Marrow Island (17 page)

Washing blood from my hands in a basin full of stone-cold seawater didn’t feel like praying. It felt like penance.

Eight

THE RIVER

HANFORD REACH, WASHINGTON

MAY 7, 2016

IT’S OVER SIX
hours from the Malheur to Spokane. I told Carey I would wear the GPS watch the whole time, and here it is on my wrist, tiny red light flickering in the dark. I imagine him watching it beat like a tiny red heart on a screen somewhere, in the middle of a digital Palouse.

As I crossed from Oregon to Washington, I gassed up in Kennewick. There were signs for the Reach—this long stretch of the Columbia River near the Hanford Site. It was twenty miles out of my way, but I wanted to see the place where the retired nukes go.

A broad expanse of river on a plain, a wetland alive with birds and insects, a distant cluster of concrete buildings, an alien city surrounded by volcanic hills as desolate as the surface of the moon. It surprises me, how beautiful it all is; how calm I feel, sitting on the banks of a river rumored to harbor radioactive effluent. No one believes in containment, despite the Department of Energy’s official statements. But people still live here, raise children downstream.

I think about how we keep making these beds, and the only real choice is choosing which one to sleep in. The one with the loveliest view? The cheapest cost of living? The vibrant nightlife and culture?

Sister J. is lying in her bed over a hundred miles from here, still alive.

My hand is in the pocket of my sweater, resting on a small metal tin. In the tin are a dozen dried wavy caps,
Psilocybe
cyanescens
. They’re the only things I could think she might want from me.

Nine

THE ISLANDS

MARROW ISLAND, WASHINGTON

OCTOBER 12, 2014

“
WE’RE ALL STILL
waiting for the ‘Big One,’ aren’t we?” Sister J. was walking the shore with me before midday meal. We gathered seaweed, which they washed and dried and stored for food and medicine. The tide was low and the beach widened into mud flats.

“The big earthquake? I guess we are,” I said. “Or any other earthquake, with all the faults we’re living on.”

“Your father died here, didn’t he?”

“At the refinery, yes.” I wasn’t sure where these questions were going, but it didn’t feel like Sister was just trying to get to know me.

“And it took you some time, but you came back. To see the place where he died, to be here.”

I didn’t respond. I busied myself cutting a bunch of bladderwrack from a rock. She tromped over to me with a bunch of her own and put it in the basket beside me.

“Does it feel safe here to you, now?”

“Not when I’m being interrogated by women religious,” I said.

Sister cackled and slapped her knee, then fell into a coughing fit. I put a hand on her back and held her arm to steady her. We each had a small, sharp foraging knife in one hand. She finished her deep hacking and chuckle-coughed some more. When she was done, she was out of breath. I settled her on a rock and sat beside her, dropping our tools in the basket. She seemed older than her fifty-seven years.

“I admire your boundaries, Lucie,” she said when she had regained her breath. “I know it’s not easy to talk about loss, even years afterward.”

“I don’t mind talking about what happened, but I feel like there’s a riddle here, like this conversation isn’t really about me coming back,” I said.

“I apologize. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m saying until I’ve talked my way around it for a while.”

We sat for a moment, watching a pair of gulls squabbling near the water’s edge.

“What does my father’s death have to do with earthquakes? Besides the fact that he died after one?”

“I’ve noticed, over the years, that people are much more comfortable talking about the tragedies that have passed than the tragedies that are to come.”

“That’s probably true.”

“After the May Day Quake, people rebuilt, despite knowing that there would be other earthquakes, even bigger ones. Why? Why, when you know untold danger is imminent, do people stay? Invest time and money in a city that may crumble again?”

I thought for a moment and said, “I think we trick ourselves into believing we are safe, that we’ve learned from the past and can survive what comes, so that we can continue to live in the world, have relationships with each other.”

“What if we’re not tricking ourselves at all, though? What if we choose to take great risks so that others can continue to live in the world and have relationships with each other?”

“You’re talking about the Colony?”

Sister J. took a deep breath and let it out.

“Smell that air,” she said. “When I smell that air, I think,
God is good
.”

She lifted herself from the rock and picked up the basket.

“Sister, is the island making you sick? Has it been making others sick?” I stood so that we would be face to face.

“The island sustains us as we have sustained it.” There was sadness in her eyes, though she smiled faintly. “And that is what we want the world to know.”

Sister J. didn’t join us for midday meal. We parted ways at the fork in the path; I headed up the hill to meet Katie, and she went down to meet Maggie. The colonists seemed subdued at the lunch tables; conversations were quiet and contemplative. No one mentioned the dying woman.

Katie and I sat alone at the end of a table. I told her about the conversation I had just had with Sister. She chewed her greens and stared at a knot in the woodgrain.

“What do you think she was trying to tell me, Katie?”

“When I wrote you—four months ago?—things here were a little different. We were feeling confident that our method had been successful, that after twenty years, we might be able to share what we had learned. I thought that you might come and write about us—about Sister J.’s mission—and that maybe it would bring some donors our way, so that we could expand the cleanup to the refinery site itself.”

“So you do want me to write about the Colony?”

“I thought that you might.”

“If you wanted me to come to write a story, why didn’t you just ask me?”

“I wanted to see you, too. We haven’t seen each other in so long, I didn’t know, I guess, if this would work. And Sister wasn’t sold on the idea.”

“She didn’t want me to come?”

“She didn’t want anyone to come. But I thought if she met you, if she understood what this place meant to you and the work you have already done—and what drives you—she would change her mind.”

“Has she changed her mind?”

“About you, I think so. But she’s still worried about what publicity would do us. It might make things difficult for us, legally.”

“What do you mean?”

“Technically, we’re squatters.”

“But you have an agreement with Jacob Swenson?”

“Nothing in writing.”

“Nothing?”

She shook her head.

“Squatters have rights, Katie. Especially after so many years and so much investment in the property.”

“Right.” She nodded.

“With publicity, you might gain widespread support among activists, you’d probably get the attention of more donors . . .”

“Yeah, that was the thought. But there are complications with that.”

“Like what?”

“Like taxes. We haven’t been filing.”

“Okay. I mean, you could become a 501(c)(3) and file retroactively. There are tax lawyers who can fix these problems.”

“This just . . . it isn’t what we’re about, is all. We don’t want to be a business; we just want to keep doing what we’re doing.”

“If the park reopens, there will be a lot more traffic on the island, Katie. People are going to become more aware.”

“I think we just need time to figure out what we’re going to do. And it’s not the best time for us, at the moment.”

“Because of the dying woman?”

Katie nodded.

“I understand. I do. I guess I just don’t know what you want me to do with all this. It definitely complicates things for me, if I were to write about the Colony. I can’t tell the story you want to tell. I have to tell the story I see.”

“Let us get through Sarah’s passing. We’ll figure it out.”

I spent some time in the kitchen helping to prep vegetables for the harvest supper, until Jen shooed me out, saying I was a guest and I should enjoy the last of my time here before I left in the morning. The kitchen was bustling, and many had suspended their usual activities to help with the preparations. Katie had vanished.

So I set off for Fort Union. It was about a mile to the park through the trees to the northwest. I took my time, noting the way the landscape changed as I approached the western side of the island, how it dried out and the trees thinned, leaving wide-open spaces of mostly summer-spent grasses. But I also noticed how each step away from the Colony showed an island whose recovery was less and less visible. There were more dead trees, still standing, but leafless and gaunt, hollowed out. And the trees still living showed less new growth. They weren’t thriving like the trees around the Colony. This time I took pictures along the way.

Carey wasn’t in the old ranger station—really just a one-room hut near the shore; it was empty of everything but dust and spiders. There was a sturdier structure for the ranger’s quarters, a cabin up the hill past the barracks. The decaying building was uncanny, with nothing but trees and sea behind it. It seemed shrunken, with warped, peeling cedar-shingle siding, windows boarded up like empty, lidded eyes.

I was taking pictures when I heard footsteps behind me.

“You here for an official interview, ma’am?”

“I could be. I’m not sure at the moment.”

“Would coffee help?”

“You have coffee? Jesus, I’d love some coffee.”

“Come on.” He gestured toward his cabin.

He was cooking on a camp stove, so heating the water took some time. While we waited, we sat on the steps of the cabin talking. I asked how his assessment was going; he asked how my visit was going. Watching him pour the water into a cup of instant coffee, I thought about the well at the park.

“Have you tested the water here?”

He looked up at me, curiously.

“Haven’t yet. I’m just here to check out the camp and set things up so the biologists can come in and do what they need to do.”

“Did you filter that water?”

“Nope.” He handed me the steaming cup.

“What if it’s full of hexavalent chromium?”

He shrugged. “We’re not living here. Short-term exposure, almost twenty years after the fact . . . The human body’s pretty resilient.”

Not willing to wait much longer, I took a scalding drink from the metal cup.

I moaned. He laughed.

“Does it taste like poison?”

“It’s perfect.”

We talked more about the difference between remediation and restoration. Working for the Forest Service, Carey was more accustomed to restoration—after events like fires, floods, landslides—than remediation, which involves removing toxins from the ecosystem. It was one of the reasons—that and the remoteness of the site and the projected costs—that Fort Union had been closed for so long.

“That’s what baffles me about your friends over there at the Colony,” he said. “They’ve been exposing themselves to—whatever’s here—for a long time. Have they got million-dollar filtration systems? Did they have a barge unload a few metric tons of fresh topsoil to grow their food in?”