Free Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen Page B

God, and that Rocky Flats has nothing to do with it.

The rumors start with rabbits.One Rocky Flats worker and then another begins to notice long-eared bunnies, lots of them, out by the 903 Pad, an area of 260,000 square feet—larger than four football fields—where more than five thousand rusted oil barrels stand. Barrels stretch nearly as far as the eye can see and have been open to the elements for years. Since 1954, as a matter of fact. There’s just no place to put them. Each thirty- to fifty-gallon drum holds waste oil and solvents contaminated with plutonium and uranium, for a total of hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid waste laced with radioactive material. They can’t be shipped, they can’t be stored, and no on-site building can hold them all. Weeds poke through the badly corroded bottoms. Contaminants leak into the soil and the groundwater that feeds into Woman Creek and Walnut Creek, and then Standley Lake and Great Western Reservoir. Rocky Flats calls it the 903 Pad, but some workers privately call it the Launching Pad, where all sorts of things are launched into the environment.
    Word gets out among the workers. Those bunnies are hot.
    But management has known all along. A top-secret memo, with the heading CONTAMINATED RABBIT , dates back to January 1962.The rabbit, dissected for analysis, showed high concentrations of alpha radiation, particularly in the hind feet.
    T HE SUMMER of 1969 seems apocalyptic. Images of death and destruction in Vietnam are shown on the evening news. The Manson murders stun the country, and Ted Kennedy drives a car off a bridge near Chappaquiddick Island. Apollo 11 lands on the moon and more than 400,000 people show up for three days of peace and music at the Woodstock Festival. In August, several thousand Colorado residents travel to Washington, D.C., to participate in the largest antiwar demonstration to date. The Cold War is in full swing, and Rocky Flats is busy building the heart of every nuclear weapon in the United States.Occasionally demonstrators begin to appear at the west gate of Rocky Flats to protest nuclear war.
    Except for my father’s sporadic railings about how Nixon can save the country—and possibly the world—my family is largely unaware of anything that’s happening outside our immediate cocoon of kin, pets, and general chaos. Vietnam is just imagery on television, and racial tensions are far, far away. The only conflict on the block is when my friend Danny gets teased for being Italian. “I’m a wop,” he says. He’s proud of it.
    As soon as we settle into our new house, we receive more tokens of appreciation from my father’s nonpaying clients. My dad says that if I’m to have a horse, every kid in the family should have one. None of them are much good for riding. Chappie is loose-limbed and harebrained, with the golden coat and white-blond mane of a movie starlet. He has a habit of walking into fences and the sides of buildings; we suspect he suffered at the hands of a previous owner. Comanche stands for hours in the same spot, dumbly waiting for dinner. Barney has the sly manner of a mutineer deceptively packaged in the body of a sleek Shetland pony. His favorite trick is to stretch out his neck, grab the bit between his teeth, and tear madly at top speed across the field. In one single brilliant moment, he stops dead in his tracks, plants his front feet, dropshis head, and sends the rider flying like a cannonball over his ears. We all take our turns.
    Barney has another useful trick. He uses his teeth to slide back the metal lock on the gate, but is polite enough to leave it open for the other horses. He goes to forage and snack on the local lawns and gardens and sometimes on the golf course. “Kris!” my mother hollers up the stairs on early mornings before school. “Go round up the horses!” We’ve scarcely moved in and the neighbors hate us. Barney seems especially fond of the garden and field of a family on the east end of