Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  I lose track of Randy Sullivan and his entourage of friends and the throngs of adoring girls that no doubt follow him everywhere. Undecided about college, Randy takes a job at the Ralston Purina pet food factory down by the Denver stockyards. The pay is good, but the job includes cleaning up sticky cat food when the conveyor belt breaks, and he only lasts a year. He feels he’s dodged a bullet with the military—the Vietnam draft ends a year before he becomes eligible—but he’s not sure what he wants to do with his life.

  With the help of student loans I start classes at Colorado State University and move to Fort Collins, where I take a job making doughnuts at an all-night doughnut shop. The college is two hours away and I drive home on the nights my mother calls, frantic, with my father banging at the door. He wants in. She’s afraid of him but won’t call the police. “He knows all the cops and judges,” she explains. “It wouldn’t do any good.”

  My father sporadically sends small checks. Often they bounce. I pin them up on my bulletin board. “He loves you,” my mother says. “He’s just trying to show his support for you.” It’s not unusual for the two of them to go out for a nice dinner after one of their fights. When my mother calls to tell me about one of their make-up dinners, she reports that she’s filled him in on all the tiny details of my life: my classes, my job, my half-attempts at a dating life. “You kids don’t talk to your dad, so I’m the one who has to tell him everything,” she says. I feel like a splayed fish, split right down the middle.

  I finish my final exams and move home for the summer to work and save money, but also to help my mother. “I need you here,” she says. She seems on the verge of divorce, but can’t quite do it. Divorce is a disgrace. “And I love your father,” she says. Then her eyes grow sad. “Doesn’t he realize what he’s doing to me? What he’s doing to you kids?” How easily love and hate lie together, I think. Side by side.

  I need a job. The truck stop is out of the question. I comb the classifieds and find a job as a driver on a roach coach, a lunch wagon that winds around construction sites and office parking lots all day. Construction is booming in Arvada and business is good.

  I love my roach coach. The front cab is like an old taxi. The seat is worn and the dashboard is dusty and bleached from the sun, but the back of the truck is as shiny as a big kitchen, opening up on both sides to reveal rows of cold soda pop and racks of wrapped sandwiches and honey buns. Each morning at five I report to the loading station and shovel chipped ice into the soda bins, stock the shelves, and fill the tank with gas. The owner is a caustic man who watches over his fleet of three trucks like a hawk, carefully counting the remaining stock each evening to make sure his drivers aren’t snacking on his profits. I’m given a list of stops and a timetable—no more than five minutes at each stop—and I’m promised a twenty-five-cent raise if I can handle it for a week. He has a hard time keeping drivers.

  I meet Mark Robertson on my first day. He comes up to the side of the truck shyly, bare to the waist and wearing a tool belt, worn jeans, and steel-toed construction boots. He has hazel eyes and his hair is light but his skin is dark from the sun. He buys a flattened bologna and cheese sandwich and a soda.

  “You the new girl?”

  “Yeah.” I’m nervous, mostly because I have a line of construction workers three bodies thick standing around the truck. I stand at the corner near the bumper, frantically trying to tally up chips and honey buns and give correct change. The owner has warned me about shoplifters—I’ll have to pay for anything that comes up short.

  “We get a new girl almost every week,” Mark says. “They never last.”

  “You won’t last either,” another worker adds. He buys Twinkies and corn nuts. “Let’s bet on how long she lasts.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I say. “At least not until the fall.”

  “College girl?” Mark asks.

  “Trying to be.”

  “Hang in there, then.” He gestures toward three guys sauntering away from the truck. “You better yell at those guys.”

  “Hey! You need to pay for that stuff!” I holler. I slam down the sides of the truck and run after them, my change belt banging against my thigh.

  The men turn and spread their empty palms. “Just testing you,” one laughs. He reaches into his pocket and tosses me a five. “Keep the change, sweetie.”

  When I get back to the truck, Mark is gone.

  IN APRIL 1977 the Rocky Flats Action Group holds a rally at the plant that attracts several thousand people, including the well-known activist Helen Caldicott. Thanks to the work of Sister Pam Solo and Judy Danielson and others, it’s now a good-sized coalition of citizens, scientists, churches, and environmental and pacifist groups. As Rocky Flats and DOE officials hide behind the wall of Cold War security, and scientists and politicians vehemently debate the potential health effects of exposure to plutonium, the Rocky Flats Action Group wants to pull back the veil that’s hidden Rocky Flats from the public for more than twenty-five years. Members of the action group begin talking about organizing a big rally that would gain national attention.

  When she’s in high school, my sister Karma, who’s taken an interest in Greenpeace and Rocky Flats, begins to attend meetings. Always a quiet, serious girl, she no longer seems to be the “sweet little bird” our grandmother Opal used to call her. She spends time at meetings and rallies, talking about feminism and environmentalism. She doesn’t hide her anger and disgust. She refuses to talk to our dad and she avoids our mother. “Karma’s so angry,” our mother sighs. “Why is Karma so angry?”

  I FIND myself thinking about the boy who comes each day to the roach coach to buy a bologna sandwich. He seems almost as shy as I am. “Sandwich and soda, two fifty,” I say. He hands me three bucks and I drop fifty cents into his callused palm. “Thanks. See you tomorrow,” he says. My cheeks burn.

  It’s three weeks before Mark asks me out. He picks me up from our house in Bridledale in a two-door orange Honda with a peace sticker in the back window. We go to an art cinema and watch an Italian film with subtitles, sipping Cokes silently in the dark. He drives me home afterward. “I want to get you back on time,” he says. I walk into an empty house. My father’s gone, my mother’s started working again, and my siblings are out. There’s no benefit to being a good girl in this household.

  On our second date, we eat pizza in the garden of a tiny Italian restaurant with the moon shining through the trees. Mark orders a beer and shares it. The patio is nothing more than two round tables and folding chairs set outside the restaurant’s back door, but it feels like we’re in Venice. Once again he brings me home to an empty house.

  The next night I go to see Mark perform at the Denver Folklore Center, where he works as a stagehand and occasionally plays guitar. His shyness is gone as soon as he steps on the stage. He plays a six-string and then a twelve-string guitar and sings with a rich, warm voice. I wait for him in the lobby and when he greets me with a kiss on the cheek, I hate myself for blushing so furiously. It’s late. “Should I take you home?” he asks.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say.

  We go to his place, a tiny shotgun house next to the railroad tracks in the oldest part of Arvada, white clapboard with a jumble of spider plants on the front porch. There’s a kitchen with a single burner and a big room with a mattress in the corner. Books on planks supported by cinder blocks line the walls. A cat with smooth gray fur and eyes as green as grass sidles up next to me. “His name is Arlo, for Arlo Guthrie,” Mark explains. We sit cross-legged on the floor and Mark plays records: Arlo and Woody Guthrie, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Joan Baez, and a local bluegrass group called Timberline. He tells me about his father, a machinist, and a brother who works in a molybdenum mine near Leadville. His father built the house Mark grew up in, brick by brick.

  He pours me half a cup of red wine in a jelly glass and we sit on the mattress and listen to the trains go by, one after the other, the rocking of the wheels making the little house tremble.


  “Shall I take you home now?” he asks.

  “No,” I say.

  THE SUMMER of 1977 is about sitting on Mark’s porch, listening to the trains, waking up to Arlo’s paw on my cheek. Mark is the gentlest person I’ve ever met. When the summer ends, I briefly consider forgetting about college, at least for a while. Mark has no desire to go to college. But when September rolls around, I pack up and return to school in Fort Collins, renting an old carriage house with three other female students. One has a wealthy father, one works as a waitress like me, and the third makes more money than the rest of us put together working as a stripper at a local club. My room is at the top of the stairs and was once a hayloft. It’s a tiny room filled with plants and books and a poster I tack on the wall that reads “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” I sell my yellow Rambler for fifty bucks and buy a used red Volkswagen bug with a rainbow in the back window and a ski rack on top. I wear jean skirts and hiking boots and my hair hangs in a long soft braid down my back.

  Mark drives up on weekends. “You’ll be a writer,” he says, “and I’ll be a musician.” It all seems possible. “We just need a little faith,” he says. “And time.”

  One afternoon Mark says he wants to take me rock climbing. For years he’s climbed local peaks, and he occasionally teaches beginning rock-climbing classes for extra money. I’ve done some bouldering and rock scrambling with friends on long hikes in the mountains, but I’ve never done any serious climbing.

  “It’s not hard,” he says. “I’ll show you.”

  The next weekend we pack up his little Honda with ropes and sandwiches and head up to Castle Rock, a well-known spot about twelve miles up Boulder Canyon. A three-hundred-foot tower of rock near the west end of the canyon, Castle Rock is a challenging climb, but typical fare for newcomers to the sport. “I’ll lead the way,” he says, “and you follow me up on belay.” He snaps a harness around my hips and hooks the end of my rope to his own harness with a metal clip called a carabiner. “That’s a beaner. See? We’ll be on the same line. Just watch me and put your hands where I put my hands. Watch my feet, too. I’ll put in some pitons as we go.” He gestures to the small steel spikes attached to his belt. “These act as anchors, so if one of us falls, we won’t fall very far.”

  I’ve never been afraid of heights but my hands are shaking. “Here,” Mark says. He hooks a small bag onto my belt. “This has chalk inside. If your hands get sweaty, dip your fingertips in this.”

  It takes us a long time to get to the top. I move slowly, frozen in those long seconds when I cling to the rock while searching with a single hand or foot for a secure hold. “You’re fine!” Mark yells over his shoulder. “Just keep going!”

  At the peak we share a flattened sandwich and warm beer. The wind is clean and fresh and smells of pine. The view on all sides is breathtaking.

  “We could hike down the backside,” Mark says. “But I want to teach you how to rappel. It’s a way of going down the face of the rock on a rope. I’ll control your line from the top.”

  “I don’t mind hiking down the back side,” I say. “Honestly.”

  “You’ve got to try this. It’s the most incredible feeling in the world.”

  Mark checks the harnesses and ropes and anchors himself to a large boulder. “Nothing to worry about. Piece of cake,” he says. “There’s me, and then there’s the mountain. We’re both holding you. Down you go.”

  I want to turn around and back away from the rock face, but I slide my legs over the edge. “How can I go down when I can’t see where I’m putting my hands and feet?”

  “Find your first point.” He grips my hand until my right foot finds a hold. “Now the next foot. Now put one hand here.” He gestures to a little crevice.

  “Okay.”

  “Got it?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  He lets go of my hand and I grip the rock. “Now put your weight in the harness.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Put the weight of your body in your butt. Relax into it. Let the rope pull tight.”

  I feel my body hanging in the air, barely touching the rock.

  “That’s it. Now I’ll lower you down a little.”

  I swing out from the rock and slide down a few feet until I find a new toehold.

  “That’s it!” Mark yells, exhilarated. “Keep going.”

  I feel like a spider, moving weightlessly, point by point, down the face of the mountain.

  “Now I want you to try something,” Mark yells. I can no longer see him but can hear his voice. “Kick out from the rock. Bounce against it.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Give yourself a little jump! Push out from the rock!”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Trust me, Kris! I won’t let you fall.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Trust me. Trust yourself.”

  I push my legs against the rock and swing out and down. It feels like flying. One, two, three jumps and I’m nearly at the bottom.

  “I love this!” I yell.

  “You did it!” he shouts back. Ten minutes later we’re both on the ground.

  “Not bad for your first try,” he says. “You’re going to be fine.”

  A DATE is set for the first big national protest at Rocky Flats: April 29, 1978.

  To ensure a peaceful protest, the Rocky Flats Action Group spends months negotiating with dozens of participating local and national organizations as well as Rocky Flats, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, and the DOE. The rally will include a speech by Daniel Ellsberg, who is famous for having released the Pentagon Papers. Demonstrators will be taught how to follow well-established methods of nonviolent resistance, and, following the rally, more than one hundred people plan to occupy the railroad tracks in a symbolic blockade. Although Rockwell has agreed to the rally and to a short demonstration on the tracks, no one knows for sure what will happen. If demonstrators remain on the tracks until Monday morning when the trains start running again, they’ll likely be arrested. It’s a risk they’re willing to take.

  Dr. Carl Johnson, the county’s health director, is constantly on the defensive. And yet another radioactive element has popped up. Soil and dust testing reveals an “excess amount” of cesium-137 on the west side of Rocky Flats, which Johnson believes is indicative of a more serious cover-up at the plant. Subpoenaed in connection with the suit filed by unhappy landowners, Johnson testifies that the presence of plutonium and cesium could be the result of a single criticality incident at the plant. Rocky Flats’ official position has always been—and continues to be—that there has never been a criticality at the plant. But Johnson feels strongly about his hypothesis, as do other scientists and engineers. Radioactive cesium and strontium are produced only during fission—the actual splitting of atoms—and there is no nuclear reactor at Rocky Flats. Johnson recommends additional testing of soil samples and analysis of forage, vegetables, and other fresh produce in the contaminated areas; evaluation of livestock and milk; and testing of air, ground water, and water in reservoirs.

  That’s not what developers want to hear. On cross-examination, the special assistant U.S. attorney Jake Chavez reminds Johnson of a recent Golden District Court decision that determined county officials could not block residential housing development based on land contamination—that power belonged only to the state board of health. Johnson says he’s aware of that, but his job is to investigate radiation hazards for residents and make the results known, and the county board of health has approved his activities.

  But the chairman of the Jefferson County Board of Health, Dr. Otto Bebber, suddenly has a change of heart. Some members of the board are unhappy that the latest report on radioactivity near Rocky Flats was released to the press. A Jefferson County commissioner says that he’s been receiving phone calls from people concerned that the cesium report will make their property values go down.

  Bebber tells the press that Dr. Johnson was ins
tructed to release the results of his research only to specific agencies and not to the public. Johnson denies that such a limitation existed. Bebber responds that the board will consider a censure motion against Johnson at their next meeting. However, he says, “Even if it [a vote to censure Johnson] does happen, it would be just a censureship. It wouldn’t mean his job or anything.”

  The motion to censure Johnson is defeated.

  APRIL 1978 will go down in Colorado history as the beginning of the Year of Disobedience and the Summer of Protests. But except for Karma, no one in our family—or in our neighborhood—is paying the slightest bit of attention to Rocky Flats.

  In the middle of my sophomore year I decide to transfer to the University of Colorado at Boulder and, against the advice of everyone except Mark, major in English and creative writing. I’ll be closer to home—just half an hour from my mother, who calls every day. She’s a confiding sister, a clinging daughter, my biggest fan, and—sometimes—a stone around my neck. She is as vulnerable as a child and as stubborn as a bulldog. Mark is my escape.

  I pay a local rancher fifty bucks a month to board Sassy in a field so I can ride on weekends. I take classes in the mornings and work two waitress jobs: afternoons at the New York Deli on the Boulder pedestrian mall, where I get a free bowl of matzo-ball soup, and nights at the Oasis Diner, a fifties-style restaurant where I serve burgers and shakes to the tunes of Frankie Avalon and early Beach Boys.

  It’s tough to make a living as a musician and rock climber, at least in the short run, and Mark takes a job in a hardware store. When he comes over, our attempts at cooking together are creative: we try combinations of tofu, bean sprouts, and brown rice. But we’re halfhearted hippies and poor vegetarians. “Try this,” Mark says one night. He flips a slice of bologna into a frying pan.