Full Body Burden (21 page)

My mother starts working a few days a week on the swing shift at the local nursing home. She hides the money from Dad so she can buy groceries. In our whispered bedroom conversations, she tells me that the money he earns seems to go into his sinking law practice or the cash drawer of Triangle Liquor. She never sees it. Our household grows a little leaner. We give Chappie to a local 4-H kid—he’s a little addled in the head anyway. There’s little money for hay and horse brushes and riding lessons, never mind clothes and books and tennis shoes.

When school ends I look for a summer job. I’m old enough to get a real one, but pickings are slim. I skim the classifieds and find nothing. Then I see that the truck stop a short drive from our house is hiring. I fill out an application for a waitress position. “Thank goodness you came in today, honey,” the woman behind the cash register purrs. “I had two girls quit just this morning.” Her copper-red hair is piled up in a beehive as stiff as a football helmet. It’s 1974. Even my mother has stopped wearing beehives.

I place my application on the counter. A long U-shaped bar stretches around the edges of the room, with truckers on bar stools hunched over their meatloaf and mashed potatoes. A few tables stand empty in the middle. A black-and-white TV roars in a corner and the room is filled with smoke. “When will I hear back?” I ask.

The woman rings up a gas purchase and hands the receipt to the man waiting. Several truckers stand impatiently behind him. It’s a busy place, and she looks at me as if she’s already forgotten me.

“Do you have any experience, darling?”

“No.” This is my first job, except for the long Saturday afternoons spent hanging out at my dad’s office.

She looks me up and down. “That’s all right. Just show up tomorrow morning at five thirty. We’ll give you one week on the early shift, six to two, and if that works out we’ll put you on the late shift. Girls make a little more money on the late shift.”

I watch as a waitress takes a pot of coffee up the line of truckers at the bar, filling each cup.

“Anything else, dear?” The words are not kind.

“What does it pay?” I blurt.

“A dollar twenty plus tips. And you’ll get a uniform. The uniform is free. You need to get yourself a pair of pantyhose, honey. Neutral color.” She shoos me away with her long fingernails. “Tomorrow morning. Five thirty. Girls get fired for being late.”

I don’t tell anyone at home about my job. It feels new and exciting and a little dangerous. The best thing, though, is the paycheck. A paycheck that’s all mine.

E
VERYONE—THE
governor, the mayors, Rockwell, and ERDA—seems to like the idea of a citizen watchdog group. Following the recommendation of the Lamm-Wirth Report, Governor Dick Lamm establishes the Rocky Flats Monitoring Committee, probably the world’s first and only group of citizens formally tasked with monitoring a nuclear weapons facility.
Sister Pam Solo is the sole woman appointee. The group meets regularly at the Rocky Flats plant, where they’re treated like VIPs. They drive through the checkpoint and put on booties and respirators for formal tours of the plant. They shake hands with managers and watch films produced by the Energy Department.

They have no real authority.

Few women work at the plant except as secretaries, and Pam has a hard time finding a respirator that will fit her face. She’s also one of the few people who are skeptical of the intentions of Rockwell and ERDA. For one thing, being inside the plant makes her uncomfortable. She feels like she’s entering a world she’s feared and hated since she was a child, when she had to dive under her school desk for drills during the Cuban missile crisis. And she’s struck by the language the workers and managers use to distance themselves from the product they manufacture. A nuclear bomb explosion is called an “excursion”—as if, Pam thinks, one were going for a mountain hike on a nice summer day.

It begins to dawn on Pam that the ultimate recommendation of the Lamm-Wirth Report—the phasing out and closing of the plant—may never be addressed.
She worries that things will continue as usual, with the committee merely gathering data and indecipherable information as a substitute for actually carrying out the real recommendations of the report.

But small groups of activists now appear regularly at the gates. Pat McCormick and fellow nuns from the Sisters of Loretto meet with a prayer group every Sunday morning just outside the plant. Housewife Ann White drives up from her home in Cherry Creek to march with people carrying signs and beating drums from Boulder to Rocky Flats, a twelve-mile hike along a busy highway.

I
SHOW
up for my first day at the truck stop and I’m handed a short-skirted uniform with a white bib, a pocket for a leaky blue pen, and an order pad. I feel like I’ve become a stereotype. “No runs in the pantyhose,” another waitress warns. “They’ll send you home. You need to have a spare pair in your purse.”

Through the window I can see trucks moving in and out, filling up with gas, their drivers jumping down from the cabs to light cigarettes and stand and talk. The trucks carry beer and milk and gas and who knows what—I wonder if some of them come from Rocky Flats. Later I will learn that they do. The truck bay is brightly lit, but inside it’s dim and smoky all day long. Plastic globe lighting hangs from the ceiling, and the carpet is gray and stained. By 10:00 a.m., I’m exhausted. The cook yells and the busboy is slow and the truckers—a constant stream of them—smile as if they expect something that’s not on the menu. Speed is everything. Two girls work the counter and one girl—the new girl, me—gets the family dining area, a small room set off from the counter area where no one actually sits down to eat. You have to pay your dues and prove you’re willing to work hard for nothing before you get moved to the counter, where tips are thick. The coffee is scalded and the food all looks the same, some version of an open-faced beef sandwich and
mashed potatoes coated with gravy and a slice of microwaved cherry pie for dessert.

If I’m going to be a truck-stop waitress, I’m going to be a good one. Before long I can carry four plates on each arm just like any other girl. The manager lets me work the counter. Tips are good. One waitress befriends me, a heavy woman in her forties named Shelley who lights a cigarette while still finishing off the last one. She’s raising two kids on her own. “Don’t stay here too long,” she laughs. “It grows on you.”

I count my tips each night and keep them in a shoebox under my bed. It’s rumored that some girls make extra money at night after their shifts end, climbing up and tapping on truckers’ windows. I begin to receive letters from places as far away as Nevada and Utah from a trucker not much older than I am who stops at the diner every other week or so. I barely know him and he writes three or four pages at a time. “Is this boy in love with you?” my mother beams.

One evening I’m making a chocolate malt and Shelley grabs my arm. “I think someone wants you in the family dining area,” she says.
Oh no
, I think. It’s my long-distance admirer, who’s taking a new approach. But no. It’s my mother. She waves as if I’m on the other side of the planet. The other waitress—the new girl—is trying to pour her a cup of coffee. “No, no, no!” my mother exclaims. “I want Kris. I want my daughter!”

I take the coffee pot from her hand. “I’ll get it,” I say. The girl is pissed. There are few tips to be had in the family dining area, and later—when my mother has left—I give her the five-dollar bill my mother leaves under the plate. Karma and Kurt sit on either side of the table and order grilled cheese sandwiches. My mother has the beef. “Sit down and join us!” she says, pulling my arm. “I’m so proud of you.”

“I’m working, Mom,” I say, crimson. I retreat to the back room, where Shelley is smoking just as fast as my mother is out front.

“That’s your family?” she asks.

I nod.

“What a nice family,” she says, and stubs out her cigarette in the last remains of her patty melt.

At the end of the summer I quit. It’s not the long hours or burned coffee or even the girls with questionable morals. It’s the palpable feel of loneliness, the edge of desperation. It’s the way the waitresses smoke in the back and the men joke out front and the drawer of the cash register bangs constantly.

W
ITH FUNDING
from the National Institutes of Health, and in the face of growing opposition from nearly every side, Jefferson County health director Dr. Carl Johnson continues his studies on areas downwind from Rocky Flats.
In 1975 and 1976 he and his colleagues find an average of forty-four times more plutonium in soil near the plant than had been reported by the State Health Department at the same locations, with some “hot” spots even higher, reinforcing earlier independent studies. Concentrations in the air and drinking water are also high.

Using data collected by the National Cancer Institute from 1969 to 1971, Johnson examines the relation between cancer rates and exposures to plutonium for people living near Rocky Flats.
The study involves 154,170 people in the most contaminated suburban area and 423,870 in an unexposed suburb.
He finds higher-than-average rates of cancer, primarily leukemia and lung cancer, in areas downwind of Rocky Flats. He also finds that in zones of increased contamination there is increased cancer.
Johnson estimates 491 additional cancer cases, where the Energy Department (then called ERDA) had estimated only one. The excess cancers are mainly the same types found in excess among the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He also believes that plutonium from the plant could increase the potential for birth defects in future generations.

Johnson’s findings are first published in
Science
in 1976. His data is confirmed
by a panel of international scientists and published in
Ambio
in 1981.

The government responds swiftly. The DOE points to a 1976
ERDA report that questioned Dr. Johnson’s soil sampling method, claiming that the samples were too shallow. Although Martell praises the method as innovative, the ERDA report argued that only samples obtained by scooping deep into the ground will yield a “meaningful” measure of plutonium,
contamination. Johnson stands by his results, emphasizing that surface particles of plutonium are more significant, as they are more easily inhaled. Plutonium typically moves around on surface levels. Studies have confirmed a concentration of 50 picocuries per gram of airborne soil in the Rocky Flats area. “In this arid, windy climate,” he writes, “a cubic meter of air may contain one or more grams of suspended dust.” Further, “in contrast to the Rocky Flats plant workers, who wear protective clothing, breathe carefully filtered air, are monitored frequently for radiation exposure, and have medical supervision, families downwind from the plant have no such protection.”

Some scientists question Johnson’s study. One complains that Johnson did not look at whether other factories in the area might also have released dangerous materials, though there are no other factories near Rocky Flats.

The debate is lost in a flurry of negative publicity.
Before Johnson’s article reaches print, officials at Rocky Flats and the Colorado Department of Health publish a scathing editorial attacking Johnson in the
Denver Post
. The editorial claims Johnson’s methodology is “largely useless” and runs the risk of being “a cruel joke.” The carefully worded op-ed doesn’t deny the existence of plutonium in residential areas, noting that “[our] analysis does not say there isn’t cancer danger from Rocky Flats. Plutonium admittedly has drifted beyond the plant boundaries. What [our] analysis does say is that Dr. Johnson has not proved scientifically any connection with cancer.”

Years later, in 1990, a reporter from the
Denver Post
will uncover the fact that the DOE paid Rockwell a cash bonus for persuading the
Post
to publish the derisive editorial.

Further, ERDA’s own report revealed several previously unpublished facts: approximately 11,000 acres of land, including 7,413 acres outside the plant area, are contaminated with more plutonium than is considered safe by the Colorado Department of Health, and almost all operations at the plant create “small releases” of radioactive material leading to measurable doses in “all segments” of the environment.

The report also stated that trucks carrying about five hundred
shipments of radioactive cargo to and from the plant each year leave measurable amounts of radiation along Colorado roads. Hundreds of radioactive shipments have traveled by plane as well. Over the past twenty-five years, plutonium and other hazardous materials have quietly been flown to and from Rocky Flats through Denver’s Stapleton International Airport and Jefferson County Airport on government aircraft, cargo planes, and—occasionally—passenger planes.
Records going back six years show shipments of up to 4.5 pounds of plutonium were not always inspected by the Federal Aviation Administration to determine if they were safe for travel. Earlier records were lost or destroyed. When this news hits the papers, Felix Owen, Rockwell’s new director of information services at Rocky Flats, downplays it. “
I believe it’s irrelevant,” he says. “A rehash of history isn’t too productive. All the flights took off and landed [safely].”

Citizen outrage is slowly growing. But in Bridledale and Meadowgate, all the neighbors agree: that Johnson guy must be a kook.

T
HE
S
MITH
garden is still a constant magnet for our pony Barney, but we rarely see the Smith children. Tamara Smith was four years old when she moved to Standley Lake in 1978. She’d spent her first years on Rainbow Ridge near the old part of Arvada, not far from our first house, and when her family moves to Standley Lake, just down the road from us, her parents are as thrilled as mine were when we moved to Bridledale. It’s the home they’ve always dreamed of, the perfect place to raise kids. Just over the ridge from our house, Tamara’s house faces the lake with a full view of the mountains, and with eight acres there’s room for a big garden and a pasture for horses and cattle. The family is devout Mormon and they live off the land, growing their own vegetables and raising their own meat. One of the first things her father does is dig a well.