Full Body Burden (30 page)

To this group, the nuclear industry means patriotism, freedom, and equality.

As families spread out picnic blankets and rub on sunscreen, a rock band ironically blasts out the 1960s song “Wipe Out.” One organizer says, “
We want the world to know that the pro-nuclear supporters are fun-loving people.”

Most employees feel that Rocky Flats is a good and safe place to work, and if it weren’t, they say, they obviously wouldn’t have bought houses and raised their families in the communities surrounding the plant. In commemoration of its thirtieth anniversary, Rocky Flats hosts a Production for Freedom celebration, and thousands of employees and retirees attend with their families.

O
N THE
cold
morning of September 26, 1979, when the sky is still pitch-black, seven people “experienced in pacifist civil disobedience,” as the press later referred to them, use a pair of pliers purchased at a local hardware store to cut through the barbed-wire fence along Indiana Avenue, the boundary of Rocky Flats. Carrying lighted candles, they walk until they’re about a mile from the secured area surrounding the plutonium processing buildings, where they are confronted by guards and arrested just as the sun hits the mountains.

“It’s a good thing we were nonviolent,” says one of the arrestees later. “I could see the plant quite clearly. I realized that any terrorists could have had their way with that plant.”

At least one Rockwell official feels the activists got off too lightly. “I’m pretty liberal,” he says, “but if I’d been guarding out there, I’d have shot them. And if I were a terrorist trying to get into the place, I’d dress like a hippie pacifist. I don’t know why the guards didn’t shoot those people. They were lucky.”

One Sunday morning, as I drive down from the college to meet my mother for brunch, I pass by the prayer group that meets just outside the gate. I slow down to take a look. I cautiously pull my Volkswagen bug over to the shoulder of the road until the tires crunch on the gravel.
The protesters smile and wave their signs. “Hey!” a woman yells. “Come join us!”

I’m curious, and I stop and get out of the car. Who are these people, really? What are they saying? The air is fresh and cool and the sky cobalt blue. I feel the breeze ruffle my shirt and the wind lifts my hair. There is a boy standing there who could be Mark. The same color hair, the same jeans, the same boots.

But no. He turns and I see it’s someone else.

I get back in the car. I can’t join those people. I lack courage or conviction. Or maybe I need convincing. I don’t know if those people are crazy or heroic. If we’re contaminated, if I’m contaminated, maybe it’s better not to know.

I just want a glimpse of Mark. I would give anything to see him again.

K
ARMA HAS
no such qualms about her feelings concerning Rocky Flats. She begins to attend anti–Rocky Flats meetings and attends a screening of a film about Rocky Flats,
Dark Circle
, in the basement of a church with a group of activists. Even though the film has won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and an Emmy Award, it’s not shown on television or widely distributed because it’s considered sensational and too antinuclear. My friends and I have heard of it but no one’s seen it. It’s a big secret that everyone whispers about, like an X-rated movie.

One sunny weekend in October 1983, Karma drives out to the plant with Karin, Kurt, and her friend Laurie. It takes them a while to find a place to park. Thousands of cars—as well as bikes, motorcycles, and scooters—line the highway.

It’s the day of the Rocky Flats Encirclement. Protesters from all over the country are planning to link hands around the plant’s perimeter.
Organizers estimate they need at least twenty thousand people to reach all the way around the seventeen-mile border of the plant. More than six hundred people have been arrested at the plant in the past five years, but no arrests are anticipated today. Organizers want “a legal protest with no
civil disobedience … a good day with good spirits.” The encirclement is planned so as not to interfere with workers coming in for the 3:30 p.m. shift change.

Karma believes in closing the plant and saving the environment. Laurie’s father still works at Rocky Flats, and, even though he disapproves, she wants to protest on behalf of workers and residents. Karin and Kurt are mostly curious and think it might be fun, although Kurt is disappointed that his best friend, Shawn, refuses to join them. Shawn’s father, sister, and mother all work at the plant.

They get out of the car and put on their jackets—the day has turned cool. They’re greeted by volunteers in purple bandannas who wear shirts saying “Link Arms to End the Arms Race.” The volunteers help them get into line and prepare to link hands. Police are everywhere.
State Trooper Dave Harper tells a reporter, “Bombs have been around before I was born and they’ll be around after I’m dead—that’s the way I see it. This,” he says, waving a hand toward the growing circle, “isn’t going to do anything.” Security guards from Rocky Flats patrol the road with loudspeakers. “You won’t make it,” a guard shouts as Karma, Karin, Kurt, and Laurie walk along the road. “You don’t have enough people.”

They join the circle along with thousands of other people: high school students, a political science professor, a small child in a gray jogging suit with his hood up to shield him from the wind. Some people wear gas masks and dust filters, or scarves tied around their noses. A tall man in black clothes and a Grim Reaper mask walks along the line.

“Listen for the trumpets,” the peacekeeper says, and hands them a flyer. At precisely 1:55 p.m., trumpet players stationed at intervals around the circle play “Taps,” meant to signal the end of nuclear proliferation. Karma reaches out for the hands of those standing next to her. She looks across the landscape. The human chain runs for miles, snaking up and down hills, people lined up against the barbed-wire fence. Blankets, ropes, jackets, backpacks, baby strollers, and bandannas are used to fill in the gaps. American flags wave in a rainbow sea of balloons, and signs and slogans are everywhere: “Freeze or Burn,” “No Nukes Is Good Nukes,” “It’s Hard to Hug a Child with Nuclear Arms.” Across the road,
signs held by counterdemonstrators read “Nuke the Liberals” and “When Nukes Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Nukes.” The spinning rotors of four news media helicopters are nearly deafening.

The trumpeters play the first two measures of “We Shall Overcome,” and then the entire crowd sings, in unison, the verses printed on their flyers. After the third verse, brightly colored balloons are released from the four corners of the site.

Near the gate, a group of about a hundred counterdemonstrators from the Colorado Conservative Union chant, sing, and burn miniature Soviet flags. “Where is your circle?” a man taunts. “You don’t have enough people!” Many employees share their sentiment.
Jack Weaver, a plutonium production manager, notes, “Well, the peaceniks are back.… Don’t you have something better to do in life than to just stand out here and hold hands and chant around the plant site?” As he drives past them on his way to work, he thinks, “I’m doing something that I think is valuable to the country. And oh, by the way, the reason you’re out here able to protest is because I’m doing what I’m doing.”

The circle does, in fact, fall short on the southeast corner, despite people stretching the line with jackets, sweaters, and anything else they can come up with. But few people seem willing to stand in the southeast area anyway—the area that leads to our neighborhood—which is directly downwind from the plant, and where soil contamination is reputedly the most severe.

Eventually, both Shawn and Laurie lose their fathers to cancer linked to their work at Rocky Flats, although nothing can ever be proven for sure. Rocky Flats seems to touch the lives of nearly everyone we know, in one way or another.

Not long after the encirclement, Dr. LeRoy Moore, an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado and a protester who had been arrested at Rocky Flats in 1979, joins five other protesters to create the Boulder Peace Center, later known as the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, in rented space at a local church.

Karma and Laurie feel emboldened after the encirclement. One summer afternoon, Karma takes the keys for our father’s copper-orange Ford
Maverick, the two-door beater with a cracked windshield and overflowing ashtray. Feeling adventurous, the girls decide to drive out to Rocky Flats and see if they can get past the security guards. It’s not the first time they’ve had the idea. Every kid in Bridledale has looked over that barbed-wire fence and wondered what’s over the hill. And security is rumored to be surprisingly lax, even though guards are supposedly under orders to shoot to kill. Karma drives steadily. They see the guard behind the window at the gate and slow down, but he merely looks up and waves them on.

“Oh my God,” Karma mutters. “I can’t believe that just happened!” She drives through the gate, heart pounding. “What now?”

“Keep driving,” Laurie says. “Look straight ahead.”

The girls drive. They have no idea where they’re going, and they begin to feel giddy. Finally they pull over next to a building and get out. No one takes notice. Karma walks to the back of the car and opens the trunk. She looks around to see if anyone sees them.

“We could have a bomb in this car,” she says loudly. “Right here in the trunk!”

“Yeah,” Laurie agrees. “We could cause some serious damage!”

They stand next to the trunk and wait for someone to notice, for security to show up.

Nothing happens. Finally the girls close the trunk, pull the car back onto the road, and drive out. No one comes after them.

I take it as further proof that maybe Rocky Flats isn’t really as dangerous as people say it is.

P
AT
M
C
C
ORMICK
of the Sisters of Loretto travels to Seattle for training in nonviolent ways to oppose the buildup of the arms race. When she returns, the prayer group that meets every Sunday at the west gate of Rocky Flats has grown to almost eighty people. They arrive with signs and songs and thermoses filled with hot coffee, and often chat with the guards. There is a strong sense of camaraderie.

It won’t be long, though, before those same guards will be facing them in court. Two friends of Pat’s, Sister Pat Mahoney of the Blessed
Virgin Mary and Sister Marie Nord of the Order of St. Francis, decide to create fake security badges and try to get inside the plant to stage a protest. They arrive with the morning shift on the east side of the plant, wave their faux badges, and cruise through the security checkpoint. The nuns drive toward what they believe is the plutonium production area, park, and hang a sign on a fence comparing the plant to the internment camps of World War II.

The women are quickly arrested and later convicted of a felony for falsification of documents. During their trial, the sisters repeatedly refer to Rocky Flats as “a nuclear bomb factory.” No more euphemisms, they say.

They spend a year in federal prison.

Throughout the year that Sisters Pat Mahoney and Marie Nord are incarcerated, Pat McCormick writes and visits.
Pat Mahoney will eventually serve two terms in federal prisons for her protests at Rocky Flats.

Pat McCormick begins to think that she, too, might want to protest inside the gates of Rocky Flats. She prays with her friend Mary Sprunger-Froese, a member of the Mennonite community, and together they come up with a plan. They meet a group of friends at the Catholic Worker soup kitchen and each person gives blood, enough to fill two baby bottles. The blood in the bottles symbolizes the children who will be born in a world threatened by nuclear weapons. Then they construct two foot-long wooden crosses and cover them with pictures of people from all over the world.

As a Catholic sign of repentance for the first day of Lent and an act of prayer that Rocky Flats should be permanently closed, the women decide to enter the plant on Ash Wednesday. They leave well before sunrise. Their car is old and clunky, a donation from a parishioner, and it refuses to go into reverse. But it chugs up the hills leading to the plant just fine. Keeping in mind that their two friends ended up in prison for falsification of documents, they carry no IDs and are prepared to be stopped at the gate and stage their demonstration there.

But they aren’t stopped. When they drive in with the 6:30 a.m. shift—a long stream of headlights in the fading dark—the guard waves
them right through. “Wow!” Pat exclaims. “They’re taking us in just as if we’re going to a Broncos game!”

Stunned, the women drive down the main road, toward what they suspect is Building 771, where the triggers are made. There is a parking place right next to the fence. They get out of the car, lean their crosses against the chain-link fence, and splash a little blood. Then, hearts beating in fear, they kneel, begin praying, and wait to be arrested.

And wait. It’s cold and still fairly dark, and even though the women are dressed warmly—nuns no longer have to wear habits—they start shivering. Both women are middle-aged. Their knees hurt.

Twenty minutes pass, and finally a group of security guards shows up with trucks and lights. The security manager is furious. The women are handcuffed and put in the back of a security van while the guards ransack their ramshackle car. “Where are your security badges? How did you get in here?” they demand.

“We just drove in,” Mary says.

The guards don’t believe her. “Where are your fake IDs?” they repeat.

“We don’t have any,” Pat responds. “We came in without them.”

“That can’t be true,” a guard says.

“This is a nightmare to them,” Mary says quietly.

One of the guards walks over to the van and recognizes Pat from the early-morning prayer meetings at the west gate. He’s shocked to see her in handcuffs. “What are you doing here?” he asks.

“Well, it’s Ash Wednesday,” Pat says. “This is my act of repentance and prayer.”

“Oh my God,” he says, anger temporarily forgotten. “I forgot to go to Mass!”

Pat laughs. “This can be your mass, okay?” she says.

The nuns are arrested and booked at the Denver County Jail. During their trial, they—like the two nuns before them—insist upon calling Rocky Flats a bomb factory. “We need to tell the truth about it,” Pat says. “It’s only through resistance that Rocky Flats will become visible.”