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.
NOT 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, Pa
t 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.
Pat said yes.
It felt like the world was shifting in important ways. The church was changing in the wake of Vatican II. The life of a nun was no longer as cloistered as it had once been; the sisters were expected to engage in the broader world. They decided to wear regular street clothes. They took jobs in the real world. They became more vocal about how social and government policy affected the lives of the people they were trying to help: the poor, the sick, people marginalized by society.
Pat was living in Bolivia when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. She met Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest who was involved in organizing the peace movement and protesting the Vietnam War. He encouraged her to return to the States to get involved with the peace movement. Pat decided to move back to Denver. Her first action was with the United Farm Workers and the grape strike against growers in California, organized by Cesar Chavez, to protest for fair wages for primarily Mexican-American and Filipino farm workers.
When she’s arrested for the first time, Pat McCormick is sitting on the picket line in front of a liquor store in Applewood, near Arvada, protesting the sale of Gallo wine. “Don’t buy California wine,” she calls to customers. “Don’t buy California grapes!”
Across town, in a well-to-do enclave on the east side of Denver called Cherry Creek, Ann White, a young mother of three, is talking on the telephone in her living room.
Her cousin is coming for a visit. That’s fine. She doesn’t get to see him as often as she would like. It’s not just a social visit, though. He’s a Quaker and a photographer for the American Friends Service Committee, another organization that works for peace and social justice. He wants to stay with her while he’s on assignment—an assignment to photograph a planned antiwar protest at Rocky Flats. “And there’s been a fire,” he says. “Did you see it in the paper? Some people think a lot of plutonium escaped from the plant.”
She can’t recall seeing anything in the papers.
It’s not that she’s naïve about these things. Ann grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Los Alamos was the biggest secret in town. Ann’s father knew some of the physicists and he liked to have them down to the house to talk, although it was illegal for them to leave the closed city. She remembers the driver waiting quietly, ready to take the men back up the mountain before daylight.
Los Alamos is the brains of the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Rocky Flats, she suspects, is the muscle, although she doesn’t know for sure. She just knows it’s a secret government facility.
“What’s going on?” she asks her cousin.
“I’m not sure,” he replies. “A lot of groups are starting to take interest. Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Sisters of Loretto, and a group called Citizens Concerned About Radiation Pollution. An antiwar group is going to hike from the Boulder County courthouse to Rocky Flats to begin a five-day protest.”
“Yes, come and stay here,” Ann says. “I want you to tell me everything you find out.”
MY FATHER reads about the protesters in the newspaper. “What do you think of this?” he asks my mother. She laughs and shakes her head. “Hippies and housewives,” my father huffs. “Those people should get real jobs.”
I rarely read the paper. Early mornings are for tending to our growing brood of critters. The sun is raw and bright when I go out to feed the horses before school. They line up eagerly at the fence, heads up, ears tipped forward, nickering in anticipation. The air is clean and fresh and I can smell everything at once: the sweet hay, the deep musk of the swamp mud, the tall grass, the oddly comforting scent of manure. I pull two flakes of hay from the stack for each horse and pour a cup of oats in each bucket. As they munch, jaws grinding rhythmically, sometimes I try to catch a rabbit. There are rabbits everywhere, hiding in the hay bales, hopping behind the porch, padding quietly around our half-attempt at a garden with their noses twitching. I never come close to catching one, and soon it dawns on me that if I can’t catch one, I could buy a tame one for a pet.
My first rabbit is black and white, a commoner, thick and dull and not much interested in socializing. For three dollars I buy a hutch that’s been hammered together by a neighborhood boy, two-by-fours and wire mesh, and the rabbit comes with the hutch. Scarcely two weeks pass before the hutch is ravaged and the rabbit gone. I’m pretty sure the neighbor’s German shepherd is the culprit, but there’s no hard proof. I fortify the hutch and buy two dwarf bunnies, rabbits so tiny they fit in my palm. I adore them but they chew their way to freedom, leaving an escape hole in the side of the cage not much bigger than a half-dollar. I do a little research and seize upon the idea of owning and breeding Siamese Satin rabbits. For ten dollars I buy a pair of rabbits with long fur so shiny it’s almost translucent. Like Siamese cats, their coats are a rich gray and their feet and ears look as if they’ve been dipped in black ink. They put our real cats to shame. And they’re crazy about each other. My ten dollars will be the beginning of a dynasty. A local stock show has a rabbit competition. My bunnies are so beautiful, I think, they’re sure to win, and with a couple of ribbons, people will be lining up to buy them for pets. I enter the contest and my pair of Siamese Satins takes a second-place ribbon.
When I go to pick them up after the show, the showroom is filled with empty mesh cages. “Where are my rabbits?” I ask the man who is briskly snapping the entry cards off each cage.
“You can pick up your check in the office,” he says.
“What check?”
“The check for your rabbits.”
“I don’t want a check,” I say, confused. “I’m here to pick up my rabbits.”
He looks at me as if he suddenly sees me for the first time. “Your rabbits are already sold, sweetheart. Packed and frozen. Go talk to the front desk.”
Numbly I walk over to where a woman with hair teased up into a fluff the color of orange soda flips through a file and hands me a check. I hold it for a moment and hand it back.
Later my mother explains. “This is the way it is with farm animals,” she says. “When I was a girl on the farm, we raised calves and lambs and pigs, and I knew I could never love them very long.”
That’s the end of my rabbit business. I go back to chasing them around the haystack. I can’t bear the thought of one of my lovely Satins ending up on someone’s dinner plate.
IN OUR freshly built neighborhood, everyone is new. Each kid has a shot at establishing some social territory, but our parents are all keenly conscious of status. Sons and daughters of the Depression, most of them come from farm or working-class backgrounds. They’re eager to show they’ve arrived, even if it’s by the skin of their teeth. Each house in Bridledale has a new boat or snowmobile. Each kid has a pony or dirt bike.
Many of the neighbor kids have fathers or uncles or older brothers who work at Rocky Flats or Coors, the beer factory in Golden. The neighborhood kids regard Coors with equal doses of derision and respect. If you have to work, you might as well work at a beer factory, where everyone is bound to have a pretty good time. On the other hand, it’s generally agreed that Coors isn’t a real beer, like some of the other brands our parents drink. None of us plan to drink “Colorado Kool-Aid” when we grow up. Budweiser is a real beer, for example. That’s what all the older boys drink at the pool hall in downtown Arvada, a strip of shops that holds little more than a hometown bank, an antique store, a dusty bridal shop, and a psychic who keeps irregular hours. Once you turn eighteen you can take a tour of the Coors factory and get two free beers at the end, which is acceptable
since it’s free. Some of our teachers spend their summers working at Coors as tour guides.
None of the kids seems to know what their fathers actually do at Rocky Flats, though. There’s a mystique surrounding the fathers who work at the plutonium factory, if that’s what it is—who knows for sure?—and it raises the social standing of their children in the neighborhood considerably. Even secretaries make boatloads of money at Rocky Flats; everyone knows that.
We have big plans for our new house. By early spring our yard is a sea of mud and my mother plants grass and trees and flowers that refuse to take hold. Unlike her beloved Minnesota, nothing grows in Colorado. The neighbors talk about the importance of self-sufficiency and stock their basement bomb shelters with a year’s supply of canned goods and a radio. The show home with a built-in bomb shelter in nearby Allendale Heights opened with great fanfare—the governor, two mayors, and two thousand curious residents showed up to see it. Many of our neighbors followed suit and built their own.
This all intrigues me—we have a tornado shelter at my mother’s family farm in Iowa, which is terribly exciting—but the only concession my father will make to domestic self-reliance is to try once again to dig a well in the backyard. A man comes out with a rig to dig the well and nothing comes up, no matter how deep he goes. “I don’t understand it,” my dad says, irritated. “We’re right on the Standley Lake water table.” We stick to city water that tends to run orange after the pipes freeze and thaw, which happens often.
More and more, our father stays away, and when he’s home, he talks to no one. One day Karin and I find a square glass bottle tucked behind the couch, an inch of bourbon in the bottom. We don’t dare touch it. A few days later we discover another behind the recliner, half full. Then one in the living room. They seem to be everywhere. After much discussion, my sisters and I wait until our mother is out of the house and then pour the contents down the kitchen drain.
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