The Last Word On Nothing

There’s a little patch of horror growing along my weekly drive, a strange blossoming on the side of the highway. People can’t stop pulling over for it. Flowers have appeared in profusion, alpine firecrackers of penstemon and some blue-hooded species, maybe an Aconite, wolfsbane, not one I know because they are invasives seeded across a toxic cleanup site that looks like a fireworks show.

The pullout in the mountains near Telluride, Colorado, has turned hard-packed and dusty, and I’m getting used to slowing as I round the corner, idiots ahead on a winding two-lane, cars half off pavement, or pulling out at two miles per hour.

I don’t blame gawkers and picture takers, families laying down hand in hand as if fallen into the fields of heaven. I’d stop here, too, snap off some facebooks and instagrams, if the dirt weren’t sitting on half century of leached mine tailings, cancerous heavy metals in acid-broken ore, crushed, covered over, and seeded with wildflowers. I just wouldn’t.

A driver told me that living here 25 years, she’d hold her breath when passing this spot. The EPA says it’s safe, because it might be, probably is, I think? I mean, this isn’t an investigative post, but over the next couple decades is there going to be a rash of melanomas and liver cancers untraceable because the only thing people have in common is that they breathed when they drove by here?

Everywhere has places like this, beautiful and toxic, mined the hell out of. Minerals are hammered into poisonous dust and lung killers, winnowed of gold, silver, uranium to make our cars, computers, and bombs. More earth is left exposed at these sites than taken away, carcinogens and acids concentrated. Reclamation laws and the EPA are here to make sure the mess is thoroughly capped or trapped in green and red-colored ponds lined with black membrane, sometimes done so sweetly you’d never know it was there. Successful or not depends on what news you follow. Not successful in that much of the cost for repairing environmental damage from private industry falls on taxpayers. A coal mine in Wyoming shuttered without warning earlier this month, laying off 600 overnight and leaving “huge open pit mines that aren’t actively managed by trained experts — spontaneous coal fires, unsecured explosives and abandoned clean-up operations.”

Jonathan P. Thompson’s recent book “River of Lost Souls” beautifully documents a failed reclamation a few years ago that turned a pristine mountain river in Colorado yellow and killed almost everything in it.

In theory, when mining ends, the operators or the nearest responsible party returns the land to an approximation of what it was before mining started. Mineral firms glowingly tout their records, environmental groups say otherwise. The verdict seems to be that mining reclamation, when enforced, is at least marginally successful. Or, a lot more successful than if extraction companies pulled up stakes and went home like a mining company is doing in Wyoming and most of the rest of its mines across the country.

I went backpacking with my teenage son and his buddy in the desert down the highway from the flower spectacle. We crossed a clear, warm river that flows from the mountains, from mines and Superfund sites 70 miles away, said to be perfectly safe, water quality meeting EPA standards. In the more immediate vicinity, I was concerned about heavy uranium tailings, canyon rims lined with oxidized equipment, crane-like extraction towers you might never notice as you putter through, admiring epic scenery of cliffs and canyons. The worst has been capped, an entire town removed, mesa slopes and canyon heads sculpted with millions of tons of clean river stone. Most mineral extraction is messy.

My son’s buddy’s mother is a filmmaker who made a documentary, “Uranium Drive-In.” It’s about communities around here and their fight for and against mining even as cancer runs rampant among elders proud of their hard work in radioactive mines. I asked if she thought filtering, boiling, and drinking water or eating crawdads from the river would be a problem. She seemed convinced the cleanup had been thorough enough for our needs. It supplies drinking water for towns and cities downstream, adding to freshwater reservoirs that have to meet interstate and Federal standard. Excess toxic releases are still being discovered in the area, but what is one night of crawdads?

Safe or not? Is anything? What do you see in that crystal clear water coming out of your tap, or the pesticide laden roses you sweep beneath your lover’s nose? Thank goodness for regulatory laws, right?

The flowers can be seen between Sawpit and Telluride, Colorado, north side of the highway. If I had a mind to, I’d pull over and take a picture so you could see this profusion, an island of superbloom. Golf courses and grazing fields are built on reclaimed mine land. We ate that handful of crawdads out of a river flowing through more clean-up sites than I can count on my fingers, so what’s stopping me?

I don’t want to be a traffic hazard, don’t want to join the quaint throng of admirers, people after my own heart. Keep pulling over, my friends. It’s worth it. You might perish hideously someday, a tube down your throat as a machine breathes for you, but like those old uranium miners drifting off with tumescent livers and lungs, proud as can be to have had a good life, you can reflect on how beautiful that day was, how crisp the sky.