Full Body Burden (52 page)

“Why don’t we get a box for that?” I ask.

“No, no,” he says, shaking his head and grinning. “It’s better this way. I feel like I’m getting away with something.”

T
HE NEXT
day, I rent a car and drive the sixteen miles from Denver out to what used to be Rocky Flats. There are new roads where no roads were before, houses and strip malls and office buildings where once there were fields. I drive down Indiana Street, to the spot where I used to wait at the east gate in a long early-morning line of cars. There’s nothing here now. The land is empty and still except for a number of unmarked monitoring devices and several No Trespassing signs. Legislation that would have required additional signage informing visitors of what happened here, and why it might still be dangerous, has twice been defeated. The wide paved road leading to the guard checkpoint is gone, the asphalt dug up and covered with soil and low grasses that sway slightly in the wind.

I drive past Standley Lake, where a few boats bob on the water, and into Bridledale. Many of the same neighbors are still there, although attitudes have changed. The golden, guileless optimism of the 1970s is gone. Bridledale, it turns out, was not the heaven my mother imagined. The economy declined. People divorced. Their kids married and divorced.

No one defends Rocky Flats anymore. Every family has a cancer story or knows of one. Still, if people are critical, it’s in a whisper.

The evergreen trees my mother planted along our long driveway are monstrous now, too large for the narrow strip of earth that anchors them. The rail fence is worn and sways like the back of an old horse. Our house looks weathered, a little shabby, the concrete of the front porch cracked. I knock on the door and the man who answers the door kindly listens to my request. He lets me wander around the house, all gold and avocado—little
has changed—and even the purple walls of my bedroom are the same, except with a different bed, a different bedspread. In the den a well-stocked wood fire roars, although the temperature outside is barely cool. The house feels warm and safe, a sanctuary. From the kitchen window, from which I could once see the Rocky Flats water tower, there is nothing but open space punctuated by housing developments and the deep blue mountains in the distance.

I shake the owner’s warm, damp hand and climb back into my car. It doesn’t take long to reach the cemetery in old Arvada, the rows and rows of crumbling markers on the small rise just above the square brick block that was our first house. The neighborhood has fallen into decline. The Arvada Beauty Academy, where my mother spent long afternoons getting her beehive hairdos, is gone, but the Arvada Pizza Parlor remains, the paint on the façade faint, the lettering faded. The customers don’t need a sign.

I pass through the cemetery gate with the stone marker carved with the year 1863, and drive down the pebbled road to where my grandparents are buried. Someday my father will be buried here, too. When my siblings and I helped him move out of his apartment, he gave me a worn cigar box filled with photos dating back to the forties. “You’re the family historian,” he said. “You keep all the stories.” My mother—whose death three years ago from a stroke is still so fresh it grips my heart—requested that her ashes be buried in her beloved Minnesota. Colorado was never really her home.

I sit down on the ground between the two markers and look toward the mountains. It all feels familiar. The rough grass scratches my ankles and here, above all the houses, the strip malls, the checkered patterns of housing developments that stretch as far as I can see, a meadowlark sings. Will I be buried here as well? Will a meadowlark still sing?

I inventory my body. It’s a sturdy one, all things considered. Maybe some of what my mother used to say about our Scandinavian ancestry—farmers, most of them—is true. Working the land made us strong. I’m not a farmer, or even a very good gardener. But I love the land; I love this land.

In the geography of land and the geography of the body, some things are seen and some are unseen. My stubby toes remember dim-witted Comanche, who artlessly stomped on my feet with his iron shoes, and sly Tonka, who did the same but was more intentional. My left knee has a long scar, a reminder of my rock-climbing days. Four inches below my belly button is the tiny pink smile of the C-section that brought Sean into the world. My neck bears two scars. One is a small puncture from the handlebar of my first tricycle. The second scar, more visible, is a vertical line along my neck that takes the place of my left lymph node. It keeps me mindful of the scare I had with lymphoma and the doctor who told me I had better figure out who was going to raise Sean and Nathan because it probably wasn’t going to be me.

The body is an organ of memory, holding traces of all our experiences. The land, too, carries the burden of all its changes. To truly see and understand a landscape is to see its depth as well as its smooth surfaces, its beauty and its scars.

I have spots in my lungs. I’ve never smoked. A speck of plutonium in the lung looks like a tiny starburst, a punctuation point of energy reaching out in infinitesimal pointy spires to the surrounding tissue. My spots, so far, are harmless. But other problems persist. I changed my diet and lifestyle to try to manage the symptoms I’ve struggled with my entire life, with no clear diagnosis. Karma has had several bouts of cancer related to her reproductive organs. Kurt has rheumatoid arthritis. Kurt, Karma, and I all have ongoing problems that seem to be related to immune system deficiencies: chronic fatigue, muscle ache, swollen lymph nodes, and a high white blood cell count.

“It appears that my body has no control of its immune system,” Kurt wrote recently, after a fresh round of blood tests, “but the reason behind it is undetermined. They’ve tested for just about every known disease or cancer, but thankfully all are negative. Crazy stuff, huh? Rocky Flats strikes again?”

We’ll never know for sure. Karin’s health seems to be good, but she holds fast to the Scandinavian family doctrine of never complaining and never going to the doctor.

We’re the lucky ones. Nearly every family we grew up with has been affected by cancer in some way. Some of those illnesses and deaths can be linked, directly or indirectly, to Rocky Flats.

Everything else is, as the government likes to say, nothing but conjecture. Speculation. Exaggeration. Media hype. They say there is no direct link between Rocky Flats and health effects in the surrounding communities. All contaminants are at levels that have been declared safe by the government.

It’s hard to imagine that everyone in the government believes this.

I think of the day I sat next to Mark’s body, as still as stone, at the mortuary in Boulder. How quickly time passes, and how quickly things change. Yet the emotion remains the same. I wish I had been able to say good-bye. I wonder if my father ever thinks about the time he stood at my bedroom door and I wasn’t able to open it. Would my life, his life, be any different if I had risen from that bed? I remember being a child and the sweet freedom of galloping through the fields around our house and out to the lake. That time seems very long ago.

When Kristen Haag died in Bridledale at age eleven, her father, the man who built our house, considered taking Rocky Flats and the DOE to court. Money can’t take away grief, the neighbors said. You can’t make the government into a scapegoat. It’s easy to feel paranoid about things you can’t control. Sometimes people just die of cancer. Sometimes even a child dies. These things are in God’s hands.

We don’t talk about plutonium. It’s bad for business. It reminds us of what we don’t want to acknowledge about ourselves. We built nuclear bombs, and we poisoned ourselves in the process. Where does the fault lie? Atomic secrecy, the Cold War culture, bureaucratic indifference, corporate greed, a complacent citizenry, a failed democracy? What is a culture but a group of individuals acting on the basis of shared values?

In less than a generation we have almost forgotten what happened at Rocky Flats, and why it must never happen again. In a few years it will be completely forgotten, as if it never occurred at all. Will those who walk on the trails and pitch their tents to watch the stars know what the land can’t forget? Years and decades will pass; governments and government
agencies will change. People will build homes and businesses and roads and parks on land tainted by an invisible and invincible demon. And no one will know.

In early 2011, following the reversal of the jury verdict, the plaintiffs for the Rocky Flats class-action lawsuit requested that an entire panel of circuit-court judges hear the case, a type of request that is usually granted if there is a case with broad legal impact or if there are contradictory decisions from different courts. The court denied this request. As of this writing, the Supreme Court is deciding whether or not it will review the case.

The Charlie Wolf Act has never passed.

All documentation from the 1989 FBI raid on Rocky Flats and the subsequent grand jury investigation is, after twenty-two years, still sealed. Jurors are still not allowed to speak. The crimes committed at Rocky Flats, and the full story of the environmental contamination that resulted from those crimes, are still sealed in the grand jury vault.

Who can imagine our culture, our human lives, 24,000 years in the future? The Cold War will be just one of many wars that my grandchildren will study in school. For their grandchildren, Rocky Flats will be a tiny footnote in history. Four, five, six generations are nothing compared to 24,000 years.

The bones of my grandparents have turned to dust, and all that remains are their names carved in granite. Someday I, too, will have a stone marker. I think of Mark, and the tall tree that now stands where his ashes are buried.

There will be no markers at Rocky Flats. What lies beneath will remain. A few light drops on my cheek make me turn my face to the sky. The air is suddenly acrid with the scent of raindrops and soil, a clean sharp smell, and it’s time for me to go. I watch a growling mass of clouds, as white as marshmallows just moments ago but now dark and mottled, move toward me from the line of mountains. The drops quicken, and I can see sheets of rain moving across the flat plain of rooftops. The granite stones grow wet and the ground turns to mud.

I have always loved the many moods of the sky at Rocky Flats. Turquoise and teal in summer, fiery red at sunset, iron gray when snow is on the way. The land rolls in waves of tall prairie grass bowed to the wind, or sprawling mantles of white frosted with a thin sheath of ice in winter.

But the serenity of the landscape belies the battles that still wage over who controls the land, how dangerous the levels of contamination are, and what’s to be done about it. Roughly one-third of the site is permanently fenced off due to high levels of contamination. The opening of the rest of the area as a wildlife refuge and public recreation area—about five thousand acres—is temporarily on hold.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) says it lacks the $200,000 a year it would take to build walking paths and hire staff. Many citizens remain unconvinced that the refuge is safe for public recreation.

The controversy over land surrounding Rocky Flats continues as well. Government agencies claim that the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge is safe and nearby areas are fine for homes, businesses, and
recreation. Yet at the same time a 1970 study by Atomic Energy Commission scientists showed that land now held by the FWS on the eastern portion of the Rocky Flats site—as well as an adjacent off-site area of roughly thirty square miles—had been heavily contaminated with plutonium released from the plant. The FWS is currently considering several proposals for the use of some of this contaminated land. The privately financed Jefferson Parkway Authority proposes a major toll highway on land along the eastern edge of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge that would link up with an existing beltway around the city of Denver. Completion of this project would spur even more residential and commercial development near Rocky Flats. The city of Golden, which opposes the highway, wants to build a bikeway along the same strip of land. Hundreds of local citizens signed a petition demanding that the FWS first determine the quantity, depth, and extent of plutonium contamination in the land proposed for the highway or bikeway, noting that construction itself churns up plutonium-laden dust that could pose a risk to construction workers and residents. In the fall of 2011 the FWS announced that it would not implement such a study.

The problems faced at Rocky Flats are shared by former nuclear sites around the United States and around the world. Hanford, which housed nine nuclear reactors, is one of the most heavily polluted places on earth. Parts of the buffer zone are now the Hanford Reach National Monument, established in 2000 by President Bill Clinton. Only certain areas are open to the public. Fernald, the former uranium processing facility in Ohio, released millions of pounds of uranium dust into the air and contaminated surrounding areas with radioactivity. The site is permanently closed.
Nobody can ever safely live here, federal scientists concede, and Fernald will have to be closely monitored essentially forever.