Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  No one seems to notice. The bottle is magically replaced by another, half full, a day or two later. Karin, who’s never afraid to take charge of a situation, suggests adding water to the bottles to dilute them. “Sounds good,” I say. Karma nods. Karin fearlessly totes the bottles up to the kitchen sink and fills them to the top.

  Days pass. No one notices. Nothing is said. Fresh bottles appear in their place. My parents, who rarely see or speak to each other, carry on as usual.

  Karin grows bolder. She’s the rebel, the one with a temper and the one who can say things the rest of us don’t have the guts to say. She wears glittery blue eye shadow and curls her hair like the older girls at school, and her laugh is always the loudest in the room. In her mind there’s no time for doubt. She pours out the bottles and puts them in the trash.

  It’s not long before our mother catches her red-handed. “What are you doing?” she shrieks. “Don’t do that. Your father will be furious.”

  Karin flounces off to her room. I stop inviting friends over to the house. It’s too embarrassing to explain the bottle under the sofa or behind the chair—the bottles we’re not supposed to know about.

  A FEW miles down the road, a nuclear chemist named Ed Martell can’t stop thinking about the Mother’s Day fire. He’s bothered by the bits and pieces of information he’s read in the newspapers, and rumors abound.

  Martell knows something about radiation. A West Point graduate with a Ph.D. in radiochemistry from the University of Chicago, Martell is a former program director of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, when he studied the effects of radiation from U.S. nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s. He saw what happened to life—human and otherwise—in the South Pacific after the detonation of a nuclear bomb. He decided to retire as a lieutenant colonel and go to work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, where he also heads the study group for the Colorado Committee for Environmental Information (CCEI), a nonprofit group of twenty-five people, mostly scientists, that deals with the impact of technology on the environment. The group works independently of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

  The CCEI has been in the news lately for their criticism of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a former World War II chemical weapons facility on the northeast side of Denver that continues to hold dangerous chemical agents, including mustard gas and nerve gas, for long-term storage. The scientists also opposed a plan by the AEC to conduct a 43-kiloton nuclear test project in Rulison, Colorado, to determine if natural gas could be easily extracted from deep underground levels. Despite the opposition, the AEC went ahead with the test on September 10, 1969. It was ultimately unsuccessful. The natural gas that was extracted proved too radioactive to be sold on the commercial market.

  The Rocky Flats Mother’s Day fire—particularly compared to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and the Rulison project—is supposedly no big deal. The AEC reports, “There is no evidence that plutonium was carried beyond the plant boundaries.” But Martell is suspicious. He personally saw the smoke billowing from Rocky Flats. Has there been off-site contamination? If so, how much? He contacts other scientists in the CCEI and the group decides to approach Dow Chemical and ask for more details.

  The response is swift: Dow denies the request.

  Martell calls up an acquaintance from his military days, Major General E. B. Giller of the Air Force, who now helps oversee the nation’s nuclear weapons production complex, which includes Rocky Flats. Giller’s comments are reassuring: the fire posed no danger to the public. Dow will attempt to answer questions presented by Martell’s group of scientists, but of course some information will remain classified, as they can’t risk a breach of national security. And, he adds, there will be no off-site testing.

  BRIDLEDALE GROWS, and there’s a friendly rivalry with the adjacent subdivision, Meadowgate Farms, where houses are springing up just as fast. Summer days are sunny and long and slow. The four of us kids sit up on kitchen stools for cereal each morning—my sisters and I fuss over who gets the latest Bobby Sherman cardboard record, “Bubble Gum and Braces,” glued to the back of the Alpha-Bits box—and then our mother boots us outside for the day, with instructions that we’re not to come back until suppertime. I have a Bobby Sherman poster secretly taped inside my bedroom closet. Publicly I’ve sworn to my sisters to having no interest in boys. My life will be devoted to horses. Karma fervently agrees.

  A long, fenced bridle path encircles both subdivisions and kids can gallop their ponies and horses around and around. No bikes, no dirt bikes, no motorcycles. A new boy moves into Meadowgate, a boy my age with dark hair and brown eyes, named Randy Sullivan. He’s tall, with a quick smile, and he rides a palomino mare. At our kitchen window I hide behind the curtain and watch him gallop past on the bridle path, which goes right behind our house.

  Our house is filled with endless places to hide: behind the back patio, in the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, under the basement stairs. Hide-and-seek takes on a new dimension. But the house can be terrifying as well. On top of a hill with no trees to protect it, it’s a perfect target for the winds that sweep across Rocky Flats, which hit with the force of an eighteen-wheeler. The windows rattle and buzz and we have to shout to hear one another in the bearskin room. When the chinooks hit, inexplicably hot and fierce, everyone feels on edge. My parents complain that the windows aren’t sturdy enough to withstand the weather. The developer, Rex Haag, stands firm: the windows are up to code.

  My mother has no qualms about setting aside her nursing degree to look after her own brood, which, she is happy to tell anyone, is more stressful than any job. She finds solace in paperback novels with lurid covers that she hides under her bed and beneath the sofa. “These books are strictly off-limits,” she says. “Don’t let me catch any of you girls reading these books.” Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins, Victoria Holt, Mario Puzo—her admonition is better than a library card. I read them all and slip them back into place without bending a page or breaking a spine.

  Very few women in the neighborhood have outside jobs. Once a week they meet for coffee, first at one house, then another, ten o’clock sharp after the beds are made and breakfast dishes done. Sometimes I get to sit in when the wives come to our house. My mother pours me milk with a drop of coffee. When I’m grown up, she explains, I’ll drink my coffee black like she and my father do, like all good Scandinavians. “I don’t miss having a job,” she says. “It’s impossible with kids. Who would take care of them?” Day-care centers haven’t been invented yet and the only babysitters around are the fourteen-year-old daughters of her friends, good for one evening a week at best. “They just sit on the phone and empty the refrigerator anyway,” she says. She often tells the story of how, when she was pregnant with me and again with my sisters, she wore a tight girdle under her nursing uniform to hide her expanding figure. “You get fired if they know you’re pregnant,” she says. “I hid it right up to the end.”

  It’s generally agreed that for women there are very few jobs worth having. Although, truth be told, the wives agree, a husband can be a lot of trouble. The only divorced woman in the neighborhood, a good friend of my mother’s, comes over by herself on a different day. Everyone whispers about her.

  Some of the husbands work at the plant out at Rocky Flats. “I don’t know what he does, exactly,” one wife says. “He’s an engineer. It’s too complicated to explain.”

  “There’s nothing to explain,” another wife snorts. “It’s Dow Chemical. They make bathroom products. What’s the glory in that?” The women sit at my mother’s kitchen table, smoking and sipping coffee, until someone says she better get busy with her laundry before the kids get home or her grocery list is long enough for the Russian army, and the group disbands until the following week.

  But my mother has social aspirations beyond the local coffee klatch. My father’s reputation grows, and she’s invited to join the Denver Lawyers’ Wives Club. This is a great honor and she takes it very seriously, putting on a skirt and heels
once a month to attend their afternoon teas. One day she takes me shopping for a new dress so I can accompany her to the Daughters’ Tea. We go to the mall and choose a maxiskirt—all the rage—and a matching vest and blouse. The ensemble is stifling hot. At the party I take turns with the other girls pouring steaming tea from a heavy silver pot, and we listen silently to chatter about home decorating and children’s soccer games.

  Soon it’s my mother’s turn to host a tea at our house. She frets for weeks—what to serve? what to wear? how to make the house presentable?—until it finally becomes evident to her that there is no way to hide the dust and chaos of our household and the constant parade of half-hidden bottles of bourbon. She quietly drops out of the group and never mentions it again. They were all just a group of silly women, anyway.

  NEIGHBORHOOD POLITICS are rough. The girls act like I don’t exist and the boys tease me for wearing cowboy boots when go-go boots are all the rage. One girl, Tina, decides to give me a break. She lives up the street and rides a quarter horse mare that can race a motorcycle and win, if the race is short enough. She has a mother who lets her have boy-girl parties and a father who’s never home.

  Tina’s a girl of strong opinions. Cowboy boots—shitkickers, she calls them—are for after school only. She wears short skirts and go-go beads and streaks her hair with spray bleach she buys at the five-and-dime. All the neighbor boys think she’s a fox. Her friendship is contingent upon the relentless completion of small rites of passage like ditching biology class, kissing a boy with your tongue, and jumping the pipe.

  Every kid in the neighborhood knows about the pipe. Standley Lake is fed on the west side by Woman Creek, the waterway that runs from Rocky Flats. On the east side are several small, open canals that flow from the lake, canals filled with frogs and water skippers and darting glints of minnows. A long corrugated pipe, about four feet in diameter, extends from a high bank and spouts water to a deep pool nearly thirty feet below. Shallow and muddy, the canal meanders at a snail’s pace toward the lake, but a small round pool directly beneath the pipe is deep enough to accommodate a cannonball dive. Aim is everything. Speed helps. A quick sprint to the end of the pipe followed by a forceful, froglike leap works best, although few kids have the guts for that approach. Some kids crawl inside the pipe and jump from its dark cavern. Even if you manage to hit the deep pool and avoid breaking your neck, it’s still a mighty task to battle the waist-high mud that makes clambering back to the bank like fighting quicksand.

  As a heavy metal, plutonium settles in mud and sediment.

  I’m a spectator for weeks. Every afternoon after school a small jury seats itself on the grassy bank. One by one, a kid gingerly inches out to the edge of the pipe, looks down, takes a deep breath, and jumps. Or not. Few do it twice. To look down into the muddy swirl and contemplate a retreat under the vigilant gaze of your schoolmates means not only assuming the role of social outcast but establishing a reputation that will follow you all the way to high school.

  Randy Sullivan jumps. Tina does, too. She makes it look easy. She hardly even looks—just eases out to the end of the pipe, closes her eyes, and leaps out into the air as if she could fly. She’s dressed herself with an audience in mind: a low-cut, sea-green swimsuit and tattered jean shorts. “Shit!” she breathes, pulling herself up onto the slick bank and flipping back long strands of wet hair. Her legs are covered with mud and tangled weeds. “Your turn,” she says.

  “Okay.” My legs feel like lead. I let two boys go ahead of me—one sprints, to much applause—and I inch out, my legs wrapped around the pipe’s rusty ridges, my heart thudding. I can’t even dive off the board at the deep end of a swimming pool without serious soul-searching. But failure isn’t an option. I’m the first in my family to try to meet the challenge. Our reputation is at stake. And the esteem of my only friend.

  I reach the sharp edge of the pipe. I peer over the rusted rim and see the dark blue circle where the water is deep. It looks to be the size of a large dinner plate. I glance over at Tina on the bank, her hair slicked back in triumph.

  “Go!” she says.

  I can’t do it.

  “Come on,” Tina says. She sounds peeved. A couple of kids laugh. “Holy cow.”

  My face flushes. My hammering heart seems to have slid into my stomach. After what seems like a decade or two, I inch back off the pipe and climb the bank.

  Tina is gone.

  THERE IS no further word from Dow Chemical. Ed Martell and the other CCEI scientists, worried that the infamous winds at Rocky Flats might have carried lethal particles of plutonium toward an unsuspecting population, initiate an independent investigation. They take soil samples from two to four miles east of the plant and test for plutonium-239—weapons-grade plutonium—and strontium-90. To account for fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, they take soil samples from other sites along the Front Range and estimate the background concentration of radionuclides in surface soil. Comparing these samples will allow them to determine if there is an excessive amount of plutonium in the soil—plutonium specifically from Rocky Flats.

  Other people are worried, too, and some citizens begin to organize local meetings. Lloyd Mixon, a farmer near Rocky Flats, talks about deformed pigs and how his hens lay eggs that won’t hatch. The chicks have beaks so curled and deformed they can’t peck their way out of the shells. He wants to know what’s happening at Rocky Flats.

  Bini Abbott, a local horsewoman, also begins to worry about how Rocky Flats might be affecting her livestock. For nearly ten years she and her husband have owned a large ranch a mile and a half southeast and downwind of the plant. She often shows her horses at local shows and gymkhanas, where she sees some of the kids from Bridledale and Meadowgate. Karma and I envy her horses, her horse trailers, her professional skill. We want to be like Bini when we grow up.

  Bini buys several horses each year off the local racetrack and trains them for jumping. Sometimes she buys mares for breeding. She always gets a few crooked foals—it’s part of the business—but ever since she moved near Rocky Flats it seems worse than what might be expected. She has high hopes for one mare in particular, a descendant of a Kentucky Derby winner. The mare has two foals before she has to be put down herself due to health problems. The first foal lives for a week. Bini is determined that the second foal, born two years later, will live. But this foal, a little colt, also has problems. For an entire week she camps out in his stall around the clock. March is cold in Colorado—still winter, really—and Bini’s husband brings blankets and hot meals out to the barn.

  The colt dies.

  After hearing about Ed Martell’s soil sampling, Bini begins to keep organs of the deformed animals in her freezer. They have misplaced bladders or hearts, sometimes other problems. Bini is a practical and down-to-earth person. She doesn’t scare easily. But someday, she thinks, those organs will be tested.

  In February 1970, the CCEI completes the report on its investigation. Nearly all the soil samples that were taken show plutonium contamination that originated at Rocky Flats. Plutonium deposits in the top centimeter of soil taken from locations east of the plant are up to four hundred times the average background concentrations from global fallout. In some places, the level is 1,500 times higher than normal. Dr. Niels Schonbeck, a biochemist at the University of Colorado, later notes, “That is the highest ever measured near an urban area, including the city of Nagasaki.” Deposits are heaviest in the top surface of the soil, Martell reports, but are present in all levels down to five inches, indicating a long series of leaks from the plant. High readings of plutonium are also found in water along Walnut Creek, which feeds into Great Western Reservoir, the water supply for the city of Broomfield.

  Before making the results public, Martell and his associates call a meeting with the Colorado Department of Health and officials from Rocky Flats to report their findings. To their surprise, officials don’t dispute the results. Instead, they admit that the plutonium found by Martell—no news to them
, it turns out—didn’t come from the 1969 fire. There were two previous contamination sources: the 1957 fire, twelve years earlier, and windblown particles of plutonium that have leaked into the soil from the drum storage area. The AEC states that it has never attempted to conceal the fact that “minuscule amounts of plutonium” have been released through ventilation systems during normal operations of the plant. They also concede that there has been inadequate testing of the soil in the areas surrounding Rocky Flats.

  The public response to Martell’s study, though, spurs them to action. The AEC sends two of its own scientists, P. W. Krey and E. P. Hardy, to take soil samples from the Rocky Flats plant site and its surrounding areas. In August 1970, Krey and Hardy produce a map that shows plutonium from Rocky Flats both on and off the site, covering an area of more than thirty square miles east and southeast of the plant. Nonetheless, the AEC insists local residents are safe. They say that the amount of plutonium released by the plant is “far below the permissible levels” and does not pose a public health hazard. Major General Giller confirms that the commission is in “reasonable agreement” with the CCEI report, but concurs with AEC officials that the amount of plutonium released from the plant does not pose a public health hazard. For plutonium to be truly dangerous, one official notes, people would have to literally “eat the dirt—and large amounts of dirt.”

  But plutonium is dangerous if ingested or inhaled: plutonium particles can lodge in lung tissue and remain active for years or even decades, emitting alpha radiation. In an interview with the New York Times, Martell estimates that 200,000 to 300,000 people live immediately downwind from Rocky Flats. He is most concerned about the suburbs of Arvada, Westminster, and Broomfield, but this off-site contamination—which has been found as far away as forty miles from the plant—is not the only problem. A potential nuclear disaster could devastate Denver and possibly all of Colorado. The CCEI report states that “in the not-too-unlikely event of a major plutonium release, the resulting large-scale plutonium contamination could require large-scale evacuation of the affected areas, the leveling of buildings and homes, the deep plowing or removal of topsoil and an unpredictable number of radiation casualties among the people exposed to the initial cloud or the more seriously contaminated areas.” There is no emergency response plan to protect the public in the event of a major disaster at Rocky Flats. Rocky Flats is still the biggest secret in town.