LandDesk
The Animas Valley enveloped in dust and wildfire smoke on a recent June day. With climate change, these days are increasingly common across the West. But it wasn’t always that way./ Photo by Jonathan Thompson
Impressions from a homecoming Playing the ‘used-to-be’ game in one’s old stomping grounds by Jonathan Thompson
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henever I arrive at a new-to-me place, I become a sort of human sponge, taking everything in, gawking out the windows of the bus as it rolls into town from the airport, trying to read the signs on shops even if I don’t know the language, staring at people, drinking it all in. I do the same, only with more intensity, when I come back to the oldest-to-me place of all: the southwestern Colorado town in which I was born and raised. From the moment the plane lifts off from Denver, I smash my forehead against the window, trying to match what I see on the landscape with the mental map I’ve drawn over the past half century, finding special landmarks and mumbling their names like a mantra: Black Canyon, Gunnison, Uncompahgre, Val-
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lecito, Hogback, Los Piños, La Platas, Animas. This time we fly in at night, and as the plane tilts sharply for its sweeping right turn I marvel at the orange glow from all the coalbed methane wells and the sprinkling of lights along the Animas River. It is after 10 p.m. when we land and I step out of the plane. A warm, dry breeze washes over me. In the car, driving from the airport to town, I continue the ritual, only out loud, peppering the trio that volunteered to pick me up with questions about what has changed since my last visit and subjecting them to the used-to-be game: There used to be a restaurant there called the T-Bone; that used to be the sale barn, my grandpa would take me there; and there was a sawmill over there where those fancy condos are … and a drivein theatre where those fancy condos are, and on and on. We cross the Florida River and I notice it is dry.
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That’s not unusual, I think, then remember it’s early June. Used to be the snowmelt-swollen rivers would all be running over the banks about now … used to be, used to be. Sometimes the used-to-be game is an exercise in nostalgia, a genuine yearning for the way things used-tobe. Mostly it is just timekeeping, a reminder that things and places and people change, and not always for the worse. And oh, how they’ve changed. The semi-working class college town of my youth, rife with tangible reminders of its industrial past, has transformed into a green, traffic-choked, vibrant, gentrified place, for better and for worse. The uranium tailings pile no longer blows its dust all over town, a person can soon ride their bike or walk from one end of town to the other on
