The hot spot

I was 7, maybe 8 years old, when Dad brought the Geiger counter home. A small black box, the contraption sported a large dial on one end and a wire with something resembling a microphone on the other. Eye fixed to the dial, the old man cautiously walked around our house, checking for any hot spots. With me trailing him like a lost puppy, we covered every square foot up and down, probed bedrooms, checked the kitchen and bathrooms, visited the basement and felt out every section of the yard. Despite these best efforts, the needle wouldn’t come to life. At the end of the grand traverse, Dad breathed a sigh of relief but also looked at the box and wondered if it was broken.

“Let’s go for a little drive,” he told me, and we pulled out of Telluride and headed west into San Miguel County, the beginning of red rock country and toward a monument to the last uranium boom.

The mysterious structure had fascinated Telluride kids for decades. Its skeleton of wood stood probably three stories tall, weathered red with age and supporting a long cable that stretched high to the canyon’s rim. We never knew what it was, only that it was “cool,” leftover from the mining era and tall and weird enough to attract our interest. Friends and I would pay regular visits to the relic, using it as our “fort” and imagining a day when we could use the artifact as our secret party grounds. So it was not by chance that my Dad, the Geiger counter and I pulled up alongside the dead tower in our quest for radioactivity.

Still sitting in the driver’s seat, Dad grabbed the black box and flipped it on. Immediately a faint “tick-tick-tick-tick” sounded and the needle danced to life. We stepped out of the car and closer to the wooden skeleton. The needle redlined and the machine really started screaming. Dad just looked at me with sad eyes. That was my last visit to the “fort.”

I was 32, maybe 33 years old, when my Dad brought the Geiger counter to my Durango house. “Not this again,” I muttered to myself, watching him walk the property with the microphone in his hand and his eye fixed on the dial. He probed every corner of the house, felt out the bedrooms and tested the basement and attic, my 3-year-old daughter trailing him like a lost puppy the whole time. The two walked casually outside, started transecting the yard and then stopped dead in their tracks. From inside the house, I could hear the device jump to life: “tick-tick-tick-tick.”

There, embedded halfway down our rock wall was a blueish rock the size of a loaf of bread covered with yellow streaks. The moment the microphone came close to the rock, the needle danced to life and sound began. Dad set the instrument on top of the yellowish thing, and it started screaming and the needle buried.

At that moment, we all remembered a sad truth of life in the Southwest – we frequently tread on poisoned ground here. Mining’s forgotten legacy can stain our clothes, seep into drinking water and taint our air. It can also penetrate our deepest places and bathe our organs with radiation.

Unfortunately, it’s also come full circle – a new uranium boom is taking shape in the Four Corners region. Prospectors have filed thousands of claims over the last year, eyeing areas like Paradox and Disappointment valleys, the greater Dolores River drainage and some of canyon country’s finest nooks and crannies. Dozens of mines in the region have already or are scheduled to reopen in coming months, all with the intent of providing what will mainly become weapons-grade uranium to national and international clients. And the White Mesa Mill, in Blanding, Utah, is scheduled to fire back up early this year, processing ore and creating mountains of waste just a relative stone’s throw from our city limits. The list goes on and on and includes plans for new nuclear power plants, ambitious nuclear recyclers in nearby New Mexico and thinly veiled attempts to bring uranium mining back to the Navajo Nation despite Diné residents’ objections.

For my part, I can honestly respect mining as a profession and know that my life would be a shadow of its current self without metals (particularly that noblest of all – titanium). But I also can’t help but think of the damage that’s hit throughout our home because of mining in general and uranium mining in particular. I can’t help but think of the cost in lives and hardship on all four of our region’s corners. But most of all, I think about that man holding that Geiger counter. He defied the odds and successfully beat his first cancer, but what does the future hold? And what about those two kids, the ones who trailed behind him like lost puppies, anxiously waiting for that black box to start ticking?

– Will Sands