Yazzie, a Shiprock-area farmer, activist, and politician. “We were at a loss. It was right in the middle of the growing season, when our crops have to have water on the regular basis. To be told that our water is ruined, it is utter devastation, particularly to our elders.”2
Farmers will lose crops, and rafting companies in Durango will miss out on hundreds of thousands of dollars of potential revenue. In coming months, Republican congressmen will hold a half-dozen hearings in Washington, D.C., where, for the first time in many of their political lives, they’ll rail against an alleged polluter—in this case the EPA—and demand prosecution. The state of New Mexico and then the Navajo Nation will sue the agency over what they will call one of the worst environmental disasters of our time.
As shocking and heartbreaking as the Gold King spill and its aftermath may be, however, it’s merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The disaster itself was the climax of the long and troubled story of the Gold King Mine, staked by a Swedish immigrant back in 1887. And it was only the most visible manifestation of a slow-moving, multi-faceted environmental catastrophe that had been unfolding long before the events of August 5, 2015.
For thousands of years, humans and this river and the landscape through which it flows have been intimately entangled. The land shaped the humans, their cultures and their religions, and the humans returned the favor by building settlements, cultivating fields, hunting game, and even burning underbrush to make for better game range.
In the 1870s, however, this relationship shifted. The white settlers that arrived then were no less dependent on the land than their indigenous predecessors, and their culture, too, was shaped by this place. Yet they tended to derive less of their identity from the land itself than from its exploitation. They shaped the land, not the other way around. Silverton was not a mountain town, but a mining town. My grandparents were not people of the dirt and the river, but farmers. They pulled and pulled the riches from the earth and for so long didn’t give back. That which fuels our existence fouls our home. Our history is a history of pollution.
The history of human settlement along this river, from its headwaters high in the San Juans, down to the confluence with the San Juan River, and into Utah, has been rich, full of struggle, hardship, beauty, and triumph. It has also been one of desecration, death, poison, and blight. This land and water is sacred, and it is sacrificial.
The farmers along the Animas River are sitting down and permitting the waters of that river to be so tainted and polluted as that soon it will merit the name of Rio de las Animas Perdidas, given it by the Spaniards. With water filled with slime and poison, carrying qualities which destroy all agricultural values of ranchers irrigated therefrom, it will be truly a river of lost souls.
—Durango Wage Earner, 1907
I’M MAYBE SIX YEARS OLD and it’s June, just after the first cutting of hay, so that pungent aroma still lingers in the early afternoon air as we walk down past my grandparents’ milk barn and the hay barn and through the dank human-sized culvert that passes underneath the new highway, which isn’t so new anymore but that’s what we call it anyway.
“Maybe we can find some asparagus,” I say, darting toward the fence.
“It’s too late,” my dad says, his voice deep. “All gone to seed.”
So I pick butter and eggs—yellow toadflax—instead, bunching a bouquet up in my little fist, no idea it’s some sort of noxious scourge, already overrunning the Animas Valley. We’re going down to the Sandbar, which is what we call the place on the river below the Farm where we fish and picnic and camp. Used to be, all the farms stretched to the river and beyond, but the new highway sliced all the old homesteads in half, so a lot of the fields down below went fallow. Then my grandparents retired and sold off the lower part, anyway, but the new owners still let us go down there so it makes no difference to me.
We called it the Farm because back then it was a farm—that’s how my grandparents made a living. They had dairy cows and sheep, they had fields of hay. They had rows of corn, apple orchards, peaches, strawberries and raspberries, spinach and lettuce. What they didn’t eat, they sold. My mom and her sisters, hair in ponytails, picked raspberries for a nickel a quart and folks would come
