Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  So … all those James Bond films were perfectly correct: when the evil scientist’s lab is about to blow, the AH-OO-GAH horn really does sound. I followed my DOE escort, Eric Olds, out into the parking lot, along with the poor excuse for an evil scientist I had been corresponding with for over a year. Randy Brich was a “Tanks Focus Area” physical scientist working for the DOE, and not much into world domination. He was, in fact, an obsessed windsurfer with a minor preoccupation in mountain biking.

  Randy had offered to set up a raft trip down to the Hanford Reach, inarguably the most pristine and unspoiled stretch of the Columbia River. It was, Randy said, very much as it had been when Lewis and Clark camped nearby in 1805. There were elk and salmon and sturgeon and egrets and herons and white pelicans and peregrine falcons and ferruginous hawks, along with pygmy rabbits and several varieties of rare wildflowers. In fact, because the area was restricted for fifty years, biologists had only recently begun an inventory of flora and fauna. In 1996, for instance, two plants previously unknown to science and dozens of new species of insects, including seven new species of bees, were discovered.

  Before the float trip, however, Randy thought I might want to tour the Hanford Site. The irony was that the unspoiled stretch of river and the toxic waste dump were one and the same.

  We piled into a DOE van. Eric drove us to the restricted site, where we presented our credentials to armed men at a gate and rolled out onto the flat, arid landscape along the Columbia River.

  The remains of a few dry orchards, untended for over fifty years, stood gnarled on the sage-littered steppe: arthritic shapes against a baleful gray sky. Apricot trees. Cherries. The people who planted the orchards back in the late 1930s and early ’40s believed that the basin of the Columbia River could rival or surpass California’s Central Valley in food production. Yes, the land was a steppe-shrub environment—a desert, most would say—but the Grand Coulee Dam, just upriver, had been completed in 1941. Irrigation water would be plentiful. The low-lying basin, set in the rain shadow of the Cascades, had a growing season that started two weeks earlier than California’s. The future was bright.

  But then, in January 1944—in the midst of the Second World War—the government claimed the cities of Hanford and White Bluffs. Over 1,300 people were given 30 days to evacuate, and the government confiscated 560 square miles of land along a 52-mile stretch of the Columbia River known as the Hanford Reach. Massive work crews—more than 150,000 men and women—hired to “do important war work” began breaking ground.

  Aside from required housing, 554 mysterious buildings were constructed at Hanford in only 30 months. The soil, laid bare in the frenzy of construction, was whipped by fierce desert winds into vicious swirling dust storms that dimmed the sun, snarled traffic, and sand-blasted exposed skin. Despite the high wages paid, hundreds of workers typically left the Hanford Site after one of these “termination winds.”

  Only a few top scientists and engineers knew the purpose of the project. Some workers joked that it had to be President Roosevelt’s summer home. But no one talked about his or her job. FBI informers were everywhere. People were fired for injudicious comments. Thefts were not prosecuted because the stolen material would become a matter of public record at a trial. The secrecy was so complete that Vice President Harry Truman was not informed about the nature of the Hanford Project until President Franklin Roosevelt died.

  On July 16, the first atom bomb, code-named Trinity, was test-fired at Alamogordo Bombing Range in south-central New Mexico. It was armed with plutonium produced at the Hanford Site.

  On August 6, 1945, another atom bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Japan, killing more than 64,000 people. The Hiroshima bomb was fueled with uranium produced at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Three days later, a blast of blinding light mushroomed over Nagasaki. Seventy thousand people died. Human bodies simply evaporated at ground zero while, at the periphery of the blast, others shivered and collapsed into ashes before the nuclear termination wind.

  The plutonium that fueled the Nagasaki bomb was produced at Hanford B reactor.

  B Reactor was built and producing plutonium in only fifteen months. Today, it is a pile of weathered gray cement blocks several stories high, designed in the square Lego-block architecture style of the military-industrial complex. We were met at the door by a volunteer tour guide, Roger Rohrbacher, who had come to work at Hanford in the spring of 1944. “I thought I was coming to a chemical plant,” he said.

  We moved down a gray hallway, past water pipes stacked on water pipes, all sporting a bewildering mass of round hand cranks used to open and close valves. The Hanford Site was chosen partly because water from the Columbia could be used to cool the reactor. It required seventy thousand gallons of water a minute. Red tags hanging from some of the valves read: “Deactivated System. Deactivation Complete 2/22/68.”

  The reactor, Roger said, was built on a twenty-three-foot-high slab of concrete. We passed through a doorway and stared up at the front face of the reactor. It loomed three stories over us, thirty-five feet high, thirty-five feet wide, and looked like nothing so much as a giant punchboard. Except that the pins that fitted into the graphite holes were forty-five-foot-long rods. There were 2,004 of these “process tubes,” which contained uranium that was converted to plutonium (and other nasty fission products) by the bombardment of neutrons.

  In the dim light, the face of the atomic pile—“we called it ‘the unit,’ ” Roger said—seemed vaguely unreal, like something designed for a Buck Rogers space opera. I glanced up into the darkness. There was a catwalk to one side of the reactor where two spectral figures in full yellow radiation suits stood looking down at us, silhouetted in the dim light from an open doorway on the third floor.

  “What are they doing?” I asked Roger.

  “Completing the decontamination,” he said. “Desks and file cabinets and stuff up there.”

  We moved around the back of the pile to the control room, where there was a chair for the reactor operator. It was positioned in front of a curving green wall in which there were nine gauges. It looked a bit like the cockpit of a commercial jetliner, only much less complex. I saw something labeled “spline coiler control.”

  To the right of the desk where the reactor operator sat was the back of the pile, and there were the 2,004 tubes, each with its own water-flow meter. A sign said, “Caution: Bumping panel may cause SCRAM.”

  “Scram” is the universal word for “reactor down.”

  During the Cold War, Roger said, eight more reactors were built at Hanford. People of Roger’s generation are damn proud of the work they did at the site. In their view, it won the Second World War, and it won the Cold War. The Richland High School football team, the Bombers, wear helmets emblazoned with mushroom clouds.

  All nine Hanford reactors are decommissioned now, and the DOE, after years of secrecy and downright lying, has initiated a policy of openness. Seventy-five percent of the nation’s most toxic nuclear wastes, we are now told, are buried at Hanford: 54 million gallons of highly radioactive waste stored in 177 underground tanks, mostly buried in what is called Area 200. The DOE says that it will take “decades” to clean the area. The current, unofficial target date is 2035.

  Officials at Hanford encourage visitors to think of the deadly toxins festering there as “legacy wastes”: a legacy of the Second World War, a legacy of the Cold War, a legacy of victory.

  The Columbia River rises in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. The waters flow south into the United States, abruptly turn west, and empty into the Pacific north of Portland. In between, in the state of Washington, there are ten dams along the Columbia, forming a series of lakes and reservoirs. The last of the free-flowing Columbia is the Hanford Reach, fifty-two miles of bright blue water flowing past boxlike concrete munitions plants and through a desert painted in dull, sage-stippled pastels. The land, in its undeveloped and extravagant abundance, is another legacy of Hanford, and an entirely unintended one at that.

  Less than 5 pe
rcent of the 560-square-mile nuclear reservation has been developed. The river and the land, including two wildlife reserves comprising nearly ninety thousand acres, have been protected from any development for over fifty years. Now that Hanford’s plutonium mission is over, the DOE plans to release the land it confiscated. The strange and fortuitous irony is that the security zone created around the nuclear munitions plants left the land undeveloped and a significant stretch of river undammed. Consequently, the Hanford Site supports populations of fish, bird, and insect life threatened with extinction elsewhere. Several species of salmon spawn in the waters below the reactors, and proponents of a Senate bill to designate the Hanford Reach a Wild and Scenic River argue that such protection is the easiest and least expensive method of the salmon-restoration programs mandated by federal courts.

  Permission to camp along the reach was a matter of some bureaucratic maneuvering, requiring several weeks’ effort and a slew of letters. Randy Brich, who spearheaded the effort, described it this way: a float trip courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy, sponsored by the Desert Kayak and Canoe Club and underwritten by Battelle’s Pacific Northwest national laboratory.

  The river was running at about 5 miles an hour, but the waters were high, deep blue under a cobalt-blue sky, and almost glassy. Pat Wright, a Battelle safety officer, and I took turns rowing his drift boat and drinking beer, flowing gently down the stream in company with a kayak, a couple of catarafts, and a canoe. Most every floater worked at Hanford.

  The gray brick buildings of the Hanford Site scrolled by on our right. Pump houses and cooling stacks and pipes running into and out of blocky gray cement buildings looked odd and out of time, rather like the shell of an old car, a Model T, for instance, rusting away in a field full of wildflowers. From a distance, the buildings were dwarfed under the overwhelming arc of sky.

  As we floated by the last reactor to be decommissioned, N, there was the disconcerting sound of a cell phone ringing and Rick Raymond, a Lockheed Martin Hanford Company project manager who was paddling one of the catarafts, peeled off from our flotilla. He caught a back eddy under an unmanned, glassed-in guard tower. It was very quiet on the river. The only sounds were the whisper of the wind and the mad, birdbrained screams of mud swallows building nests on the banks of the river. In this relative silence, Rick’s voice carried well and I could hear him speaking with some urgency.

  Later, when he caught up with us, I accused Rick of committing business on a river trip.

  “Sorry,” he said. “One of our tanks is belching hydrogen.” Some of the double-walled waste tanks contained a million gallons of waste: a horrifying goulash of plutonium syrup and cesium and strontium and other venomous toxins. The tanks produced hydrogen, which is a by-product of nuclear decay. Hydrogen is highly flammable. The tanks were built to vent gases, but sometimes a thick crust formed on top of the waste, and the hydrogen collected underneath in an ominous, growing bulge. In these cases, giant circulating pumps were used to vent the tank.

  This was what was happening as I floated past the tank farm. An explosion in the enclosed underground tank could hurl radioactive sludge high into the atmosphere.

  “Technically,” he said, “it’s what we in waste management call ‘a bad thing.’ ”

  Randy Brich, who was paddling a canoe nearby, recited the Hanford mantra: “A nuclear waste,” he muttered, “is a terrible thing to mind.”

  A snowy egret rose from the banks across from the reactors and kept pace with us as we drifted along at 5 miles an hour. Ferruginous hawks worked the hillsides, river left. Ahead, along a great, ten-mile curve of river, the White Bluffs loomed six hundred feet overhead. They were crumbly sandstone deposits containing the fossilized remains of mastodons, beavers the size of bears, camels, bison: the whole ice-age menagerie.

  Just across from Locke Island, a part of the bluffs had collapsed into the river, and the geologists in our group blamed irrigation on the bluffs above the cliff face, in an area known as the Wahluke Slope. Further irrigation would cause further sloughing and damage the salmon-spawning grounds. Happily, in April 1999, Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson announced the DOE’s desire to preserve ninety thousand acres of the Wahluke Slope as a wildlife refuge.

  We made camp at a cove set deep into the White Bluffs and then set off along a road previously used by security vehicles. The bladderpod, one of the plants new to science, grew along the tops of the bluffs. A species of mustard, the bladderpod was in early bloom and sported yellow cruciform flowers. We found several of the rare plants growing at the very tops of the White Bluffs, where they spread out and hunkered down low against the termination winds. I glanced back down the river toward the reactors, which lay along the path of the cataclysmic ice-age floods. There were forces here beyond human comprehension, and I regarded the land below as both terrible and sacred.

  The House of Boots

  It was no great feat of investigative journalism to find the house of Boots. The ramshackle log edifice was partially hidden behind a dozen mature trees, about a hundred yards off a gravel road a dozen miles or so outside the town of Cholila, in Chubut Province, Argentina. It was surrounded by a barbless wire fence intended to keep cows away; I had been told that no advance permission was required to examine the unmarked and abandoned complex of log buildings, so I climbed over the fence. A pasture fronting the dark structures was alive with daisies and the lazy hum of bees. The main house was pleasantly shaded by trees, and there were several outcabins strung along the banks of the slow-flowing blue waters of the Río Blanco.

  The man called Boots, I had been informed, had built this homestead nearly a century ago, in 1902, after he fled to South America from the United States. In Cholila, there are those who will tell you Boots was a gunslinger and a killer. One local family believes he killed one of its forefathers during a botched and cowardly robbery. The Ap Iwans, a clan of Welsh settlers, had established a trading post to do business with the Mapuche Indians. On the night of December 28, 1909, a torch was thrown through the window of the store. The proprietor, Llwyd Ap Iwan, was inside and fired several shots to drive off the robbers, but burned his hands badly putting out the fire. The next day, they say, six outlaws, including Boots and a woman, attacked the trading post. Boots burst through the door with his pistol drawn, but Llwyd grappled with the intruder, who fell when his spurs became tangled in a rug. Despite his burned hands, Llwyd managed to get the gun away from the outlaw, but it had been modified to be cocked with the heel of the hand—to be fanned—and the trigger was missing. Llwyd was slow with the gun, and a man known in North America as the Sundance Kid stepped into the room carrying a Winchester .45 rifle and killed him.

  The Welsh community was enraged. The Ap Iwans say that the outlaws were hunted down by Argentine territorial police and killed not far away, near the border with Chile. There are others in Cholila who say that the Ap Iwan family is mistaken and that Llwyd was killed by another gang of North American bandits living in the area at the time. The man who called himself Butch Cassidy (“Butch” sounds like “Boots” in a Spanish-speaking mouth) was a good neighbor and a fine rancher. According to this variation on the legend, Boots was driven from his land by political circumstances beyond his control and died either in Bolivia or back in the United States.

  A breeze sighed through the tall old trees around the house of Boots, and I listened for the voices of spirits. A set of crooked steps led up to a small porch, and it was no great feat of imagination to see the place as it must have been almost one hundred years ago: graceful and rather elegant, a scaled-down version of the late-nineteenth-century cattle-baron style.

  The doors were locked and the windows shut tight. I looked through panes of wavy glass into dusty, dark rooms. My own shadow slid across the floor, but I imagined dim figures, vaguely translucent, shifting through the gloom, a table set for a long Argentine lunch: one woman, two men. A linen tablecloth, fine silver, plates of beef and salad, the contented murmur of conversation.


  “Step inside,” a disembodied voice suggested, “for we wish to relieve you of your time and currency.” Not me, I thought. But it was as if the locked door was already swinging open on ghostly, creaking hinges.

  El Señor Raúl Cea, seventy-seven, is generally considered the historiador, the keeper of the legend. He owns a small cattle ranch set on a hillside above the Río Blanco, and I drove to visit him with an Argentine fishing buddy of mine named Eduardo, who directed me through fenced fields of fine, fat cows. Beyond the valley was the Cerro Tres Picos, an Andean wall rising stark against a cloudless sky, and the three pinnacles that gave it its name. Glaciers on the saddles between the peaks glittered in the sun.

  “Raúl will talk about Boots for hours,” Eduardo told me. “His wife doesn’t like it. She believes he is obsessed. We should only stay for one hour, no more.”

  We arrived at the modest old ranch house to find Raúl Cea wrestling with a used freezer that was sitting on the tailgate of a battered Ford pickup. He was a big man, but it was my opinion that anyone who has attained seventy-seven years shouldn’t be carrying around freezers single-handedly.

  Eduardo and I shouldered the resolute Mr. Cea out of the way and lugged the bulky appliance into the house. We gathered around the kitchen table, and la Señora Cea graciously offered the thick green tea called mate and sat with us for a moment until it became clear that we were going to talk about the dreaded Boots. She excused herself and left the room, closing the door perhaps a bit more firmly than was absolutely necessary.