Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  A few months later, the Denver Post breaks the news of the new plant with the headline THERE IS GOOD NEWS TODAY: AEC TO BUILD $45 MILLION A-PLANT NEAR DENVER. Announcement of the plant catches everyone by surprise, including state and city officials, and the news breaks like a thunderbolt over the community. Though owned by the AEC, the plant will be operated by Dow Chemical, a private contractor that will be indemnified against any accident or mishap. The Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant will become the workhorse of an AEC complex of weapons facilities that eventually includes thirteen sites from Nevada to Kansas to South Carolina. Each AEC facility will be involved in its own particular aspect of the design, manufacture, testing, and maintenance of weapons for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

  Components and processes will be divided up around the country, but Rocky Flats will be one of two sites designed to produce the fissionable plutonium “pits” at the core of nuclear bombs. (After 1965 it will be the only site.) The whole system depends upon Rocky Flats.

  Construction of the plant is rushed.

  Few people know the deal is in the works. Not even the governor has an inkling. Colorado’s top elected officials are not informed that the plant will be built until after the decision is made and there’s no going back. But Denver welcomes the windfall. No one knows what the factory will produce. No one cares. It means jobs. It means housing. Contractors, the local power plant, and local businesses all look forward to the “juicy plum” to be known from now on as Rocky Flats.

  It’s the Cold War. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 may have ended one war, but they started another. The perceived Soviet threat is an ever-present shadow in American life. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 creates an impenetrable wall of secrecy around the U.S. nuclear establishment. All government decisions and activities related to the production of nuclear weapons will be completely hidden. Information about nuclear bombs, toxic and radioactive waste, environmental contamination, and known and unknown health risks to workers and local residents is all strictly classified.

  And no one asks questions.

  An editorial in the Denver Post predicts that Rocky Flats will be “a source of satisfaction to all residents who have an abiding faith in Colorado’s destiny and future greatness.” The newspaper reports that workers on the project will be safer than “downtown office workers who have to cross busy streets on their way to lunch.”

  The announcement is made simultaneously in Denver, Los Alamos, and Washington, D.C. The plant site in Jefferson County has been chosen for “operational values,” including the fact that the land is nothing but an old rocky cow pasture, “virtual waste land.” Officials from the AEC emphasize that no atom bombs or weapons will be built at Rocky Flats, only some unspecified component parts. The plant will not give off “dangerous wastes” or use large quantities of water, gas, and electricity. When questioned further by reporters, AEC spokesman Dick Elliott states adamantly, “Atomic bombs will not be built at this plant.”

  One small but devastating error escapes notice. The site criteria specifically state that the wind passing over the plant should not blow toward a major population center. But there is a mistake in the engineering report. Engineers base their analysis on wind patterns at Stapleton Airport, on the other side of Denver, where winds come from the south. Rocky Flats is well known for extreme weather conditions—rain, sleet, snow, and especially the prevailing winds, including chinooks that travel down the eastern slope of the Rockies from the west and northwest, directly over Rocky Flats and straight toward Arvada, Westminster, Broomfield, and Denver. Called “snow eaters,” chinook winds occur when the jet stream dips down and hits the fourteeners—the 14,000-foot mountains west of Denver—where they lose their moisture. The winds warm as they race down the lee side of the mountain range, and by the time they reach flat land, they’re hot and often exceed 100 miles per hour. Snow melts overnight. Sometimes chinooks snap telephone poles, blow out windshields, and overturn vehicles in the area around Rocky Flats.

  One employee who notices the error is Jim Stone. An engineer hired to help design Rocky Flats before it opens, Stone is a careful and thorough man. Born during the Depression, he was sent to a Catholic orphanage when his parents couldn’t afford to raise him. His path to becoming an engineer has been hard won, and he brings years of experience to his job at Rocky Flats. He warns against the location of the plant “because Denver is downwind a few miles away.” He is ignored.

  The name Rocky Flats is taken from the dry, rolling land dotted with sage and pine trees, a name chosen by early homesteaders who raised cattle and hay. Now it will no longer be ranchland. The money is in housing. Jefferson County and the entire Denver area are booming. Just over half a million in 1950, by 1969 the population of the Denver metro area has more than doubled. Jefferson and Boulder counties are two of the fastest-growing counties in the entire country. Thomas Mills, the mayor of Arvada, worries about housing. Rocky Flats plans to hire at least a thousand permanent workers immediately, and unlike in other nuclear towns, such as Los Alamos, workers will not be housed on-site. “The housing situation is rough here. We’ll receive the brunt of all that traffic to the plant because we’re on the only direct route to it,” Mills says. “The city is comprised mostly of small homes. There really is only one large apartment house.… It’s going to cause us lots of headaches.” By the first week of March 1951, extensive new home construction has begun.

  The plant is surrounded by two tiers of barbed-wire fence stretching ten miles around the circumference of the core area. The first tier, three feet high, is to keep cattle out. The second tier, nine feet high, is electrified and patrolled by guards with guns, high-powered binoculars, and, eventually, tanks. With the exception of a two-story administration building, the plant’s buildings are built low to the ground, in ravines cut deep into the soil. The factory is almost completely invisible from the road. By early 1952, things are in full production. By 1957, nearly 1,600 people work at Rocky Flats. Radioactive and toxic waste have to be dealt with from the beginning. Effluence is run through a regular sewage disposal plant and empties into nearby Woman Creek. Solid and liquid waste is packed into fifty-five-gallon drums. Much of what remains is incinerated. What spews from the smokestacks of the production buildings is expected to disperse by the time it reaches the outer limits of the plant boundary.

  The product that comes off the factory line at Rocky Flats is a well-kept secret.

  By 1969, more than 3,500 people work at the plant. No other nuclear bomb factory has ever been located so close to a large and growing population.

  WE BEGIN what we do best as a family: collecting pets. They come and go. Fluffy, a gray tabby who melts in my arms when I rock her on the backyard swing, lasts only a few weeks before a neighbor’s dog gets her. Melody is a sweet-natured calico cat who disappears almost as quickly; when my sister Karma sees a photo of a similar-looking cat in a glossy magazine, she tells me that Melody has run off to become a famous cat model. We drive a dachshund to neurosis by chasing him around the house. Fritzi is then sent to the home of an elderly couple to recover. He never returns. My mother takes us to the Arvada Pet Store and buys me a green parakeet I name Mr. Tweedybopper. Karin gets a tiny turtle, Tom, in a plastic moat, and Karma gets a pair of hamsters. When they succumb to the various hazards of our household—Mr. Tweedybopper catches a draft, Tom Turtle dehydrates, and the hamsters successfully plot an escape—we visit the pet store again.

  My father endures our ever-expanding household with little comment. He spends Saturdays—the only day we see him—mowing the backyard in Bermuda shorts, black socks, and worn penny loafers. My sisters and I dance along behind him in the clipped path, the scent of the grass thick, sweet, and heady. Saturday is also trash day. We help Dad pack up all the household trash and take it out to our incinerator, a cement-block monument in the backyard, blackened from use. We take turns pushing trash in through the trapdoor at the front. Everything goes—cans, paper, plastic, food, coffee
grounds. Dad lights a match and we watch the pieces catch and burn and the oily smoke curl up into the sky.

  WITH THE birth of my brother, Kurt, the house reaches its limit. My father says he doesn’t have room to think, and my mother claims she’s losing her mind. Our Sunday drives take us out by Rocky Flats, through empty landscapes of planned housing developments, dirt roads drawn in chalk, and squares of land separated by wooden spikes with fluttering orange ribbons. Bulldozers push piles of earth and dig rows of deep foundations like a vast potter’s field. My parents sit up late at night at the kitchen table, looking at blueprints and adding up numbers.

  “Guess what, kids,” my mom says. “We’re moving to a new house.”

  Our house begins with a deep rectangular pit. My mother drives us out in the station wagon, a long green lizard of a car with no seat belts, so we can watch. No one back then has seat belts; if they do, they don’t use them. My father takes pride in not buckling up.

  Carpenters arrive in weatherbeaten pickups. The soil is rocky and the workers cuss. We aren’t supposed to hear, even if it is in Spanish. There is a lot of pounding. I remember the bones: two-by-fours reaching to the sky, anchored in concrete.

  Our skeletal house stands on nearly two acres at the end of a road that dips down to a small hill, where our driveway begins. Not a long driveway, but long enough to set us apart from everyone else. There is no grass or trees, only mud. We look out from the freshly poured concrete of our front porch and see lines of spindly houses: streets laid out for pavement and front yards of raw earth waiting for sod, doors and windows, mortar and bricks. All the pieces ready to be put together. Some families have already moved in with their dogs and tricycles and motorcycles and an occasional horse stabled in the backyard.

  The developer calls it Bridledale. My mother calls it heaven. Bridledale represents the golden dream of suburban life and all its postwar promises.

  The bills begin to mount and our new house is still not finished. My father spends more time at the office. Some evenings, if he’s home from work, we go to the McDonald’s near the old bowling alley, where the dry cleaners used to be. Now two shiny arches loom yellow in the sky. “What does this represent?” my dad asks. He never waits for a response. “This represents change,” he says. The sign out front shows how many hamburgers have been sold. Millions. Who eats all those hamburgers? we wonder. “Out of the car,” Dad orders. He’s in a hurry. He’s always late and he’s always in a hurry. The world gallops two steps ahead of him and he never catches up.

  We stand at the shiny counter while he orders. Six cheeseburgers. Six Cokes. Six orders of fries. The room is clean and efficient and people stand politely in line. The clerk crisply folds the top of each white bag, and my dad carries them to the car and stacks them together on the front seat, where no one is allowed to sit.

  “Can we have just a bite?” Karma asks.

  “No.”

  “A fry?” Kurt, now a toddler, is sandwiched between his sisters. His hair is shaved close across the top of his head, a bright blond fuzz.

  “No.” Dad smiles. He’s pulled off his tie, and the crisp shirt he put on this morning is crumpled and damp. “Sit tight.”

  My mother forbids us to eat any of it until we get home, lest only empty white sacks arrive. It’s ten minutes there and ten minutes back and temptation is strong. My dad has a game on the radio turned up loud, and the four of us sit cheek by jowl in the backseat, fighting over property lines. Occasionally the game is interrupted by the irksome buzz of the Emergency Broadcast System. Dad mutters along with the game, but eventually his hand wanders up over the back of the seat, fingers pacing like spider legs. “Who wants a pinch?” We squeal. The hand descends, waving, searching for an elbow or knee. “Who needs a tickle?”

  On the way home we stop at Triangle Liquor, where an amiable man stands at the counter, a black-and-white television flickering behind him. He looks out to the parking lot, counts heads, and adds the right number of cherry suckers to the bag while my dad digs for his wallet. Time is short. We grab as many french fries as we can before he strides out, slides back into the seat, hands out suckers, and tucks the brown paper bag with the big square bottle beneath his seat.

  When my mother asks me later if we stopped at the liquor store, I say no. I know the rules. I know what not to say, what subjects are taboo, and what secrets must remain secrets.

  PEOPLE COME to see my father with all sorts of problems, and his law practice grows. Divorces. Speeding tickets. Drug charges. DUIs. I think he must be very wise. He works in a small brick office with few windows and comes home only to sleep. His waiting room is filled with overflowing ashtrays and people whose faces are rough and tired. Within walking distance of his office is a Dolly Madison ice cream parlor and a smoke-filled bar. On Saturdays we go with Dad to work so our mother can get some time to herself. After we spend a couple of hours banging the keys and spinning the ball on his secretary’s worn Selectric typewriter, Dad gives us money and the four of us file down the street for chocolate sundaes while he heads to the local bar. Sometimes he just sits at his desk and drinks straight from the bottle in his desk drawer. We finish our ice cream and patiently wait until he tells us to get into the car.

  My mother doesn’t like my dad to bring clients to the house, but soon some of their possessions begin to appear. A clock, a set of dishes, a car that sputters and burns oil and has to be hauled away. If people can’t pay their bills, he takes whatever they can give. Sometimes all they can give is a promise, and that’s okay, too.

  One day a client drives up in an old truck pulling a shaky, single-stall horse trailer and unloads a tall, ancient sorrel horse named Buster. “Now you kids can learn to ride,” my dad declares. Both he and my mother spent their childhood summers on family farms in Iowa. Every family needs a horse, they say. Even in the suburbs. For twenty dollars we can keep Buster in a nearby field until our new house is ready. One of the best things about Bridledale is that we can have horses.

  Buster turns out to be a dubious gift, his back so bony and sharp no one can endure sitting on him bareback. We think we’re saving him from the glue factory, but he’s so far gone that he spends only a couple of weeks in our care before he’s loaded back into the shaky trailer and taken away.

  But the damage is done. I want a horse now, badly. A real horse. My grandmother in Arizona sends me a collection of tiny white porcelain horses and they prance across the ledge of my windowsill in full equestrian joie de vivre. I don’t care for dolls or dresses or Easy-Bake Ovens. I dream of pintos and palominos, Morgans and Thoroughbreds and Tennessee Walkers.

  I hear whispered conversation in the kitchen regarding plans for my birthday party. “She still remembers the rocking horse she lost in the fire,” my mother says.

  There is a long pause.

  “I know a man with a horse,” my dad says. “A good horse. And he owes me something.”

  THE BEST way to watch the stars is lying flat on my back, in the backyard on our big trampoline cool with dew. Our house is far enough out from the city that the night sky is as black as soot and the stars shimmer in tiny pinpricks, with the veil of the Milky Way spiderwebbing across the sky. Sometimes the moon is nothing more than a thin curl of ribbon, and other nights it’s round and full and portentous, a pregnant beacon. And yet I know all its brilliance is borrowed. The moon has no light of its own; it pirates its light from an invisible sun.

  The other beacon in that night is Rocky Flats. The lights from Rocky Flats shine and twinkle on the dark silhouette of land almost as beautifully as the stars above, but it’s a strange and peculiar light, a discomforting light, the lights of a city where no true city exists. It, too, is portentous, even sinister—if only one could have the ability to see beyond the white glimmer, to see what is really there.

  In the daylight, we can see the Rocky Flats water tower from our back porch. “What is Rocky Flats?” I ask my mother.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s run by Dow
Chemical. I think they make cleaning supplies. Scrubbing Bubbles or something.”

  Neither of us likes housework very much, so we leave it at that.

  THE DAY Tonka arrives, the field behind our house smells of melted snow even though spring flowers poke through the mud. Tonka comes in a two-horse trailer pulled by a white pickup and he is everything Buster was not. Young. Frisky. And he’s never had a bit in his mouth.

  “He’s not quite broke yet,” Glen explains. Glen is a cowboy, the real thing, and we know he’s in some kind of deep, secret trouble if he’s working off a debt for my dad. His girlfriend comes along. She’s short and pretty and sits on the tailgate of his truck. My mother wonders aloud if Glen’s wife is at home.

  Tonka is the most gorgeous creature I’ve ever seen. Brown and white patches splash across his coat. He has a long cream stripe across his left shoulder and a narrow white blaze down his nose. His legs are so white it looks like he’s wearing silk stockings.

  “Hey, Krissy,” Glen calls. I hate that name. I jump off the fence I’m straddling with my sisters, and he hands me a piece of horse candy. With his feathery lips Tonka nibbles at my neck and arms and then plucks the candy from the palm of my hand. “He likes you,” Glen says.

  “Let’s get her on!” my dad says. My mother waves from the back patio where she’s getting the birthday cake ready.

  “Well,” Glen says, “I guess she can ride bareback.” He swings me up across Tonka’s smooth brown back and hands me the reins. “Just hang on tight, honey. Grip with your knees.” The bridle is nothing more than two strips of leather and a rawhide cord across Tonka’s nose. “Just give him a little neck rein to make him turn. You know how to do that?”

  I shake my head.

  “Just press the reins across this side if you want to go left and this other side if you want to go right. Pull straight back and he’ll stop.”