I should have known this with more precision a long time ago.

The fat blue line on this map, particularly at the right, is the Rio Puerco.

The Little Colorado is the thin blue line, entering the channel just east of town.

And thereby, according to the official mappers, turning that whole channel into the Little Colorado River Basin, rather than being called the Puerco, which to me would make more intuitive sense.

The Puerco proper was the site of the greatest radioactive spill in history that you never heard of, just the other side of Gallup, some eighty-plus miles upstream.

That better image is from a Department of the Interior report on the Church Rock disaster and other man-made sources of uranium and radon poisoning.

The report suggests, in language that seems almost desperate to persuade at times, that the spill never really reached as far as Holbrook in dangerous quantities. That part is believable and marginally reassuring.

But places further upstream, like Sanders and Houck and Lupton and Manuelito, were brutally impacted.

There seems to have been a massive effort to play it down and to placate the Dine’ in particular, as that tribe was hit hardest. The report feels very like a part of that placating, to my ear.

In the grand scheme, the important part is that Navajo elders and children and people in general drank viciously radioactive water for some time after the corporation and its embankment failed.

If that part doesn’t move you, be advised that their cows drank it too, and that it is roughly likely that you ate pieces of their tainted flesh once upon a time.

This land we love is damaged and ruined for proper human habitation in a thousand ways, and most of these ways we will never even personally hear of.

Our bodies know anyway.

Fuck capitalism, and weep for the bad joke of democracy long since passed.

There is nothing good about any of it. You can warble all you like about liberty, but there is no real liberty when you don’t have the freedom to drink from the river without ingesting a serious cancer risk or hurting yourself in any of those other thousand ways.

The white man’s way is the way of death, for the native people sure, but even for his own children besides.

And he will tell you with a straight face that none of it matters, so long as his truck is new and shiny and his ranch house holds every creature comfort ever devised by the satan he actually worships.

That is the noble America I see, gazing out over the murdered pretty lands.