by Margot Kahn
Francis B. Stein, my elementary school principal and Buchanan’s late, beloved historian, collected and saved postcards of the park. Muted but enthralling, the cards show beaming visitors wading into the river, bounding toward the dance hall and lining up for 75-cent rides on a boat called Miss Indian Point V.
Approached from the east, Indian Point is set back from the road so that its reactors are visible only from a distance. When I was young, and my family drove together down Broadway toward my aunt’s house, where my sister and I caught the school bus most mornings, I would twist my neck from the back seat of our Ford to glimpse the tops of its domes—dull and squat, turning pinkish-gray as the morning sun climbed higher. You could spot them from the riverfront in Peekskill, too, but the best view was from the other side of Annsville Creek, near the kayak launch. There, the domes (“Domes of doom,” my aunt joked) rose clumsily from the horizon, odd and oafish, cold. Even now, that juxtaposition—organic versus synthetic, ancient versus new—feels ominous.
One day, when I was still in elementary school, my mother discovered a man with a sack of unwieldy equipment roaming our backyard, uninvited. My mother, who is unusually fearless, marched us outside and confronted him. Apologetic and bumbling, he said he had been sent to survey our land—and all areas surrounding Indian Point. Why? He mumbled something about fault lines.
I had already learned a bit about earthquakes in school. As far as I could tell, they involved giant, lightning-bolt-shaped gashes in the earth. As the man nervously packed up his instruments and left, I began wondering what it would feel like if our house slipped into a gaping crack in the ground. That worry changed shape when we were told that Indian Point was built on the Ramapo Fault Plane, a 185-mile system of fractures in the earth’s crust that snakes from Pennsylvania into the Hudson Valley. The plant claims it was designed to absorb an earthquake of up to a 6.1 magnitude (the earthquake that felled Fukushima Daiichi was a 9.0), but as of 2010, Indian Point still ranked number one on a cautionary list compiled by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission—meaning it has the highest risk of suffering core damage from an earthquake of any nuclear plant in the nation. Twenty million Americans live within fifty miles of it.
Eventually, I went away to college in Virginia and didn’t think much about Indian Point until the fall of 2001, when I moved back to New York and enrolled in a graduate writing program at Columbia University. In the days following the 9/11 attacks, I would pull fliers—for chemical suits and build-your-own nuclear bunker kits—from underneath my windshield wipers every time I went home and parked my Honda on the street. Camouflage-clad armed guards stood at the entrance to the plant, and the whole area was cordoned off like a prison, with stretches of razor wire. Those fences remain.
That fall, the National Guard started camping out in the forest behind our home, near the cemetery where my grandmother is buried. On the evening news, we watched anxious anchors speculate about Indian Point’s vulnerability as a terror target. We ourselves had whispered conversations with neighbors about whether rolled-up blueprints for the plant had really been found in a cave in Afghanistan. When I stood at our living-room window during those days, gazing out over the lake and drinking coffee with my father, I half-expected a tank to slowly roll by. There was a sense, then, that danger of some sort was imminent, though we couldn’t specify its origins or potential. This is the most odious and creeping kind of fear.
A few years later, my aunt was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. She recovered, but I still wonder if Indian Point contributed in some way to either the genesis or progress of her disease. (There has yet to be a definitive study of thyroid cancer rates in Westchester and Rockland Counties and local nuclear radiation, though plenty have and continue to speculate about potential correlations.) Not long after, our veterinarian found a lump growing on our old cat’s thyroid gland; he was treated, successfully, with an injection of radioactive iodine. Now, when I go to the dentist for a checkup and all the attending X-rays, my mother still cautions me to request a thyroid guard, an extra bit of lead-lined apron that can extend up and over the neck. Secretly, I want to ball up under the bib like a hermit crab, shielding my entire body from any more radiation. It is a curious, shapeless, and omnipresent enemy: electromagnetic waves, shooting from somewhere to somewhere else.
I don’t live in Buchanan anymore, but I still spend plenty of summer weekends there, grilling steaks and ears of corn in my parents’ backyard, helping my father plant potatoes, idly picking ticks off the cat. In the last few years, the county has been developing the waterfront more, building bike paths and picnic areas, converting old factories into lofts or hotels or craft breweries. The plant remains, unmovable, nearly stoic. We look at those domes and shudder, or shrug, as we have all our lives.
Amanda Petrusich is the author of three books about music, including Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records, which was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Slate, and BuzzFeed. Petrusich is the recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, and is a contributing writer for the New Yorker. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, Pitchfork, GQ, Esquire, Playboy, The Nation, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She is a commissioning editor for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, a 2015 MacDowell fellow, a 2014 New York State Foundation for the Arts nonfiction fellow, and an assistant professor of writing at New York University. In 2015, she was named one of the most influential people in Brooklyn culture by Brooklyn magazine. She lives in New York City.
Keeping My Fossil Fuel in the Ground
Terry Tempest Williams
My husband, Brooke Williams, and I recently bought leasing rights to 1,120 acres of federal public lands near our home in Utah. The lease gives us the right to drill for oil or natural gas. We paid $1,680 for it, plus an $820 processing fee.
We put it on our credit card.
I hadn’t planned on leasing these lands when I attended an auction run by the federal Bureau of Land Management, a government agency that manages hundreds of millions of acres of public land across the West. I was there to protest the leasing of these lands to oil and gas companies planning to drill for fossil fuels.
But I ended up in the shorter line to get into the auction, the one for people registering as bidders. So I signed a registration form and was given the number 19. I followed the other bidders inside and found a seat in the front row.
My husband entered with the protesters, who were assigned to a separate space set aside for them.
As people filed in, a BLM agent approached me and asked, “Are you aware that if you have misrepresented yourself as a legitimate bidder with an energy company you will be prosecuted and you could go to prison?”
His tone moved from inquiry to intimidation to harassment. “I am asking you, are you aware…”
I said I was aware of what happened to Tim DeChristopher, who attended a similar auction in 2008, where he bid up prices and ended up with 22,000 acres, worth nearly $1.8 million that he had no intention of paying for. He was doing it to protest the auction. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison on felony counts of interfering with the auction and making false representations.
“As an American citizen,” I told the agent, “I have a right to be here and witness this auction and decide if I am going to bid or not on these leases on our public lands, correct?”
“I am saying, if you choose to misrepresent yourself…”
“But I have this right…”
“What energy do you plan to develop?”
“You can’t define energy for us. Our energy development is fueling a movement to keep it in the ground.”
“You will be prosecuted if…”
We were interrupted as the auction began. Parcel after parcel was sold to the rhythmic bantering of the auctioneer until voices in the back of the room began singing, “People got to rise like water…”
The singing became louder an
d louder until the bidders could no longer hear the auctioneer. The auction stopped. The protesters were told to be quiet. They kept singing. They were asked again. They sat down. The auction continued.
“Two dollars, two dollars, do I hear 2.25, I hear 2.25, 2.50, 3, 4, 5, are you in, are you out, do I hear 5, I hear 5, do I hear 6, 6 dollars, do I hear 7, 7. Sold! Bidder No. 14.”
And so it went.
Then the protesters began to sing again. This time, they were escorted out by the police. They offered up words of protest as they departed, ending with “Keep it in the ground!”
The doors were closed. The auction continued as the singing of protesters echoed from the stairwell.
“Come on, men, are you in, are you out, or are you stayin’ home—this is a lot of scenery going to waste,” the auctioneer joked when no one bid on a parcel.
As the auction closed, we were told that if we wished to lease parcels that had not been sold, we could go to the BLM office and purchase them “over the counter” at a discounted price. Call it a fire sale.
Which is exactly what my husband and I did. We were interested in buying leases within the county where we live specifically, on land where oil and gas exploration might threaten sage grouse, prairie dogs and other wildlife. We met the qualification: we’re adult citizens of the United States.
With maps stretched out before us, we found what we were looking for. The $2-per-acre base price had been reduced to $1.50. We took out our credit card, and sealed the deal. The land sits adjacent to a proposed wilderness area. When we visited, we were struck by its hard-edge beauty and castle-like topography.
We have every intention of complying with the law, even as we challenge it. To establish ourselves as a legitimate energy company, we have formed Tempest Exploration Company, LLC. We will pay the annual rent for the duration of the ten-year lease and keep whatever oil and gas lies beneath these lands in the ground.
Those resources will remain there until science finds a way to use those fossil fuels in sustainable, nonpolluting ways. After ten years, we will lose our lease if we haven’t drilled.
We’re not suggesting that everyone who feels as we do about the exploitation of our public lands should do what we did. We aren’t going to be able to buy our way out of this problem. Our purchase was more or less spontaneous, done with a coyote’s grin, to shine a light on the auctioning away of America’s public lands to extract the very fossil fuels that are warming our planet and pushing us toward climate disaster.
Out here in the Utah desert, we are hoping to tap into the energy that is powering the movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Some 32 million acres of lands managed by BLM have already been leased to energy companies to drill for oil and gas, even as some climate scientists tell us the world needs to keep most fossil fuels in the ground to avert a catastrophic future of runaway global warming.
The energy we hope to produce through Tempest Exploration is not the kind that will destroy our planet, but the kind that will fuel moral imagination. We need to harness this spiritual and political energy to sustain the planet we call home.
Terry Tempest Williams is the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert; The Open Space of Democracy, and Finding Beauty in a Broken World. Her most recent book, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks, was released in 2017. She is currently writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide.
Sea Home
KaiLea Wallin
Today we are anchored in a wide bay, the swell has dropped for a few days and the boat is pleasantly becalmed. When I climb out of bed and poke my head above deck, this is what I see: a dozen other sailboats anchored a comfortable distance around us. Low clouds waiting to burn off the humid mountains on the opposite side of the bay. Flocks of Heermann’s gulls and pelicans pestering fishermen as they drift by us, cleaning their catch from the night before. A lone paddle boarder, racing no one out to sea.
Back aboard our floating universe I see surf wax and dinghy fuel and our tiller draped in rash guards. There are small drool rags of various colors tucked in handy nooks, like under the dodger and from hanging lines off the mizzen mast. A long row of rinsed cloth diapers are clipped to our lifelines and wave like surrender flags in the breeze. A faint odor rises up from forgotten damp flip-flops.
I tuck my head below and survey the interior. The port or left side berth cradles instruments: guitar, ukulele, drum, baby rattles. The starboard or right side berth holds dry goods and fruit: rice and cereal, limes getting squished by grapefruits, bright bananas hanging above ripening mangos. As I climb down the ladder back into the main cabin, I see my husband with Etolin in his arms, headed for the changing table. While they debate, using mostly body language, the merits of wearing clothes versus spending the day in the nude, I put on water for oatmeal. Eventually Etolin concedes to Rob’s persuasive arguments and removes his foot from his mouth, allowing the proper placement of his diaper followed by a cotton onesie. Rob takes over breakfast preparations and I carry Etolin up to the cockpit to look for whales.
Six months a year, this boat is our home. She’s a good boat and we love her. She is ample and stately, no-nonsense, with sexy curves and a confident air. We are proud of her classic lines, workhorse nature, and simple, modest systems. We don’t mind that she’s lacking a few luxuries, like hot water or a shower.
Before we met and married, Rob and I separately satisfied our travel itch and distaste for office jobs by working seasonal, often maritime-related, jobs in Alaska, Hawaii, New Zealand, and beyond. Independently we lived on schooners and barges, fish boats and yawls. We accrued hundreds of hours of sea time, learned how to fix engines and outboards and studied both high tech and ancient forms of navigation. We were pretty salty before we met and after we joined forces, our time on the water doubled. Eventually I moved aboard his 38-foot sailboat and we merged our varying visions of the future into one: quit our nonprofit jobs and sail the boat south.
Two thousand and seven hundred miles later, here we are in Mexico. What was supposed to be a quick stop on our sailing journey has turned into a lifestyle. The longer we stay in this deep bay circled by lush green mountains, this balmy climate, the more our ties to the community grow and the anchor lodges deeper. I will concede that Mexico will never be home to the same degree as the nostalgia-rich Pacific Northwest that we sailed away from. But bringing your house with you really helps bridge that divide.
We first lived on our ship in the rainy harbors of Puget Sound and the Salish Sea that connects Seattle to Canada. Then we lived on her offshore in giant seas and epic gales. Then we lived on her in the foggy coastal towns of California and the dusty desert pueblos of Baja. Now, in tropical mainland Mexico, she fits us like an old pair of boots. She’s worn in where we have tread the most (the galley, the head) and she’s scuffed and cozy in comforting ways. We can dinghy to shore, explore new towns, eat foreign food, and speak Spanish all day then return to the same bed we’ve slept in for nine years.
But for all the joys of this maritime life, after a long winter on a rocking home, I’m feeling a little green. Plus, we have bills to pay. So every spring we leave the boat and head back to America. Six months a year, our home is on land. This is our working home. While families around us prepare for summer vacations, we start working 10–14 hours a day, sometimes every day, for months at a time. Some summers we slay salmon in Alaska, others we lead wildlife tours. If we work hard enough and save our pennies we can turn them into pesos and go back to our boat for another season of aquatic adventures. Compartmentalizing our lives into one home where we play and one where we work is a bit extreme in terms of work-life balance but it averages out to nearly normal hours and income if taken over the course of a whole year. We like to think of it as trading stock
options for a reoccurring, annual, six-month retirement.
April is the month we leave our water home for our terra firma home. To prepare our boat for Mexico’s summer hurricane season, we have pages of “To Do” lists that dictate our days. We painstakingly remove every stitch of fabric and every single line and clean, dry, and stow them below. That includes all the sails, sail covers, cockpit cover, dodger, weather cloths, and safety netting. We wash, dry, and fold all our clothes and put them in trash bags with dryer sheets to prevent mold and mildew. We bag every single book for the same reason. We give away perishables and dry goods that bugs would enjoy and bag up cans and sealed food with bay leaves and rodent traps. The engine, the batteries, the dinghy, the outboard; every single thing onboard gets some kind of special check up, tune up, and treatment for stowage until the entire boat is almost bare above deck and below deck looks like a bursting storage unit. We even take the booms off and put them below to preserve their Sitka spruce cores from baking in the summer heat. Surfboards and solar panels get stuffed below. Meanwhile the temperatures soar into the nineties, we often miss meals because we can no longer cook in our torn apart galley, and our heads and backs ache from hauling heavy objects up and down the ladder. Patience runs thin.
Once we’ve finally crossed everything off the list and raced to make our flight north, it’s unpacking time again. We cross our fingers that our renter has left our little apartment in good condition and we don’t have any major repairs that need attention. We try to remember what we shoved where in the frantic rush of leaving the previous fall (the shed? the storage unit? the laundry room cupboards?) and we hope our car is not too disgusting from spending another winter under a tarp. Eventually we find our sweaters and shake out the moths and put them back on and start our summer jobs in earnest. We restart our cell phone plans, our insurance plans, and our friendships. During all this, we try to ignore the nagging thought that in six months, it will be time to do it all over again.
