There is perhaps no one more suitable to tell the backstory of the Gold King Mine spill than Durango’s Jonathan Thompson.
His book, River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster, is much more than a chronology of events leading up to the now infamous spill.
At its core, Thompson’s debut work tells the tale of the Four Corners, its history, its people and their interaction with the land – all from the perspective of a fourth-generation Durango resident.
“I think this book was boiling in my brain for a long time, but I didn’t realize it,” Thompson said. “And then the Gold King happened.”
On Aug. 5, 2015, while working north of Silverton, the Environmental Protection Agency dug too far into the collapsed portal of the inactive Gold King Mine, unleashing a torrent of wastewater into the Animas River.
As the spill turned the river an electric hue of orange, it also awoke a consciousness in many Western towns that the legacy of mining pollution continues to have detrimental ramifications.
But Thompson said, in a phone interview, that he took the spill in stride. (He is currently living in Bulgaria where his wife teaches at a university.)
Over the years, he had seen the river turn all kinds of colors – orange, brown, black. What was unprecedented, however, was the reaction the Gold King spill elicited.
“I went down that day to look at the river and saw all these people waiting for the plume,” he said. “News helicopters, people from France asking to use my photos. That’s when I realized it was a big deal on that level, just because it was getting so much attention.”
It wasn’t long after the spill and the beginning of the road toward a long-awaited Superfund designation – the EPA’s official program for cleaning up hazardous waste sites – that Thompson decided to write a book.
While the spill serves as the catalyst for the book, the story is more a tale of how people have lived on the land in this pocket of the American Southwest, where industry and communities have had a tumultuous relationship.
In a way, River of Lost Souls reads as Thompson unloading years and years of deep knowledge and perspective on the region.
“It felt good to have an excuse to put all this stuff down that’s just been gathered from living in a place so long and paying attention,” he said. “And people need to know the context because it’s kind of crazy in some ways what we’ve done to this river and this landscape that we all purport to love, call home and cherish, and there’s been a long line of nasty stuff going on.”
Thompson’s family history traces back to the first waves of Western settlers to stake roots in the Animas Valley. More recently, his father, Ian Thompson, was a renowned archaeologist and historian of the area.
Jonathan Thompson’s part in the story started nearly two decades ago when he took a job with Silverton’s only newspaper – the Silverton Standard & the Miner – as a “cub reporter,” as he likes to call it.
Entrenched in small-town politics, Thompson was awarded an intimate view into a town reeling from the loss of the mining industry and its stubborn transition to a tourist economy – and all the struggles and personalities that came with it.
After a few years, Thompson left the Silverton Standard, only to start a competing newspaper, the Silverton Mountain Journal. A few years later, however, he ended up buying the Silverton Standard. He is now a contributing writer for High Country News.
“Everything you wrote, you knew you were going to see that person as soon as the paper hit the streets, and if you portrayed them in a way that they didn’t like, you were going to hear about it,” he said.
Thompson, with his deep family roots in the area and work history, has an unmatched institutional knowledge of what’s happened to this small mountain hamlet. And his story reads as such.
He offers a comprehensive history of the settling of Silverton and Durango, numerous true stories of the Western frontier and explains with strong storytelling prowess just how nasty the business of mining was in the late 19th century.
Even surprising himself in his research for the book, Thompson tells the long history of people downstream of Silverton fighting miners, taking them to court, petitioning legislators and doing everything they could to stop the pollution.
“They were essentially environmentalists, but we wouldn’t call them that then,” Thompson said. “They were ranchers worried about their fields, and it was happening everywhere in mining country.”
In many ways, Thompson said he benefited from putting the finishing touches on the story from nearly 6,000 miles away.
“It was good because you do get more distance, and you can zoom out a bit and see the big picture a little bit more,” he said.
Perhaps most successfully, River of Lost Souls puts the interplay between mining and the Western settling of Silverton and Durango into geographical context with the often-overlooked downstream communities in New Mexico and the Navajo Nation.
While the mines of Silverton are isolated high atop the San Juan Mountains, the headwaters of the Animas River eventually spill into the San Juan River and serve as irrigation and drinking water for thousands of people in the watershed.
It’s these dispersed communities that are often left out of conversations.
“There is an isolation that goes on in our region where we don’t realize the connections,” he said. “But that’s where all this water comes from, and if something goes wrong, we’re in trouble, too. We’re all downstreamers.”
Despite the long road toward solutions – in the complicated Silverton mining network, Superfund cleanup could take up to 20 years – Thompson offers a sense of hope.
“If there’s a lesson to be learned or something, these companies, it would be great if people would put as much innovation and creativity and thought into protecting the environment from mining as they do into the technology to make more profit,” he said. “It just seems like some shift in consciousness that could do it, and it is being done on a certain level.”
jromeo@durangoherald.com
If you Go
Durango author Jonathan Thompson will discuss the Gold King Mine spill and his new book, River of Lost Souls, at 6:30 p.m. April 11 at the Durango Public Library, 1900 East Third Ave.
