River of Lost Souls. Jonathan P. Thompson

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.

       Holy Land

      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 by on the old road on their way back up to Silverton and pick up some of the bounty.

      The valley floor here is wide and flat. The glaciers pushed all the rocks downstream or ground them into coarse sand, so the river runs slow here, meandering between steep and sandy banks, nearly twisting back on itself at times like a giant, murky green umbilical cord. In the spring, when the water’s big and red and brown, listen and you might hear it eating its way through the soft earth. At the Sandbar, the banks were softened into a beach by the current. As we get close, I run off ahead of my father and brother. I take off my shoes. The sand burns my feet. The water whispers.

      I stare at the old, crushed cars all lined up against the opposite bank, their front ends underwater.

      “That was a drive-in theatre,” my towheaded, freckle-nosed brother tells me, again. “And one day the bank collapsed and they all fell in the river and died.”

      Maybe I believe him, maybe I don’t, but I do wonder what movie they were watching when it happened. Upstream from the Sandbar, around the next corner, an ancient-looking rowboat sits half buried on the gravelly shore. Sometimes we try to get it out so we can float down the river on it, but it won’t budge. An ancient boxelder tree grows at the edge of the sand, its canopy so dense and low that we can crawl under there and sleep and stay dry even in a downpour.

      Just downstream from the Sandbar, polished and crooked cottonwood branches jut out from the murky deep green swirling water. Suckers and carp and brown trout so big you don’t want to catch them lurk down there. The lost souls, the animas perdidas of the river’s name, linger there, too. And if you venture in, my grandmother says, the undertow will pull you down into the cold, deep, and dark, and you will join them. Sometimes, my brother coaxes me into wandering over to that