Everything We Don't Know

by Aaron Gilbreath

  That seemed like good news. But I no longer know what to think.

  I’m worried. My wife’s worried. Some of our friends are worried, though some of them are inclined to neurotic anxiety. Still, the threat is real. The other threat: the unknown. The human mind likes what talk shows call “closure.” It tries to make full circles. It prefers completed puzzles to pieces. We struggle to live with enduring mystery, because lingering questions physiologically disturb our minds. God, cosmic meaning, the afterlife, the “truth” about Fukushima—the unsettling effect of such knowledge gaps linger in the mind, circulating like nucleotides until we resolve them with answers from science or religion. The ocean still feels too big to instill confidence in me. The scientific method is objective, but it still requires belief; you have to trust the methods. I trust science. When it comes to discerning truth, we have devised no better system. But when it comes to disasters that involve top-heavy governments, I’m also a cynic.

  “No one will die from Fukushima radiation,” Forbes wrote in March 2015, “there will be no increased cancer rates, the food supply is not contaminated, the ocean nearby is not contaminated, most of the people can move back into their homes, and most of the other nuclear plants in Japan can start up just fine.”

  Eight months after that article, in October, a study linked Fukushima radiation with increased rates of thyroid cancer in local children. Of 370,000 kids tested in Fukushima Prefecture, 137 had confirmed or suspected cases of thyroid cancer—a rate twenty to fifty times higher than kids outside the Prefecture.

  That same month, researchers Ken Buesseler and Jay Cullen announced that their monitoring efforts show that, despite the damage to Japan, North America’s West Coast remains unaffected by Fukushima radiation. As PBS reported:

  “‘To be very direct about it . . . at the levels that we’re seeing, if one were to consume 20 kilos [over 40 pounds] of salmon in a year, the dose that one experiences from consuming that fish is about 300-fold less significant than if you’re a pack-a-day cigarette smoker,’ said Jay Cullen, an associate professor of ocean sciences at the University of Victoria, at a recent presentation of his latest data.”

  Cullen and Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, found no trace of radioactivity from the meltdown of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor in fish collected off British Columbia. Rather, the faint traces of radioactivity they found can be traced to weapons testing done over the Pacific in the 1960s and ’70s.

  Four and a half years have passed since Fukushima, and here’s what I know for sure: I moved to Oregon in 2000. I’ve visited the coast countless times. The water still looks clean, the blue still true. It’s always been too cold for me to swim in without a full wetsuit. I like to dip my toes. Sometimes I get in to my knees. Sometimes I submerge my ankles. Mostly, I stand on the rough sand shivering, gazing at the horizon, and I let the frigid waves wash over my feet with consecutive lines of foam. It’s the same foam that washed away entire Japanese villages.

  During the week, the fish keep sizzling in my skillet, and cans tower on my shelves. With the way I eat, I’ve put the ocean inside me. This water composes part of my cells. Its protein has become my protein, its trouble my trouble, while its little fish carry me toward a future I don’t yet know.

  As forty-two-year-old Koriyama resident Ritsuko Kamino told The Japan Times in 2015, “It’s better not to live in fear.” Eight months after the Fukushima meltdown, she left Koriyama and moved to the city of Naha nearly 1,300 miles to the south, on the Japanese island chain of Okinawa. Thanks to its clean environment and diet, Okinawa has one of the densest populations of centenarians in the world. As Kamino spoke to the reporter, she checked radiation levels on her own meter and advised her seven-year-old son not play outdoors.

  A RECKLESS AUTONOMY

  The thud of slamming car doors jolted me awake. Car doors had been slamming in the underground parking lot for what felt like the entire night, but when I pulled back the thin sheet to check my phone, I realized they’d probably only been slamming for part of the morning. It was 7:31 a.m. I’d gone to sleep just after 2:30.

  I stretched my legs as far as the back seat of my truck would allow. Right outside my window, hotel guests dragged wheeled luggage toward the lobby, letting their big oblivious footsteps pound atop the pavement. One of the slammed doors set off a car alarm, and now a high-pitched squeal was echoing through the parking structure like the angry call of a predatory bird. With the sheet back over my head, I squeezed my eyes tight and took a deep breath. When I awoke later it was almost 8:15. In forty-five minutes the hotel would stop serving its complimentary breakfast.

  This was my vacation. I had driven to Tucson from Phoenix to see a Bay Area band play. Countless bands were returning home from South By Southwest, and most had booked shows along the way. Since I’d missed this particular band the last time they played Phoenix, I drove the two hours south to Tucson, caught the show, slept in my truck in some chain hotel parking lot, then drove straight to Los Angeles the morning before to see another band perform that night. Seven hours one way, four hundred eighty miles, burning ninety dollars worth of gas, without enough money to sleep anywhere but my truck. It wasn’t even my truck. I’d borrowed it from my dad. My dented, fifteen-year-old Toyota Corolla had tiny cracked tires and a grimy, rattling engine that was liable to die somewhere in the desert. Also, the Corolla wasn’t a suitable place to sleep. Dad’s pickup stood high off the ground. Its back seat was long and wide, and the windows were tinted enough to conceal its contents—factors, when combined, that make ideal sleeping quarters.

  As strange as it sounded, I’d been sleeping in cars on roadtrips since I was twenty, so long that I even had a name for it: car-camping. I’d car-camped alone on both extended trips and weekend excursions, had car-camped with an ex-girlfriend and car-camped with friends. I’d slept in the camper shell of my old Toyota pickup, in a rented Subaru station wagon, in the back of a mini-van, back seat of a sedan, and in the back of a rented SUV, not just in my home state of Arizona, but throughout California, Oregon, Washington, Texas, and British Columbia. Many people found the practice dangerous. “Just get a room,” they’d say. “Spend the money to be safe.” They were missing the point. If I spent money on rooms every night, I couldn’t afford the trip. I only rented rooms if I needed a full-body wash and couldn’t find a free shower at a public beach or a pay one at a truck stop. I could wash my face, hair, arms, and teeth in gas station bathroom sinks—not as thorough as what’s called a “bird bath,” but clean enough that I looked presentable in public. What little money I had went to food and gas.

  Anyway, back in my twenties, sleeping in the car was part of a trip’s appeal. It was adventurous, and adventure was fun. And car-camping not only freed you from having to pay exorbitant prices at chain motels, it let you overnight in towns that were too tiny to have motels, and in landscapes too wild to contain much infrastructure. With the right car, properly equipped, you could park on old national forest logging roads, on public beaches, or on residential side streets in beach towns. You could park in cul-de-sacs overlooking pastures and in state parks’ developed campsites. Then, you could wake up to gorgeous views of beaches, mountains, and lakes—just lower your truck’s tailgate and be greeted by a cool breeze and the sort of scenery travelers paid big money to see from their hotel balcony. I’d cooked many breakfasts on my Coleman stove in front of such scenes. Granted, sleeping on a side street in Mission Beach or a dirt road in the backcountry posed certain threats that you had to prepare for, but if you could successfully avoid getting robbed, killed, or kicked out by security guards, then what you experienced was a pure type of freedom, an invigorating autonomy, too rare in everyday life. Most people didn’t understand this.

  Sixteen years and a lifetime later, I was still doing this.

  The upscale Residence Inn I’d found in Burbank was shaded and safe. It stood along I-5, a few feet from perpetually roaring traffic, on the edge
of the city’s tiny downtown. If I had company, we would have split a cheap room, but none of my closest friends could join me on this trip. Dean had just lost his job, moved back in with his parents and was scouring the city for work. Chris had an eight-month-old baby to care for, was back in school finally earning his bachelor’s, and he and his wife were struggling to pay their mortgage. JT managed a big copy center and mostly stayed at home with his girlfriend and her kid. Alex had a kid too, a demanding job, and a crazy ex whose joint custody gave him constant headaches. Somehow all the crap we’d once dismissed as the bleak concerns of geezers had caught up with us. Well, not with me. I might not have had enough disposable income to fund many trips like this, but I hadn’t committed myself to kids or mortgages, either. I was single, self-employed, subsisted off of taco carts and ham sandwiches, and only rented apartments. Such concessions guaranteed that my time was mine to fill. I could stay up till 2:00 a.m. reading if I wanted to, or hike in the mountains on a whim, with no fear of abandoning or disappointing anyone else. I had no one to account for but myself. I was also at that age where you started to wonder if the life you’d fashioned in youth could nourish your adult heart.

  But this band was one of my favorites—still underground but on the verge of blowing up—and they were playing three consecutive LA shows. Last night’s took place inside some guy’s apartment in an old warehouse east of downtown. Marketing types called it a “live/work space,” but it was really a long brick rectangle where he could fit both his VW Bug and a bed. Tonight’s show was on the UC Irvine campus, seventy-five freeway miles to the south, inside a trailer that doubled as a classroom. I refused to let age or finances interfere with my enjoying life. So I left everyone to their regular lives and drove west alone. It made me think of that Stooges song “No Fun,” where Iggy sings: “No fun, my babe, no fun/No fun to be alone/Walking by myself/No fun to be alone/In love with nobody else.” Admittedly, Iggy was sixty-something years old then, his slack, wrinkled skin draped atop his ribs like a Shar Pei’s, but he still played shows, still climbed atop amps and flung around the microphone, and when he spoke, he spoke with the same intelligence and wit. He’d lived his life on his terms and succeeded, financially and personally, and wrote some of the world’s most timeless songs and seemed to have fun doing it. I envied that. In my teens I had vowed never to spend my best years enslaved to some mind-numbing office job just to earn a check, squandering my decades in a florescent-lit cubicle rather than out doing what satisfied me. And, here I was.

  Inside the truck, trapped breath and body heat turned the cool spring air into a furnace, slicking my chest with sweat. The car alarm had finally stopped, though. Guests were no longer chattering loudly or dragging luggage. The hush made me want to go back to sleep. But I knew I needed to take advantage of that breakfast—and steal as many teabags and packets of instant oatmeal as my pockets could hold—so I could put the money I saved on food into my gas fund. With a yawn I pushed off the covers, rubbed my itchy eyes and felt around for my clothes. I’d find a place to shower later.

  My clothes lay under the passenger seat and stunk of other peoples’ cigarettes and beer. Keeping my head down, I dug through my backpack and pulled out a wrinkled black collared button-up and dark Levi’s from the box on the floor. Since I wanted to sleep here again tomorrow night, I had to follow the prime directive of my car-camping system: remain undetected. So, lying on my back, I pulled on my pants and shirt, careful not to shake the truck, and before sitting up to tie my shoes, I made sure there was no bright light source that would cast me in silhouette. Understandably, people tend to get suspicious of people in the back of parked cars.

  Another car-camping technique I’d developed over the years: be cautious when stepping out of the car in the morning. You don’t want anyone to notice that you slept in it. When you open the back door, people will be able to see in, and the more observant few might notice the pillow and blankets on the seat, and the luggage on the floor. It’s not hard putting two and two together. Also, to anyone watching, it will look weird seeing you step out of the back seat rather than the front. To avoid this you have to climb over the armrest and exit from the driver’s door, as any normal person would. The thing is, to anyone who’s been standing there long enough to notice that you didn’t just pull into that spot, but had been parked there for eight hours, any exit might look strange. So, if anyone has been lingering nearby long enough to notice, I always let them gather their luggage and go inside first. If there are security cameras with their lenses aimed my direction, all I can do is hope that the person watching the security footage is as oblivious as most Americans and won’t notice that I parked and never got out the entire night.

  With my clothes on, I scanned the garage for cameras and onlookers, then climbed over the armrest and out the driver’s side. Blood rushed to my feet. My knees didn’t pop, though, and my neck didn’t ache. It felt good to stand upright, released from that fetal position. I couldn’t resist prolonging the sensation of normal circulation, so I pulled my foot behind my back to stretch my thigh muscles, thankful that, even at thirty-four, I needed no medications or special sleeping conditions to get by, suffered no health issues, like high cholesterol, back problems, or adult-onset diabetes brought on by lifestyle. I took moderately good care of myself: besides the temporary taco and sandwich diet, I ate salads, drank water, and no longer smoked. I had friends with migraines, permanent back pain, high blood pressure, therapeutic mattresses, special shoe inserts, hair plugs, slipped discs, carpel tunnel, sciatica, insomnia, acid reflux, bad knees, and others who constantly complained: “Oh, my allergies have been killing me;” “Oh my God, I’ve had a cough all month.” I stretched my other leg and complimented myself on being able to sleep anywhere that I needed to. When I was twenty-two, I’d slept under a chair for three nights on the ferry from Bellingham to Alaska. I could still do that if necessary. It made me proud that I was old yet didn’t act like it. Then I wondered if it was the other way around: maybe I was old and needed to act my age.

  While the fog started to lift from my fatigued head, I noticed a white metal sign hanging on a cement column beside my truck:

  Parking Only

  for Hotel Guests

  $15.00/Day

  Please See Front

  Desk for

  Parking Permit

  It was pitiful to think that, on my current budget, the amount of money many thirty-somethings dropped on two cocktails was what I tried to spend over the course of two days. The show last night was five bucks. Tonight’s would likely be the same. If I parceled my resources correctly, I could spend fifteen dollars on food over the course of two days, but not all at once, and definitely not for parking.

  Instead of making me feel savvy and industrious, this all made me question my lifestyle: no girlfriend, no money, no health insurance. Were music and fun all I wanted out of life? I leaned into the side mirror to fix what was left of my hair. It was thin up top, thick around the sides. I flattened a few rogue strands and studied my tired eyes—red slits ringed by dark bags. I rubbed them and stood up straight. Then I walked toward the lobby.

  Counter to the usual progression of things, the older I got, the deeper my musical appreciations grew. I got into Blues in my late-twenties, got into mid-century hard bop jazz soon after. I went through a classical music period where I listened to Handel’s Water Music and Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos so frequently that a friend asked if I was going to start wearing white shirts with ruffles. Although my tastes kept expanding, music had always been one of my central preoccupations. My dad got me into it.

  When I was a kid, we played a game. While he drove me to elementary school, we would listen to jazz or country on the radio, and I had to guess the musician. “Who’s that?” Dad would say.

  I’d tilt my ear toward the speaker. “Duke Ellington.”

  Then during the next song Dad would smile and glance at me sideways. “Who’s that?”

  “Sachmo,” I’d say. And Cou
nt Basie, Bennie Goodman, Bob Wills, and Buck Owens. After a few years, I could name scores of them.

  Most kids in middle and high school had their favorite bands. I had mine, too. Like most teenagers, my attachment to music was fierce and devoted.

  When I was fourteen, some friends and I camped in front of a department store box office at the mall to get concert tickets. This was before the Internet. Tickets sometimes sold out so quickly that in order to secure them, you had to physically stake your claim. We did this multiple times. We would have our parents drop us off on the edge of the mall parking lot, where no one could see this embarrassing transaction. Then we would ignore their heartfelt goodbyes as we carried our blankets and pillows up the stairs to the store’s outdoor entrance. Other kids usually beat us to the best spot right against the door: a birdlike boy with dyed-black hair and smeared mascara; two goth girls lounging on their backs, smoking cloves. My friends and I would lay our bedding down on the cement and try to make the next thirteen tedious hours as bearable as possible. This was before iPods or good portable video games. We had to talk to pass the time.

  As the night wore on, other kids would show up. They’d lie atop their sleeping bags, open bags of chips and chatter about the band: I love the guitarist; I love this album; I saw them play in Albuquerque; I’ve wanted to see them for years. Despite the fear of losing our place in line, my friends and I would sometimes walk to a nearby convenience store and get candy and giant forty-four ounce sodas—anything to kill an hour. When the rising sun would start to brighten the eastern horizon, everyone would get excited, not just about the tickets, but about the impending release from our boredom. The sky is glowing orange! It must be nearing 9:00 a.m.! Then we’d look at our watches: nope, only 7:00. We ate more chips and sucked soda, and when an employee finally unlocked the doors she would warn us, “No running,” and everyone would run toward the box office, weaving through the home furnishings department, past displays of coffee makers and saucepan sets, frenzied fans treating each other like enemies on a battlefield rather than kindred spirits who had just spent the night in bed together sharing their deepest musical obsessions.