Review by Ed Quillen
Local Fiction – July 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Union Park
A novel by Phil Klingsmith
Published in 2005 by Dunsmith Publishing House, Ltd.
ISBN: Pending
UNION PARK is a famliar term to those of us who follow Colorado’s water wars. It’s a basin a few miles southeast of Taylor Park Reservoir in the Gunnison Country, and its outlet is a steep narrow canyon, which makes it good geography for a dam and reservoir. It also sits near the Continental Divide, thus minimizing the cost of canals and tunnels to move any stored water to the cities of the Eastern Slope.
Proposals to build a reservoir at Union Park come and go; Aurora was interested about 20 years ago, but lost in court. Then interest waned, until this year, when it started being promoted by Jim Dyer, a state senator from Littleton.
The premise of this novel is that Union Park Dam was actually constructed in the late 1980s, with a dedication in the fall of 1990. And then on a bone-chilling night in January of 1991, an immense series of explosions put a hole in the base of the dam with cracks extending 392 feet to its top. Other blasts destroyed pieces of the diversion conduit that led to the tunnel under the divide.
Four local guys, all experienced outdoor types and most of them with military experience, pulled it off almost perfectly. One had to shoot a security guard, though – another local they’d gone to high school with. And they leave behind the tip of a broken cross-country ski which might turn into evidence.
Once word gets out, it’s a national story, with the media speculating that it must have been done by foreign terrorists. The county sheriff knows better, as does the FBI lead agent who soon arrives. They figure it had to be a few locals who came in via Taylor Park in the afternoon before the blast, and went unnoticed amid the skiers, snowmobilers and ice fishermen. The culprits must have skied out, probably over Cumberland Pass. And the cops soon figure out that the C-4 explosive charges were remotely triggered from a transmitter they find on the snowpacked trail up the pass.
BUT WHO WERE the culprits? The Gunnison Country abounded in people who hated the Union Park dam and the idea of losing their river’s flow to a distant city. Even when the FBI’s data banks narrow the list to military veterans capable of the job, there’s still a long list of potential suspects, and nobody is talking – a novelty in a gossippy mountain town where everybody knows everybody else’s business.
And the lack of gossip gets even weirder when the main FBI agent is murdered in his own bed at a local motel.
Union Park is a lot of fun to read, its main characters are well drawn, and it moves quickly. Along the way, Klingsmith gets in some good observations about the relationship between rural Westerners and their national government: One of the bombers “knew he hated the government, he hated the IRS, he hated officials, but he loved America. In his mind, there was no inconsistency in his viewpoints.”
However, this book, like many local productions, could have used more editing. There are two different dates for the expedition of Lt. John Gunnison, the Army explorer who left his name on the valley. In Union Park, the full moon rises at about three in the morning, when full moons actually rise at sunset, and the dam was built by the Army Corps of Engineers, which specializes in river-navigation and flood-control projects.
Such mistakes could have been easily rectified. The full moon could have come out from behind the clouds at 3 a.m., and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which specializes in storage and diversion projects, could have built the dam (or if not, there could have been an explanation as to why). But I have to confess that I was perplexed at the end, when a lot of the plot seemed to revolve around a decision by the U.S. attorney in Grand Junction to issue summonses to the suspects, rather than have them arrested. It was obviously important, but I couldn’t figure out why, and I’ve been hanging around courthouses for a long time.
Those flaws are just annoyances though. This is a good yarn with fine characters in spectacular but familiar territory, and it’s got sex and violence and a troubled marriage and courtroom drama, too. It’s a great way to while away a summer afternoon, glad that you’re not tramping around Taylor Park when it’s -47ยบ with the wind coming up.
(This book was reviewed from the galley. It is scheduled to emerge in bound form at a book-signing with the author from 1 to 5 p.m. on July 14 at the Book Worm, 211 N. Main St. in Gunnison.)
