Unsettlement: Some Impressions of Egnar, Colorado

To be published in the Spring 2012 edition of the High Desert Journal

My dad keeps a tattered road atlas next to his telephone. On the cover is a picture of Hurricane Point in Big Sur. The green hills of the California coast are faded and white crease lines cover the ocean. Whenever I call from an unfamiliar place he finds it in the atlas and draws a little blue star with a notation next to it: Summer 96, The Farm, Unity Oregon. I used to call a lot from small western towns and he’d have to hunt for them on the map while I gave clues to the nearest city or river or picturesque place. When my girlfriend Tanya and I travel to southwestern Colorado one winter, he has to pull out a more detailed world atlas because the Rand McNally doesn’t list all of the small towns. After a few minutes of shuffling, he cannot find Egnar but says, “I see on the atlas that it must be between the area of Colorado marked Wheat and the area marked Uranium.”

The sum total of Egnar, the town, is a fading school building and a cinder block post office. It is to a town what a footprint is to a foot, a fading reminder of something else, preserved only well enough to call attention to its decay. The two services it provides, schooling and mail, also provide the only opportunities for desk jobs. To the south is the bigger town of Dove Creek, with a café and groceries, two liquor stores and a bean milling plant. To the west are the Abajo mountains in Utah, to the east the San Juans and the Sleeping Ute batholith. To the north is the Dolores river canyon and the uranium ghost town of Slickrock. The surrounding landscape is a patchwork of piñyon pine, juniper (which the locals call cedar) and Gambel oaks amongst expanses of cleared farm land.

Egnar, the people, is a scattered population of ranchers, dryland wheat and bean farmers, old miners and a few retirees and newcomers living out of sight from one another on a 7,000 ft. plateau. Egnar is a tough, weird place, full of tough, weird people. There are a lot of holes in the ground there, a lot of people with depleted lungs, depleted bank accounts and dry luck. It is not like the eastern Oregon ranching communities I’m used to, hard bitten but tightly knit. In mining country, when the hole goes dry, the digger moves on.

Our home for the winter is a derelict uranium miner's cabin that was hauled to its present location long ago. It still has trailer lights on one wall and is the last house on highway 141 for thirty miles or so.

Uranium

Philip, who owns the old miner’s shack, tells me during one of our first driving forays over the country to watch out for the green dust along the highways. “That’s uranium,” he says. It’s a green that looks vaguely malignant, like the shade my alcoholic grandmother’s hair turned when her pipes went rusty and she wouldn’t call a plumber. I’m not sure whether to believe him, but I drive by slowly anyway, eyeing the cutbanks through the safety of the rolled up windows.

When Tanya arrives a few weeks later, I repeat what I've heard about watching out for the green dust. She thinks a minute and asks, “If that’s uranium, then why do they just leave it everywhere?”

A sensible question, and the answer is that the green dust is actually Mancos shale, a sediment about as harmful as beach sand. I’d almost asked Mike, a local geologist I’d befriended, about it but decided not to. I did not want to reveal a lack of common sense, like an Iowan having to ask his neighbor what corn looks like. Mike does tell me, however, that many of the local wells are contaminated with soft coal and other minerals.

When we drive into Dove Creek for groceries it’s remarkable how many oxygen carts we see. Junked cars sit on blocks in front of worn-out trailers. We meet people who live without electricity and die of lung cancer from working in the mines. It’s a kind of western Appalachia with its own rootless underclass of uranium victims. Only no one has come here to romanticize their poverty, write songs about their plight. They are dying out too fast for that.

When I go to the local landfill, it consists of entirely unusable debris: old diapers, rotted sheetrock, worn out mattresses. A few scavengers pull scrap metal here and there. For the most part, though, anything in this county not ruined yet quickly finds a new use or else is left in the front yard to rust and shelter pack rats.

Glenda

Tanya and I are visitors, but Glenda has spent her whole life here. She lives next to us in a trailer that has been expanded into a house. Her yard is filled with old cars and car parts strung out along the highway. Bent crankshafts and old bed springs stick out of the sagebrush, a blue Toyota Corolla body rests on its side sinking into the red clay. Chickens and dogs of all sizes poke around everywhere.

Glenda has a red face so creased and worn as to make her age impossible to read. She smokes cigarettes from a long filter tip and carries a pistol in the door of her truck to shoot rabbits with. Her shoulders and legs are going lame; she has already survived a round of the cancer that killed her father. At night her chickens roost on an old ladder and look in through the window at the blue light of the television. Sometimes they freeze to the ladder and she has to cut them off the next morning. The first thing she does, when I meet her, is to pull two Old Milwaukees from beneath her snowmobiler's parka and hand me one.

Welcome to Egnar.

To survive here, Glenda has pumped gas, sprayed weed killer for the county, worked behind the post office counter and planted trees at a nursery near Cortez until she busted her shoulder. When she was younger, she swabbed liquid uranium crystals from refining tanks in Uravan. She has gathered up mud puppies and driven to Lake Powell to sell them for bait. She has made beaded earrings and tried to sell them by mail order. She has filled out envelopes for one of those work from home outfits that advertise in rural magazines. She has collected aluminum cans to pay the power bill. She has butchered elk for others in exchange for a share of the meat. For awhile, she played bass in a family country and western band.

One night when we are eating venison ribs in her house, I ask what uranium actually looks like.

“Here, I’ll show you.”

Glenda gets up and goes into the kitchen, where she rummages through a cabinet and comes out with a glass mason jar.

“My dad kept a sample from every place he ever worked. I know I’m not supposed to have it. Maybe someone will come along and want to know what it was all about; it might be worth a few dollars. My sister flushed hers down the toilet in Cortez.”

She places the jar in my hand. Inside are layers of grayish, chocolate brown and dirty yellow dust. “That top one there, that’s yellow cake, the real thing.”

I am attracted and repelled. I want to open the jar and touch the yellow cake, I want to hand it back to her. I imagine a malignant electricity, a glowing heat seeping from the jar. I give it to Tanya, whose eyes are wide. So this pile of dust is what the fuss was all about.

Glenda’s father died of prostate cancer. She says that toward the end of his life, “You could run a geiger counter over his body and the needle would spike at each joint.” That did not stop the government from delaying his compensation claims until after he died.

Though the radiation took his life, Glenda says her father loved digging uranium. He told her how, when working a thick seam of ore, he could see the outline of the river bed that had deposited it. Only he was usually standing under the river looking up. “Dad said you could see all sorts of spooky animals, faces, strange stuff in the ore. There was more to it than just dust.”

Slickrock Tailings Receptacle

North of Slickrock is Disappointment Valley. At its western end is an absurdly wide gravel road that could easily accommodate four or five cars abreast. It leads a short way north into the sage and juniper flats and ends next to a little run-off pond and a huge pile of cobbles behind a chain link fence. In the December air the pond is frozen and the surface is a green sheet of ice.

Posted signs circle the hill of cobbles. On each, black and yellow triangles overlap to form a six part circle. You don’t have to be close enough to read “Department of Energy” to know what the signs mean. The same kind of circle hangs on the side of old bomb shelter from the days of the Cold War. You see it on the walls of hospitals: Hazard! Warning! Radiation!

Behind the fence is a low polished stone, engraved with black letters. The only granite for many miles, it is a tombstone of sorts. It announces the Slickrock Cleanup Tailings Receptacle, a grave for 1,200,000 tons of radioactive tailings removed from old Union Carbide mines along the Dolores river. The stone commemorates the day of the site’s dedication in 1996 and gives the radiation count at that time: 149 Curries. I learn later that the background radiation is about 15 Curries, meaning that this pile of rocks is 10 times more radioactive than the surrounding area. The mission of the Slick Rock (sic) mill site was to provide uranium for the United States government. The source of contamination was the residual tailings that remained after the milling process extracted the uranium.

A serious groundwater contamination problem still exists at Slickrock. Once a thriving boomtown, the entirety of the town was demolished and hauled away. Radiation had permeated everything, including the houses and schools. We go there often to hike and must first drive past several chain-link enclosures circling nothing but water testing wells and gravel fields where the town once was.

The uranium was milled especially for the Manhattan Project.

Firewood

In an advantageous symbiosis, the residents of the area don’t like to use the surrounding juniper and piñyon for firewood, preferring the yellow pine and aspen I’d use only as a last resort. A large burn full of blackened and aged wood begins down the road from our house. It’s so close I don't even worry about buying a permit; I've never seen a cop on the road.

But dead wood is not the only form of energy in the burnt-over hillsides. Here and there we pull up the tin markers of old uranium claims and stumble over capped oil wells that will remain idle, I’m told, until the price goes up. In a few places there are shallow coal pits dug by settlers. Coagulated heat is everywhere beneath and above the gamma grass.

I cut an extraordinary amount of wood to heat the small cabin. I pile the dusty piñyon everywhere, circling the walls of the tiny cabin until it can hardly be seen. Both the juniper and the piñyon smell wonderful when burning, a mixed incense—the juniper astringent and invigorating, and the piñyon cinnamony and rich. Poor man's aromatherapy a friend calls it.

This is something I’m good at, finding the trees and sharpening the saw, getting the wood home and taking care of the wood stove. I have planted thousands of trees and cut dozens of cords of wood. I have participated in what is necessary to make the forests come back again and I sleep well over my choices of which snags to cut. It’s a joy unavailable to anyone who flicks a switch to unleash BTUs from oil or coal or natural gas. You can't replant the dug up earth.

Anasazi

It is easy to see how a person could spend their life studying the Anasazi. Everywhere in this country there are perfectly preserved reminders of their existence. Nowhere else, except maybe visiting the totem villages of the Haida, have I ever felt the presence of a past culture so keenly. Philip tells me that to find Anasazi ruins—the politically correct term now is Ancient Puebloan Culture—all one needs to do is check the altitude. On any mesa above a certain height something will be on top.

Tanya and I take a backpacking trip to Grand Gulch in Utah during a spell of cold, dry weather. The wind blows down the canyon, flattening our tent, sending the dogs huddling behind rocks. Frozen pools of water, dry waterfalls, bare cottonwoods. When the sun briefly aligns over the canyon walls, we stop and bask like turtles.

Along the canyon there’s a band of rock that lends itself to shallow caves. It was here that the Anasazi retreated from their agricultural existence on the mesas and fields above. Where places like Mesa Verde preserve a culture near its zenith, the caves of the gulch are fearful, poorly fortified hideouts. Climbing to some of them you can see old turkey pens, adobe bricks, dried squash and beans and, most amazing of all, fingerprints in the mud chinking.

There are many theories about why the Anasazi fled. Speculating about it is a kind of Rohrshach test that reveals more about the speculator than the subject. The culture is so evident, so well preserved, yet the cause of its dissolution is opaque. My own armchair theory is that the caves of the retreat are too open to siege to be protection from armed enemies. I think that they were running from something internal, perhaps disease. Something sudden and inexplicable that drove bands of the survivors to isolate themselves from one another in small camps. That seems to be the obvious purpose of the caves to me, to be able to pull up the ladder when the infected come to call. That's just my two cents.

Years later, I relate my version of things to a friend who has recently rafted down the San Juan river. “I think,” he says, “they discovered God. You discover God, you start to have fear. You start to fear, you start to hate the world. You hate the world, you fear your neighbors.”

Winter

The weeks pass. It is a winter of heating water on the wood stove, hauling huge piles of groceries from Cortez, of visiting Mike and his wife Deborah who teach us about brain tanning leather and geology. One slushy warm day, we succeed in replacing the pump in Philip's well, and the running water is miraculous. We stare at it, take pictures, boil up big pots of tea, watch it run out over the yard like hillbillies discovering oil. The remainder of winter is somehow different, as if having running water has ended the sense of struggle. We build a wood-fired hot tub out of a stock tank balanced over a sideways burn barrel. Even on sub zero nights, Tanya and I bask in the steaming tub, looking up into the white stars.

During a warm spell that melts snow from the Gambel oaks and softens the red mud so that we have to throw boards in the yard to walk around, my Australian shepherd JD is hit out on the highway. In the warm chinook wind, Tanya and I find him in the dark, his guts trailing out behind him like a bloody rope. We pack him into my backpack and hike up the Dolores to bury him on a scree slope where the coyotes won’t quickly uncover him.

Mostly, however, we just hang out with Glenda, talking often on the phone, eating elk and Holsum bread off of paper plates at her house. We help tar holes in her roof, and she brings us dented cans of tomatoes from a truck that crashes in Dove Creek. Tanya wins a frozen turkey playing bingo in Dove Creek with Glenda and her sister. We go fishing for whitefish with her and her boyfriend Dee, his oxygen tank and our combined five dogs.

It is good to fix her trailer, climb beneath her truck in the mud to change the oil sending unit, to bring her loads of firewood that she doesn’t quite know how to accept. It is good to have these small projects and have them be useful to someone else.

Leaving

When the spring begins and the red mud starts to unfreeze, it’s time for Tanya and me to leave. It has been a difficult winter. A winter of counting pennies, shoveling our own feces into the hot tub fire, of waiting on payments for the pump, wood stove and sheetrock that Philip will never send. There’s not much to hold us here. There are few jobs, few friends, few opportunities. It’s a sparsely populated place for good reasons. We are leaving for Oregon to plant trees, teach math, seek out empty houses that we might caretake. We are headed home.

As we pack to go, Glenda appears with a small saucer of beer. Setting it on the ground she pulls a wiggling puppy from her jacket and says, “Here you go Josh.” It’s a farewell gift, a token of Glenda's friendship. She’s felt guilty about JD's death and I’m honored that she, who disparages most people's ability to take care of animals, has thought me worthy of a new dog. It's as if she is telling us that we have stuck just a little more than most people who come for a single season.

The question I’ve asked myself all winter is how does this place replenish itself? The answer is that it doesn't.

The scattered residents of Slickrock, Disappointment Valley and Egnar live amongst rich energy sources but get their power from coal plants in New Mexico. Most of the people who dug up the rock to feed the Cold War are either dead or dying. Dee, who is illiterate and has advanced lung cancer, tells me that the government fights any attempt by the miners to get compensation for their illnesses. It’s futile for any miner to claim compensation if he or she admits to having ever smoked a cigarette. “That's their favorite strategy,” says Dee. “They just say whatever you have, no matter how much ore you dug up or sucked down, they just can't tell whether it was that or cigarettes.”

The miners beg and fight for the money to cover chemotherapy and pay their electric bills while money flows into the former Soviet Union, the enemy whose defeat was justification for the miners' shabby treatment. The money goes there to clean up missile sites, secure supplies of enriched uranium, encourage capitalist development.

Southwest Colorado is exemplified for me in the tough, sickly dryland bean plants. Looking almost dead as soon as they are born, they grow slowly and miraculously in the face of drought and wind. This is a place where communities don't seem to stick very well to the land. Even the Anasazi's agricultural prowess was short-lived, obliterated by drought, disease, or spiritual fear, and was replaced by the nomadic ways of the Utes and Navajo.

Cultures here don't sustain themselves for very long. They settle like layers of sediment over one another. A layer of Anasazi covered by the Ute and Navajo, a layer of uranium dust, a layer of beans and wheat, trace elements of the Mormons, who mostly stay over the line in Utah. The most recent layer is composed of the newcomers and retirees. Their cedar sided houses drink in the view, placed unwisely in the middle of the wind blasted, treeless mesas. Patches of hopeless ryegrass surround them, a nod to the morainal moors of Scotland.

This is a land resistant to the gentle notions of environmental sustainability and community stability. Such dreams are mostly for places with enough water, where the grocery shelves are well stocked with vegetables grown not far away. Where the palette of the land is filled with robust greens and loamy browns. In such places, longing for deep unshakeable roots grows like a Douglas fir seedling—well watered, glistening in the rain. But the soil of Southwest Colorado is striated with mysticism and detachment, hard red and sickly ochre.

An anthropologist in Durango tells me that the Navajo language contains inexplicable references to oceans and boats, two experiences that could not have been present in their culture for many, many generations. Underneath us, though, are layers and layers—miles, really—of compressed, water born sediment. Once upon a time they were the shores of a vast inland ocean. Perhaps the Navajo are remembering something. Perhaps they are dreaming.