Columnist Bob Kunkel wrote (Herald, Aug. 19), “Unfortunately, this summer, the Durango-area brand had already been smudged.
Even before the spill, tourists were expressing strong displeasure with the increase in panhandling transients.
The Gold King Mine spill now adds another challenge to repairing a damaged brand.”
The Durango “brand” once again made it into the national media. Aired on Aug. 26, the TV drama “Criminal Minds” had Durango given the brand as a haven for “doomsdayers and conspiracy theorists.”
My “brand” for Durango and La Plata County is that it is my home, my community and where I choose to invest the greatest amount of my energy.
The impacts from mining history are foremost in recent comments, mainly from a negative view.
Folks forget that seeking a new life or experience in coming to Durango in the 1880s was not so different from why people come here today.
My family history includes folks who migrated to Colorado from the 1860s to the 1910s as farmers and miners. They developed a sense of place by investing themselves in the Colorado Territorial government, early statehood efforts; building our roads, churches, schools and communities.
This is a far different view of place than the attitude that miners only came here to rape and pillage. No different than thinking visitors only come here today to play on the river and get a Disneyland experience in Durango.
I personally trust that future generations are as understanding and forgiving of us as we are of the pioneers who came before. I think it is high time people rethink how they choose to brand Durango.
In A Sense of Place, in 1992, Wallace Stegner wrote:
“The knowledge of place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it.”
Gary Thrash
Durango
