Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  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 environmen
tal 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.

  On March 11, 2011, following a level 9.0 earthquake and consequent tsunami, the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan led to the release of large amounts of radioactive material into the air and into the ocean. It was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. More than 100,000 Japanese residents in surrounding communities were forced to flee. Throughout Japan, radioactive substances were found not only in beef, milk, spinach, and tea leaves, but also in rice, an essential part of the Japanese diet. In the United States, special monitors deployed for a short time by the EPA following the accident picked up reportedly low levels of radiation from Japan all along the California, Oregon, and Washington coastline. More than a dozen cities in the United States tested positive for fallout from Fukushima in their water supplies. Scientists found radiation from Japan in milk from Arizona to Arkansas to Vermont.

  Japanese officials downplayed the accident. Initially assessed as Level Four on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), the accident was raised to Level Five and eventually to Level Seven, the highest on the INES. Skeptics in Japan and abroad accused the government of “a consistent pattern of official lying, foot-dragging and concealment.” At an antinuclear protest in Tokyo on September 19, 2011, attended by sixty thousand people, Fukushima resident Ruiko Muto compared the people of Fukushima to hibakusha, the name for survivors of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. “Day after day, many inescapable decisions were forced upon us. To flee, or not to flee? To eat, or not to eat? To make our children wear masks, or not to make them? To speak out, or to remain silent?” she asked. Many of the hibakusha have long been opposed to nuclear weapons, but because the Japanese government maintained that nuclear weapons and nuclear power were two separate and unrelated issues, few Japanese have opposed nuclear power plants. By the fall of 2011, that had changed.

  Next to Fukushima and Chernobyl, the explosion in 1957 of the underground nuclear waste tank at the Mayak plant, near Kyshtym, Russia, is considered the third-worst nuclear disaster in history, and it reveals the same troubling pattern of government silence and misinformation. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl, classified as a Level Seven on the INES, caused the evacuation of 135,000 people and the release of radioactive material four hundred times higher than what had been released by the Hiroshima bomb. It was only after radiation levels set off alarms in Sweden that Soviet officials allowed publicly that a disaster had occurred.

  At Fukushima, a twelve-mile exclusion zone for the most highly contaminated land remains in place around the plant, and officials are considering further expansion of this zone. The estimated cost to clean up the “vast areas” contaminated by the Fukushima accident is at least $13 billion. The accident at Chernobyl contaminated approximately 100,000 square kilometers (roughly 62,000 square miles) with fallout, and levels of contamination were detected all over Europe. At Mayak, hundreds of square miles around the plant are uninhabitable. Today Mayak reprocesses waste from foreign nuclear reactors for profit.

  In the United States we currently have approximately 25,000 plutonium pits in our stockpile: roughly 10,000 in nuclear warheads, 5,000 in “strategic reserve,” and more than 10,000 “surplus” pits at the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas. When production was halted at Rocky Flats after the 1989 FBI raid, the DOE lost the ability to produce plutonium pits. During its production years, Rocky Flats produced more than 1,800 pits per year. In 1998, nine years after the raid, the production of plutonium pits began again at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, with only a few pits produced per year. The DOE says that aging plutonium pits may be unreliable and new pit production is necessary to maintain our stockpile—although many specialists believe plutonium pits are stable for at least half a century, and recent studies suggest an even longer shelf life. Nonetheless, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) currently seeks to build a modern pit facility capable of producing 450 or more pits per year. Total construction cost of this facility is estimated at more than $2 billion. So far, NNSA has failed to gain full congressional support.

  Many inescapable decisions have been forced upon u
s—decisions about nuclear weapons and nuclear energy that will have far-reaching consequences with sometimes dangerous and unintended results. To speak out or to remain silent is the first and most crucial decision we can make.

  PLUTONIAN ODE

  by ALLEN GINSBERG

  I

  What new element before us unborn in nature? Is there a new thing under the Sun?

  At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative, Scientific theme

  First penned unmindful by Doctor Seaborg with poisonous hand, named for Death’s planet through the sea beyond Uranus

  whose chthonic ore fathers this magma-teared Lord of Hades, Sire of avenging Furies, billionaire Hell-King worshipped once

  with black sheep throats cut, priest’s face averted from underground mysteries in a single temple at Eleusis,

  Spring-green Persephone nuptialed to his inevitable Shade, Demeter mother of asphodel weeping dew,

  her daughter stored in salty caverns under white snow, black hail, grey winter rain or Polar ice, immemorable seasons before

  Fish flew in Heaven, before a Ram died by the starry bush, before the Bull stamped sky and earth or Twins inscribed their memories in clay or Crab’d flood

  washed memory from the skull, or Lion sniffed the lilac breeze in Eden—

  Before the Great Year began turning its twelve signs, ere constellations wheeled for twenty-four thousand sunny years