Full Body Burden (25 page)

T
HE PROTESTS
at Rocky Flats continue. Many of the workers at Rocky Flats are unhappy about the negative publicity. About seven hundred plant employees sign petitions condemning the DOE and Rockwell for “taking the criticisms [by the antinuclear activists] passively.”

Karma attends many of the protests, sometimes taking along Karin or Kurt. The rallies turn into long afternoons of sunshine, music, and impassioned speeches. Sometimes they talk about whether it’s safe to stand out there on supposedly contaminated soil. “I guess it doesn’t really matter,” Karma says. “Whatever there is to get, we probably already got it in Bridledale.”

“That’s why we all have such glowing personalities,” Karin says wryly.

Mark and I spend weekends together at my place in Boulder. When he drives past the activists on the way to visit his parents, he honks in support. When I drive down to Arvada to visit my mother, I take the long way around so I don’t have to see the protesters. They seem a little crazy with their signs and handouts. They scare me. I look at the rolling hills, the fields where I galloped my horse. The wind is fresh, the sky turquoise blue. How can there be contamination here? It looks so pristine.

One evening Mark picks me up after work and we drive to a local park. He takes a six-pack from the trunk and we sit on a bench in the dark, cupping our cans of beer, sipping the cold foam and watching the stars above the black line of mountains. “We should get married,” Mark says suddenly.

I’m stunned.

“There’s an artist I know, a jeweler, who’s making a special ring. I designed it just for you. It’s not ready yet, but he’s working—”

“Mark—” I feel a weight in my stomach. “Don’t say this now.”

“What do you mean?”

“It can’t be now.”

He dips his head between his knees.

“I’m not even twenty-one. I’m in school and working like hell to stay there.” I feel terrible. Guilty. “I can’t get married now.”

“You could stay in school.”

“I don’t need your permission.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I don’t—” I feel choked. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know where I’m going yet.” Everything feels ill-timed and off-kilter. Maybe this is the only good man I’ll ever meet. Maybe this is my only shot at love. But I need to finish school. I don’t want to end up like a housewife in Bridledale, cleaning house and folding laundry. “I just want a chance at things, I guess.”

“Well,” he says. “All right.” But it’s not all right.

“Maybe we can wait awhile. I just need time. I love you. But marriage …”

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s give each other time.” He doesn’t look at me as we walk back to the car.

Later that night, alone in my room, I can’t sleep.

My mother is upset when she hears I’ve turned Mark down. “You could settle down and start looking for a house. All I’ve ever wanted is for you girls to get married and bring me grandchildren. I’m ready for grandchildren.” College, for me or for any potential husband, is less important to her than seeing me married. She’s proud of her daughters, but a woman’s primary role is to be a wife and mother.

I don’t ask her how we might afford a house and children when I can’t pay my tuition and Mark can barely pay his rent. “Mom, I’m not ready.”

She sighs and grasps my arm. “You never know what’s going to happen,” she says. “These things don’t always come again.”

But that summer is wonderful. Mark and I go rock climbing up Boulder Canyon. We sit on the grassy banks of Standley Lake and watch the sunset. He plays softball with a local team and I rarely miss a game. One weekend we drive all night to Las Vegas in his tiny orange Honda to see Burt Bacharach in concert. We spend the night on the old part of the strip in a cheap hotel with tattered furniture and glitter on the ceiling.
Mark buys a cassette tape and we sing Bacharach songs all the way home. “That man,” Mark says, “sure knows how to write a love song.”

T
HROUGHOUT THE
summer, contentious public debate over arms control and SALT II fills the media. President Carter refuses to comment on Rocky Flats during his visit to Golden. Many activists are crushed—he’s become a hero of sorts. Although Carter and Leonid Brezhnev, the leader of the Soviet Union, will reach an agreement in the coming year, SALT II is met with opposition in Congress, as many believe it will weaken U.S. defenses. (Signed by both Carter and Brezhnev, the treaty is never ratified. Both sides, however, honor the commitments laid out in SALT II, until 1986, when the Reagan administration withdraws from the treaty.)

In 1978 the world is watching what’s happening at Rocky Flats. Groups stand with signs at both the east and west gates, handing out flyers to workers and people who drive by. A white canvas tepee becomes the symbol for protests at Rocky Flats. Erected by members of the Rocky Flats Truth Force, the tepee that straddles the tracks just outside the plant boundary becomes a familiar landmark to drivers on Highway 93. Two flags mark the tepee: the American flag and the solar energy flag, green with a golden sun.
Some drivers honk and wave or stop to drop off food and supplies. Others make threats and obscene gestures. Protesters come and go, some staying for days or weeks. Patrick Malone is one of the most steadfast members. His face is dark from the sun. In his black beard, bandanna, and gold earrings, and wearing the fingerless wool gloves of a mountain climber, he looks more like a pirate than a peace activist. The protest goes on month after month, but Patrick remains. When the train approaches once a week, Patrick and the others quickly dismantle the tepee to save it from being taken away by the authorities. Then they sit on or lay their bodies across the railroad tracks.
The train stops, police approach, and they’re arrested. Each week the scenario is repeated. As the protest continues, Patrick is arrested ten times.

Across the rock-strewn field of amber grass lies the Rocky Flats complex, surrounded by towers and lights and patrolled by security guards.
One of those guards is Debby Clark, and she’s no longer a rookie. She’s been trained to deal with terrorists, but sometimes she has to yell at neighbor kids who hop over the boundary fence for a lark. The protesters, though, are something else. They make her angry. How could anyone be against defending the United States? They’re misguided, she thinks. They don’t understand what they’re doing. She doesn’t believe what the so-called environmentalists are saying. At Rocky Flats, everyone does their job, and workers depend on each other. They’re working to protect the country, to protect the very people who feel the need to protest.

During the weeks and months that the Truth Force occupies the tracks, part of Debby’s job is to sit in a converted truck nearby—nothing more than a heated railcar, really—and watch the protesters. She and the other guards have equipment, including night-vision goggles, to help them keep a close eye on what’s going on. Some of the activists are students and she wonders if they’re smoking pot or exactly what they’re doing out there. There’s no place to pee or take a shower. There’s no privacy. She talks to them from time to time, but she has no patience for students who should be in class.

One of the protesters is poet Allen Ginsberg, a founder of the Naropa Institute writing program in Boulder. Ginsberg is a frequent visitor at the home of Ann White, who now marches regularly with the protesters.
Ann and her husband have a home in one of Denver’s more prestigious neighborhoods, and Ann enjoys watching Ginsberg in the mornings on their front lawn, doing t’ai chi in his beard and business suit and astonishing the neighbors.

In an effort to “calm fear among local residents and to clear up the mystery about the work done at the plant,” Rocky Flats begins conducting public tours. The tour is intended to demonstrate how safe Rocky Flats is, and includes a look at Building 707, a “component manufacturing facility.” Building 707, the replacement facility for the building that was destroyed in the 1969 Mother’s Day fire, holds a storage vault containing several tons of plutonium. Tour participants, mostly curious local residents and members of the press, are outfitted with laboratory smocks and elastic-topped booties, and each person receives a respirator.
The tour guide, a Rockwell employee, instructs the group to put on their respirators if an alarm sounds while they’re walking through the pressure-sealed corridors and air locks because a particle of plutonium the size of a grain of pollen, if inhaled or taken into the body, can cause bone or lung cancer, leukemia, or genetic defects.

Despite the new openness, the public is not reassured. On June 16, 1978, when Rocky Flats is conducting a tour, Ginsberg sits on the railroad tracks with several others and reads his poem “Plutonian Ode” as a train approaches. Members of the local and national press are present when Ginsberg is arrested.
As he is led off by an officer, the officer jokes, “We’re equipped to deal with terrorists, but we’re not equipped to deal with you people.”

There are repeated arrests for trespass and obstruction of justice, and many activists, including Daniel Ellsberg, are arrested several times. A trial date is set.

Rocky Flats decides to suspend public tours of the plant.

T
HE ACTIVISTS
’ trial takes place in Golden, in the old courthouse just down the road from the Colorado School of Mines. Golden, an old mining town, is a mix of college students, Denver yuppies, and old-style cowboys. The city carefully nurtures and markets its Old West image. An arch stretches across the main street, proclaiming
WELCOME TO GOLDEN—WHERE THE WEST BEGINS
. It’s just a few days until Thanksgiving, and the town has already begun putting up Christmas decorations.

In the courtroom, thirty-one-year-old Judge Kim Goldberger is facing his first criminal trial. Seven Denver attorneys have agreed to volunteer their time to represent the protesters. The prosecuting attorneys, including two on loan from the DOE, are paid by the government. Several days are spent selecting the six-member jury, three men and three women. Expert witnesses are called; some are local, but many have traveled from out of state or from other countries, at their own expense.

The goal of the Rocky Flats Truth Force is to increase public awareness that Rocky Flats should be closed or converted to non-nuclear work, as recommended by the Lamm-Wirth Report. Members of the
Truth Force freely admit to camping out on the railroad tracks and to attempting to obstruct the activity of the weapons plant. But they plead not guilty to the criminal charge of trespassing. Attorneys for the activists base their defense on a little-known Colorado “choice of evils” law. The statute states that an illegal act is justified if it is done to prevent a greater, imminent evil or crime. For example, the law would allow an automobile driver to exceed the speed limit if the purpose was to save a life or escape immediate danger. The defense states that the activists are working to prevent a catastrophic event as well as make residents aware of potential health effects from environmental contamination. Trespassing is nothing in the face of what’s at stake.

But Judge Goldberger begins by ruling that he, and not the jury, has the right to determine if the choice-of-evils defense is applicable, and he decides it is not. In denying the use of it, Judge Goldberger says, “The courts may not be used as political or legislative forums.” Gay Guthrie, the deputy district attorney, notes, “People are not to usurp the democratic process. People are not to be so arrogant to take yourself to a point to where you sit yourself down on another man’s property and say that what he is doing is so bad that I can infringe on his constitutional rights. This is rule by anarchy.”

Although Judge Goldberger agrees to listen to several days of testimony from defense witnesses, he won’t allow the jury to hear the testimony. It’s filmed, however, in case he later rules it to be relevant. With the jury excused, the defense calls a number of experts to the stand to testify regarding the reality of radiation hazards imposed on local residents by Rocky Flats.

The first witness is Dr. Karl Morgan, a professor of health physics at Georgia Tech, one of the top engineering and physics universities in the country, and an international authority on radiation-induced illness. Dr. Morgan had been hired by the Manhattan Project to be director of health physics at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he spent twenty-nine years determining the radiation limits for workers. His testimony takes up most of the first day. “There is no safe level of radiation
exposure,” he says. “So the question is not: What is a safe level? The question is: How great is the risk?”
There is no such thing, he states, as a “permissible” dose of radiation; the slightest quantity can be enough, in a susceptible human, to cause some form of cancer. Present safety standards are dangerously inadequate. People living near or downwind of Rocky Flats are subject to a greater risk than those in other areas, and the EPA has, in his estimation, failed to consistently enforce even its own inadequate safety measures. Rocky Flats should never have been located close to a large population, he says. The plant should be shut down or relocated in a remote place, “preferably deep inside a mountain.”

Two more days of taped testimony follow, still with no jury present. Local scientists unanimously support Morgan’s statements. Dr. Edward Martell reports the results of his survey and confirms that high levels of plutonium have been found in soil far beyond the plant boundaries. Dr. John Cobb, professor of preventive medicine at the University of Colorado Medical Center, testifies that the most significant danger comes from the residue from more than five thousand leaking barrels filled with plutonium—plutonium that has been picked up by the wind and blown as far away as Denver. One way to quantify the presence of plutonium is to determine the rate of decay of radiation as measured in disintegrations per minute. In 1973 the Colorado State Health Department proposed an “interim” standard for soil contaminated with plutonium, setting the maximum allowable concentration at 2 disintegrations per minute per gram of soil.
The radioactive sand under the barrels measured at 30 million disintegrations per minute, 15 million times the state standard.