Full Body Burden (9 page)

Kristen’s parents do not file a lawsuit. It would be almost impossible to prove a direct connection between Rocky Flats and Kristen’s death, and the cost to sue the U.S. government is mind-boggling.
Ultimately, Rex comes to believe that matters of life and death are in the hands of God, and that Rocky Flats has nothing to do with it.

The rumors start with rabbits.
One Rocky Flats worker and then another begins to notice long-eared bunnies, lots of them, out by the 903 Pad, an area of 260,000 square feet—larger than four football fields—where more than five thousand rusted oil barrels stand. Barrels stretch nearly as far as the eye can see and have been open to the elements for years. Since 1954, as a matter of fact. There’s just no place to put them. Each thirty- to fifty-gallon drum holds waste oil and solvents contaminated with plutonium and uranium, for a total of hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid waste laced with radioactive material. They can’t be shipped, they can’t be stored, and no on-site building can hold them all. Weeds poke through the badly corroded bottoms. Contaminants leak into the soil and the groundwater that feeds into Woman Creek and Walnut Creek, and then Standley Lake and Great Western Reservoir. Rocky Flats calls it the 903 Pad, but some workers privately call it the Launching Pad, where all sorts of things are launched into the environment.

Word gets out among the workers. Those bunnies are hot.

But management has known all along. A top-secret memo, with the heading
CONTAMINATED RABBIT
, dates back to January 1962.
The rabbit, dissected for analysis, showed high concentrations of alpha radiation, particularly in the hind feet.

T
HE SUMMER
of 1969 seems apocalyptic. Images of death and destruction in Vietnam are shown on the evening news. The Manson murders stun the country, and Ted Kennedy drives a car off a bridge near Chappaquiddick Island. Apollo 11 lands on the moon and more than 400,000 people show up for three days of peace and music at the Woodstock Festival. In August, several thousand Colorado residents travel to Washington, D.C., to participate in the largest antiwar demonstration to date. The Cold War is in full swing, and Rocky Flats is busy building the heart of every nuclear weapon in the United States.
Occasionally demonstrators begin to appear at the west gate of Rocky Flats to protest nuclear war.

Except for my father’s sporadic railings about how Nixon can save the country—and possibly the world—my family is largely unaware of anything that’s happening outside our immediate cocoon of kin, pets, and general chaos. Vietnam is just imagery on television, and racial tensions are far, far away. The only conflict on the block is when my friend Danny gets teased for being Italian. “I’m a wop,” he says. He’s proud of it.

As soon as we settle into our new house, we receive more tokens of appreciation from my father’s nonpaying clients. My dad says that if I’m to have a horse, every kid in the family should have one. None of them are much good for riding. Chappie is loose-limbed and harebrained, with the golden coat and white-blond mane of a movie starlet. He has a habit of walking into fences and the sides of buildings; we suspect he suffered at the hands of a previous owner. Comanche stands for hours in the same spot, dumbly waiting for dinner. Barney has the sly manner of a mutineer deceptively packaged in the body of a sleek Shetland pony. His favorite trick is to stretch out his neck, grab the bit between his teeth, and tear madly at top speed across the field. In one single brilliant moment, he stops dead in his tracks, plants his front feet, drops
his head, and sends the rider flying like a cannonball over his ears. We all take our turns.

Barney has another useful trick. He uses his teeth to slide back the metal lock on the gate, but is polite enough to leave it open for the other horses. He goes to forage and snack on the local lawns and gardens and sometimes on the golf course. “Kris!” my mother hollers up the stairs on early mornings before school. “Go round up the horses!” We’ve scarcely moved in and the neighbors hate us. Barney seems especially fond of the garden and field of a family on the east end of Standley Lake, not far from our house. The Smiths live off the land. They have horses and cows and grow their own vegetables. Mr. Smith sometimes scolds whoever is unlucky enough to rescue Barney from his garden.

We endure a series of beloved dogs that are almost more trouble than they’re worth. Georgy Girl is first, a tall, skittish, red-haired Irish setter named after the character Lynn Redgrave plays in the movie, and the song my mother sings when she folds laundry. My father brings Georgy Girl home from the office with no warning. She’s sweet but spectacularly flings herself around the house, unable to sit still for even a minute. “Something happened to that dog,” my mother muses, and this seems true of all our dogs—something’s happened to them. We never know what exactly. Georgy Girl eventually flings herself out the front door and we never see her again. Thor, my favorite, is a long-lashed Siberian husky with arching brows and inquisitive blue eyes that never admit to the evenings he snacks on the neighbor’s chickens. He too disappears, and we suspect neighborly foul play.

Shakespeare is next. My mother hires a young woman to come in one afternoon a week to help her clean house—the mud and dirt tracked in on our shoes is constant—and she has a friend who has a friend who has a dog who needs a home. The following week the woman brings Shakespeare. “He took up the whole backseat of my car!” she exclaims. Shakespeare looks like the sheepdog on the television series
Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
. His hair hangs low in his eyes and he has trouble seeing things. Something happened to him, too—he shakes uncontrollably when anyone raises their voice, and it’s not long before my mother shortens
his name to Shakey. He’s sweet and slobbery and we can’t bear to discipline him. He takes full run of the house. One afternoon he catches a glimpse of a rabbit in the backyard and bolts through the sliding glass door downstairs, leaving behind a path of shattered glass. He’s unfazed, but that’s the end of him. My mother calls around until she finds him a new home. “He’s a little nervous,” she explains. All our animals are a little nervous.

We are, too, I guess. “Your father,” my mother likes to say, “is going down the tubes.” I like the way she cocks her head and raises her eyebrow as she says this—she makes me laugh even though I have a sinking feeling in my stomach. We hear Dad late at night, stomping around in a series of thuds and crashes as he makes his way down the hall. We watch from our bedroom windows as his car weaves up the long driveway, sometimes barely missing the trees my mother has planted. My siblings and I whisper and worry about what might happen when he’s behind the wheel of his car, day or night. Could he hit an animal? A person? Sometimes my mother lets him sleep in the bedroom, but usually he sleeps downstairs in his recliner with his secret bottle.

My mother tells us how she fell in love with my father on a blind date. She likes to tell the story. She wasn’t thrilled about the idea of a blind date—or the notion that she needed any help in the dating department—but she took it on a dare. Her best friend, a girl who had been her roommate in nursing school, set them up. After graduation both girls took jobs in public health and worked with the Chippewa tribe at Cass Lake in Minnesota. All week the nurses looked forward to the college boys who came up to visit on weekends. My father was a law student at Drake University in Des Moines, a tall, lanky man with a sweet, open face, who would graduate at the top of his class. She knew at first sight that this was the man she would marry. Then the Air Force sent him to Germany during the Korean War for two years.

Tensions were escalating between the Communist world—primarily the Soviet Union—and the West. In 1951, during the Korean War, the United States conducted its first domestic atomic bomb test since 1945, at the new Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas.
Around the same time, a Los Angeles construction company built the nation’s first underground family fallout shelter. Everyone was talking about moving to the suburbs. Some of those new suburban homes would have built-in atomic bomb shelters, including a show home in Allendale Heights, a new housing subdivision in Arvada not far from Rocky Flats. It was one of fifteen “Titan” showcase homes—homes named after the newly developed intercontinental Titan ballistic missile—scattered around the country near other nuclear weapon production sites.

My parents’ only date was the one they had before my father left for Germany. They married immediately upon his return.

What was that date like? Photos of my mother at the time show her in her nurse’s cap with careful curls and a wide smile. She was proud of her elegant gowns and numerous boyfriends, but she was a good Lutheran girl. “You don’t have to go all the way,” she confides to me, “to have a little fun.”

But this boy was different. His face was sensitive and intelligent and even then he had a slightly wounded look. After my mother’s death years later, I look for the letters they exchanged during that two-year period. She saved everything—postcards, photographs, greeting cards, ancient Tupperware containers—but there is no sign of those letters.

They wanted a secret wedding. But an attempt to dodge their parents was unsuccessful; both sets were waiting in cars on the side of the road with engines running. Photographs show a long table of faces with frozen smiles and a towering wedding cake. My mother leans over the cake, regal in a white cocktail dress and hat, an early version of Jackie Kennedy. She balances a long cake knife in her hand. My father has his fingers on her elbow and looks pinched by his tie. Their faces are slightly panicked. My mother hated convention and my father was never comfortable around family.

The families considered it a mixed marriage: my mother was Norwegian, my father Danish. My grandfather said it seemed a shame my mother couldn’t find a good Norwegian man. She’d have to make the best of it.

As soon as my father graduated from law school, they packed up the
car with a few belongings and a new baby—me—and drove to Colorado. Colorado meant a fresh start: no parents, no farms, no heavy Lutheran traditions. “If I had a wagon I would go to Colorado,” my father sang. “Go to Colorado, go to Colorado! If I had a wagon I would go to the state where a man can walk a mile high.” His fingers tapped a beat on the steering wheel. People moved to Colorado to start over. Life there was a gamble, but a good one.

The Colorado landscape was brown and dry compared to my mother’s beloved Minnesota, but she tried to adjust. Our long drives in the mountains are an attempt to placate her homesickness for trees. She loves Scandinavian cooking and art and all things Nordic, and as we grow, she worries that we might lose our sense of heritage in the homogeneity of American life, in the steady television stream of
Gilligan’s Island
and
The Beverly Hillbillies
. She tells us stories about noble Vikings and ugly trolls. She buys lefse, thin potato pancakes that look like tortillas but taste like paste, and fills them with butter and sugar. “You have to love them,” she says. “It’s in your blood.” She adores Henrik Ibsen. She plays Edvard Grieg on the stereo and shows us Edvard Munch’s painting
The Scream
. The image haunts our dreams. “That’s the Norwegian character,” she says. “We keep everything inside.” But Norwegians are also warm and generous and welcoming. “Norwegians get along with everyone,” she says, “except sometimes the Swedes.”

My father, whose Danish heritage requires no small degree of humility in the presence of my mother, rolls his eyes.

N
OT ALL
of Denver fails to notice the black plume of smoke from Rocky Flats that Mother’s Day. By August, larger groups of people begin to stand outside the west gate of Rocky Flats, holding peace signs and waving at passing drivers and the workers coming in to start their shifts. Some protesters have been regularly holding vigils at the gate to commemorate the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of August 1945. They plant small crosses in the ground next to the road bordering Rocky Flats to honor those who died. Others are there to protest the ongoing Vietnam War. But now the group is bigger, louder, more vehement. “Liar,
liar, plant’s on fire!” someone begins to chant. It catches on. “
Liar, liar, plant’s on fire!” the group shouts.

On the west side of town, not far from Rocky Flats, Sister Pat McCormick is about to get arrested for the first time. It won’t be the last. She’s just returned to Denver after six years in Bolivia and Peru. Those six years changed her life.

One of eleven children, Pat grew up on a farm northwest of Chicago. Her mother was a self-taught musician and singer in the church choir. In high school Pat learned of the Sisters of Loretto, a Catholic religious community of about 1,200 women around the country committed to improving conditions for people who experienced oppression and injustice. In 1953 Pat joined the community and graduated from Webster University in St. Louis. She was working as a teacher in Fort Collins, Colorado, when she was asked if she wanted to go to Latin America.