Patchwork

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Around town, though, people didn’t seem worried. There were virtually no letters to the editor of the Paducah Sun, and few people seemed willing to voice any fear of atomic pollution—as though talking about radioactivity might be enough to shut the plant down. TV NewsChannel 6 (which is owned by the Sun’s parent company) seemed more alarmed by weather scares than by radioactive-waste dumps or the presence of plutonium in the food chain.

  I chatted a while with Iris Garrott, one of the librarians, and she reminded me that that was how folks were around here. “There’s a sense that they took the risk for the jobs,” she said. “They went along with it. People here are concerned about personal and emotional things—like the shooting at Heath. That’s when everybody gets in a stir, when it touches you personally.” Iris, who had three flashy earrings in her left ear and one in her right, leaned forward. She said, “But the news is sinking in. Every day, something new comes out. Everybody’s on edge, I think. They’re just waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “They’re waiting for somebody big to come to town—Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, Tom Brokaw. If Tom Brokaw came, then it would be real.”

  Joe Gorline, Dottie’s ex-husband, loves working at the bomb plant, as his father did. From the start, Joe’s father told him, “This stuff is not good,” and Joe has been careful. His father died from chlorine-damaged lungs, but Joe has been loyal to the plant and to its important secret work.

  He looks strong and healthy. He is tan and muscular, somewhat large in the middle, and has a long gray ponytail fastened at intervals with colored rubber bands. He lives with his pit bull–Rottweiler, Baba Ram Dass (Bubba, for short). In his house are a Finnish 20-mm. antitank rifle and a Second World War German MG 34, and a safe filled with his gun collection.

  Joe repairs equipment in what’s called the cascade—a six-hundred-mile complex of pipes which comprises the enrichment system. Uranium hexafluoride gas, or UF6, is sieved repeatedly in the cascade to get a richer concentration of uranium—a panning-for-gold procedure. Joe might replace joint seals or weld pipes that carry UF6. For such work, he wears a safety suit with a respirator. “I call it my banana suit,” he told me. “It’s yellow, with yellow rubber boots, orange gloves.”

  Orange gloves? I asked.

  “It’s a statement,” he said with a grin. “Accessories are everything.”

  Doesn’t he get hot in that suit?

  “Oh, I’m used to the heat. But it’s noisy! It’s like being in the crankcase of your car. I haven’t heard a bird chirp in years.” He laughed and cupped his ear. “I listen to the machines. My job is to keep things running. After a while, you want it to run. You develop pride in your work.”

  Wasn’t he afraid of radioactivity?

  “There’s nothing out there now that scares me. The safety has improved. But if anybody got big doses I did. Fifteen years ago, the same place I’d go now in my banana suit, I went in with coveralls. We’d get covered with black oxide dust and it would be all over us, and then we’d go to the cafeteria and wallow around. I got UF6 and black oxide in my mouth and eyes.” He laughed. “It tastes terrible!”

  He showed me a small crater on the side of his nose, where he was burned by fluorine. “It would condense on a vent and drip over the door. One day, a guy went out the door and something dripped on his nose. He went nuts. He thought he’d been burned until we yelled, ‘No, that’s just pigeon shit!’ But it dripped on me one day. My nose started smoking on the end. When you start smoking, you have to go to the dispensary. One guy’s nose was worse than mine. It was flat.”

  I knew I ought to see the plant, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. I’m health-conscious. I consume antioxidants, count fat molecules, pick organic turnip greens. Did I really need to go on a treasure hunt for transuranics? Should I carry a Geiger counter? Wear throwaway shoes?

  I rode to the plant with Joe in his old Chevrolet truck. He flicked his cigarette discreetly out the cracked-open window. Paducah’s urban sprawl is westward, toward the plant. Around the mall are the typical clusters of ugliness which deface America. In the subdivisions, Ten Commandments signs had sprouted in people’s yards. The tall houses in the extravagant new developments looked overpriced and too close together, but I was glad that at least they weren’t usurping all the fine farmland. Just past Future City, we turned onto a road that led to the plant, lined with small farms and modest homes. The corn was dying.

  “The soybeans are strangely green,” I said.

  “It’s plutonium that does it,” Joe said. “All that radiation.”

  Sometimes you have to take what Joe says with a grain of greensalt.

  The plant, which occupies a fenced-in area nearly the size of Central Park, is a sprawling gray complex. The architecture resembles the back end of a shopping mall. Right away, I noticed what was stored in the front yard—the blue cylinders of depleted uranium, rows and rows of them. Each of these cylinders—there are thirty-seven thousand of them—weighs between ten and fourteen tons. They made me think of a stockpile of pods from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” The cylinders will be there until someone figures out an economical way to recover the last traces of valuable uranium in them. In the meantime, everyone hopes that they won’t rust, or leak—or explode.

  As we drove around the outskirts of the plant, I glimpsed some of the “hot spots” the Washington Post had written about—small areas where toxic waste had been spilled or buried or dumped. They were roped off and low to the ground, with little warning signs. At one time, five hundred picocuries of plutonium were detected on the plant grounds—thirty-three times what the government deemed an acceptable standard at blast sites in the South Pacific. Some of the buildings are so heavily contaminated that they have been abandoned, and, unfortunately, wildlife now live in them.

  The plant itself is not a reassuring image: it’s aging and corroding. There are six processing buildings, and they are all hooked together with pipes—long, unsupported, seemingly precarious overhead pipes. I was trying to grasp the way the plant worked, the way the gas was pumped through a network of compressors and converters—the cascade. It was such a mysterious concept—waterfalls, something beautifully flowing—that for a moment I almost wanted to see it. My sister saw it once when she worked in the safety department. A supervisor took her inside one of the big buildings which housed part of the cascade. He wanted to show her what their work was all about.

  We turned north, on a gravel road alongside the chain-link fence, and spectacular waste dumps came into view: the rusty scrap heap, the old cylinders, the giant mound of crushed fifty-five-gallon drums (Drum Mountain, it’s called). Uranium, radionuclides, “uranium daughters” (a phrase that captured my fancy), and transuranics infused these collections like mildew in damp clothes. Neptunium, plutonium, technetium, old kitchen sinks—it all seemed to be here in the scrap piles, as common-looking as a junk yard of wrecked cars. In a way, the scene seemed normal. It’s a time-honored rural practice to save your trash in the yard—what won’t fit on the porch. You dam the creeks with old mattress springs and broken refrigerators, to stop soil erosion. An earthquake on the dreaded New Madrid fault could turn this region, embraced by the Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Cumberland Rivers, into mush. Where would all this irradiated trash wind up then?

  The plant had been built on a thirty-four-hundred-acre federal property, where the old munitions plant—the original Kentucky Ordnance Works, or the K.O.W., as it was called—operated during the Second World War. Most of the land that surrounds the plant is the wildlife area and extends almost to the Ohio River. Joe was driving through this wilderness now. I know that there were still toxic chemicals from the ordnance works in the ground. (The K.O.W. had manufactured TNT.) And now radioactive pollution had spread through this area. The Washington Post said that two dozen radioactive rubble piles from the bomb plant dotted the landscape, but I didn’t see any. Radioactivity was an invisible, ghostly presence.

  “Over there’
s a great pond for frogs,” Joe said. “I used to frog gig there a lot with my son.”

  We passed other ponds, where recently the fish had been killed so that nobody would eat them. People have hunted and fished here for decades; no one wants to throw back a good catch. I was aware that this wildlife area is virtually sacred. People feel so deeply about hunting here that they would be up in arms, so to speak, if the area were condemned because of mere toxic waste. We twisted and turned down gravel roads; then we were in the scrubby fields, on what were just old worn paths that Joe said he knew by heart.

  “I love this old truck!” he burst out gleefully as we bounced over a bump. The tracks ran beneath thick weeds and tall grass. We were in a labyrinth of ancient trails. In a clearing, we passed a group of teenagers slouching around a pickup truck, playing hooky. This park is where kids come to party, Joe told me, and schoolchildren have picnics in these fields, where, over the years, thirty tons of uranium were flushed into the streams, saturating the earth, and recently an unmarked pile of contaminated railroad crossties was discovered.

  We passed a pair of sirens on poles, with signs—what to do if the siren sounds. (Basically, run for at least two miles.) A concrete water tower loomed ahead, then another and another. We were among the ruins of the ordnance works—concrete hulks. Vines crawled over the gray shapes. Even though nature was taking over, the landscape itself was a ruin, shriveled by the drought, the sumac and sassafras reddening prematurely.

  I had lost my sense of direction, and I didn’t fancy crawling through scrubland fertilized by uranium or TNT, but Joe wasn’t worried. It was a hot day. He had a jug of water and a cooler of Cokes. I clutched my bottle of water from France. We got out of the truck and waded through tickseed and ironweed, then down a gravel path. Joe, sockless in sandals, reminisced about youthful outings here as we peered inside some of the dank old buildings. They were dark, with graffiti-covered walls. A disintegrating couch, its stuffing spewing, sat beneath some lingering asbestos that hung from the ceiling like a Spanish moss.

  I was either in a gothic romance novel or in an apocalyptic Italian movie. I faced a wall, spray-painted with a message: “Live in Fear, the End Is Near.”

  I felt suddenly uncomfortable to be in a place that had an unhealthy obsession with bombs and guns and other insidious things that kill people. I saw the K.O.W. as the ancestor of the bomb plant, and I knew the plant was creating its own ineradicable legacy. The sins of the past—uranium daughters—lay strewn over the landscape and in the water and under the earth. From TNT-based weaponry in the Second World War to the first atomic bombs and the nuclear stockpiles of the Cold War, the wartime urgency left a habit of mind and a profusion of poisons.

  Dottie had shown me a photograph Joe took of her out here. She was standing in an open window in one of these ruined buildings, and in the photo the light had created an apparition above her head, merging with her bright hair. She said it looked like a dove, but its glaring whiteness reminded me of an atomic blast.

  On another day, screwing up my courage, I returned to the plant alone, determined to see the cascade for myself—heat and noise and all. It was a bleak, gray, rainy day, but after the drought I was glad to see it. I was in my rain gear, with bright-yellow boots. I wished I had Joe’s banana suit.

  My guide wore a thermoluminescent dosimeter, a radiation-monitoring badge, but she said that I didn’t need one, since I wouldn’t be allowed anywhere in the plant where there might be radiation. I was a little disappointed but mostly relieved. I was allowed into the control center, a round domed concrete building. Inside, on the curved wall, was an immense diagram of pipes and compressors and converters and electric motors. It was fifties technology, intricate but decidedly pre-Microsoft. It was like the cockpit of Captain Video’s spaceship. The diagram on the wall, with lots of red and green lights and dials, mimicked the cascade. The system has never been shut down since it started, in 1952. If it were shut down, the gas would cool and turn into a solid, and the cascade would clog up like a cholesterol-choked artery. A gauge on the wall—like a big clock—had a dial indicating the gas level.

  I was left to imagine the mighty cascade. It was like a Rube Goldberg cartoon version of the human circulatory system—the crudest technology for something as mysterious as a beating heart. The heart of the mystery of atomic energy, its deadly magic, was a mundane industrial process. Somehow, I could picture Lucy and Ethel in here, running this thing.

  The onset of autumn brought a startling revelation: an accidental uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction was theoretically possible in the plant. Paducah jumped out of its time warp, crashing into the twenty-first century. People were confused and scared. Energy Secretary Richardson visited and promised the moon. He apologized for the plutonium. The plant was buzzing with investigators. Joe E-mailed me, “During the day the plant is a hotbed of activity, auditors everywhere. They don’t know whether to shit or go blind.” In September, a ten-billion-dollar class-action lawsuit was filed against former contractors, including Union Carbide and Lockheed Martin, claiming, among other things, mental distress and “unjust enrichment.” Joe wouldn’t join it, and he had no kind words for whistle-blowers. “If I get cancer, I don’t even want to know,” he told me.

  I’ve been trying to put my finger on why, for so long, Paducah remained passive in the face of danger, something I feel I know intuitively as an insider but which seems to befuddle outsiders. Why did the workers trust some of the government contractors that ran the plant? Did they really believe that giant corporations would look out for their well-being? How could they have been so innocent? Is that how those contractors got their colossal abuses?

  These are post-Vietnam questions. The same people who are asking these questions seem a bit wistful about the virtues of small towns. All I can say is that such things exist. People here haven’t yet plunged into the frantic greed frenzy of the big time. They’re independent, proud people—agrarian, basically. They don’t want to be told what to do—like “don’t hunt on the wildlife refuge”—but once a bargain is made and a trust is built, as it was with the plant from the beginning, they will honor it and they will do as they are asked. It was more than high-paying jobs. Neighborliness, not litigiousness, has always been the norm around here, and the social contract meant getting along by going along. The problem was that the plant had been a good neighbor. It was good to its workers, who kept the secret well.

  I’m drawn again to Future City. At the intersection, it seems that the future is nuclear fallout in one direction and guns in the schools in the other. I turn north, toward Heath High School. Driving up, I see kids across the road at band practice. A banner outside the entrance of the school reads, “Rising to the Challenge.” Inside, in the lobby, fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal opened fire on the prayer group two years ago. The Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant—a good neighbor—contributed generously to the memorial fund for the three dead girls.

  I recall that, for some of the students, the instinctive reaction to the massacre was forgiveness. They painted banners that said “We forgive you, Michael” and “We love you, Mike.”

  And that’s the heart of the story. This turning the other cheek, the strange embrace of sudden horror, startled outsiders. The students’ anger came later, when grief had set in and the lawyers showed up, but their initial acceptance—their passive non-resistance—was not so surprising in an agricultural region, where farmers forgive the forces they cannot control. Droughts and pestilence are risks the farmer takes at every planting time in every hopeful spring.

  FROM An Atomic Romance (2005)

  Reed Futrell still went camping in the Fort Wolf Wildlife Refuge, but he no longer brought along his dog. One spring evening, after his shift ended, he raced home, stuffed his knapsack, loaded his gear onto his bike, and headed for the refuge. He was in one of the enigmatic moods that clobbered him from time to time, and when it struck—the way a migraine hammered some people—his impulse was to hop on his hog and run. L
ast fall, when one of these moods grabbed him, he rode hundreds of miles, to Larimer County, Colorado, where—in a hot-tub at a spa—he came to his senses and felt like turning back home.

  “Good boy, Clarence,” he had said to his collie-shepherd combo as he left the fenced yard and fastened the gate. “Lay low now. And be sweet—unless anybody tries to break in. You know what to do, killer.”

  During the five-mile ride, he ignored the industrial scenery and the suburban tableaus and the trailer havens. He escaped the desolation of the outskirts quickly, pretending his hog was a Thoroughbred stallion. As he approached the wilderness, Reed tried to imagine that he was seeing the place for the first time, as if he were entering the unfolding present of the opening of a movie. He was watching, curious to see what might happen.

  What anyone notices first about this vast, flat landscape is the fantastical shapes of rising white clouds—plumes and balloons and pillows of cloud, like fleecy foam insulation blown from a hose. When Hollywood filmed a frontier drama here, the source of the clouds remained just outside the frame of the Cinerama panoramas. A radiant green extended for miles, and the great mud and might of the river seemed unlimited. Even now, if you saw this landscape from a sufficient distance and you didn’t know better, you might imagine an untouched old-growth forest. The billowy puffs seem innocent. They are so purely white, it’s as though only dainty, clean ladies’ drawers could have been set aflame to produce them.