Full Body Burden (26 page)

All of the nuclear physicists and physicians who testify believe the plant is a public health hazard and must be closed or relocated.

The prosecution then asks whether the potential dangers of Rocky Flats justify the actions of the defendants. Given the fact, Dr. Morgan says, that ordinary political means have failed to produce necessary change, he believes that nonviolent action is probably justified to publicize the problem—even though, he quickly adds, blocking the railroad tracks will not “miraculously” decontaminate the eleven thousand acres
already polluted.
Dr. John Gofman, from the University of California, Berkeley, states, “Protest is always justified when it is the only means to make a deaf government listen.”

After eleven days of testimony, the trial is adjourned until after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Judge Goldberger has not allowed the jury to hear the testimony of expert witnesses, which he’s deemed irrelevant, but after the recess he allows some of the defendants to make statements directly to the jury. The prosecution—including attorneys from the DOE—incessantly interrupts. Truth Force member Roy Young, the Boulder geologist, takes the stand. “I was on those tracks not to commit trespass but to prevent random murder on the population of Denver.”

“Objection, your honor!”

“
Objection sustained.”

“And if I thought,” Young continues, “that by staying on those tracks … I could close the plant tomorrow, I would be willing to stay there for the rest of my life.”

“Objection, your honor!”

“Objection sustained.”

Skye Kerr, a twenty-three-year-old registered nurse and student at the University of Colorado, speaks of her training at Boston Children’s Hospital and the long-term effects of radiation-caused cancer and leukemia. “It [cancer] happens years later,” she says. “You can’t see or feel or touch radiation, but it’s as real as a gun.”

“Objection, your honor!”

“Objection sustained.”

“I felt the only thing I could do,” she continues, “was to bodily put myself on the tracks. I knew that laws much, much higher [than trespassing] were being broken.”

“What kind of laws?”

“Laws of human life. You know, violations of rights you have as a human being.”

“Objection, your honor!”

“Objection sustained.”

Finally Marian Doub’s mother, Nancy, takes the stand.
She describes the night she was arrested with her daughter. “We went out on the tracks,” she explains to the jury, “and walked up the tracks in the dark, with our flashlights, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘We Shall Not Be Moved.’ It was a very moving experience, standing next to my daughter. It’s not the usual thing you imagine for mother-daughter activity. It meant a lot to be standing beside my daughter.” She pauses to collect herself. “You know, it shouldn’t be just the young people who are worried about this. It’s not fair to give them that burden. So I was glad to be there.”

In his closing remarks, chief defense attorney Edward Sherman appeals to the jury as “the conscience of the community.” On the other hand, prosecuting attorney Steve Cantrell argues that this case is merely “a case of simple trespass. We are not here to change the policy of the U.S. government.”

The judge reads the instructions to the jury, reminding them of the fact that the choice-of-evils defense does not apply.
The jury is to disregard the emotional appeals of the protesters and consider “only, and nothing but, the formal charges of obstruction of traffic on a public right-of-way and trespass against U.S. government property.”

After five hours of deliberation, the jury says it cannot reach a decision. Judge Goldberger excuses them for the evening. The jury returns in the morning and deliberates for another five hours. Their verdict: all defendants are guilty on charges of trespassing, but innocent of obstructing traffic. Each protester faces a maximum fine of five hundred dollars or six months in jail.

The jurors explain that they sympathize with the defendants but, under the instructions of the court, could not acquit them of trespassing. One juror passes a note to the defendants: “My support and prayers are with you all.” A reporter tries to interview a juror and the juror stumbles midsentence, leaving the courtroom in tears. Another juror pulls aside defendant Jack Joppa and says, “We all support you and your cause.”

By evening, Patrick Malone and his fellow pirates are back in the tepee on the tracks.

C
ONTAMINATION LIES
hidden like land mines not only in the windswept landscape of Rocky Flats but in the bodies of the people who live there.
In November 1978, Dr. John Cobb of the University of Colorado Medical Center, in conjunction with the EPA, reports that lung and liver tissue taken during autopsies at local hospitals from the bodies of 450 people who lived near Rocky Flats contains plutonium. Further analysis confirms the presence of plutonium-239, the “fingerprint” of weapons-grade plutonium produced at Rocky Flats. Dr. Cobb hypothesizes that plutonium is present in the reproductive organs as well, where it could affect sperm and show up in future generations as cancers and deformities.

The study is halted, however, before Dr. Cobb has a chance to fully analyze his results or begin testing reproductive organs. Begun in 1975, it ends after Reagan takes office in 1981 and James Watt becomes secretary of the interior.
Hundreds of frozen sex organs from people who lived near Rocky Flats are sent to freezers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where they will remain for nearly fifteen years. The presence of plutonium in the bodies is undisputed, but whether it’s enough to cause cancers or genetic defects is never determined. The organs are finally sent to Colorado State University in 1994.
When data is finally published, the executive summary is rewritten by the government to reflect more favorably on Rocky Flats.

A quiet epidemic shadows the highly touted safety record for workers at Rocky Flats. James Downing, a maintenance machinist who worked in the glove boxes in the plutonium processing buildings, sustained first- and second-degree burns on his hands during a plutonium fire on January 6, 1961. He inhaled an undetermined amount of plutonium during a glove-box fire nine years earlier. The long, lead-lined gloves he wore while working on glove boxes often ripped, and his hands and arms were contaminated. During his time at Rocky Flats, he was injured or exposed at least forty-eight times. On November 28, 1978, he dies of esophageal cancer at age forty-four.

At a court hearing following Downing’s death, the former manager
of radiation at Rocky Flats admits that forty-eight is not considered a large or unusual number of accidents for an employee at Rocky Flats.

Downing is just one of the first of many employees to pay for their employment with their lives.

Potential homeowners had been asked to sign a waiver for years, but in 1979, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) establishes a legal requirement that anyone buying a home in the vicinity of Rocky Flats with FHA mortgage insurance or any other HUD assistance must be informed of plutonium contamination in the area. They must sign something called the Rocky Flats Advisory Notice, which says: “
This notice is to inform you of certain facts regarding the United States Department of Energy Rocky Flats Plant which is located within ten miles of your prospective residence. You should be aware that there exist within portions of Boulder County and Jefferson County, Colorado, varying levels of plutonium contamination of the soil. However, according to the information supplied by the Department of Energy, the soil contamination in the area in which your prospective residence is located is below the limits of the applicable radiation guidance developed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).”

Many local homebuilders and business owners are upset, and some believe that sales and property values may suffer.
A spokesperson for the Rocky Flats Monitoring Council notes, “Very few residents know about Rocky Flats. The problem is, how do you tell them certain things without creating a panic situation?” A Rockwell spokesman tells the press, “We [Rockwell and the DOE] try to stay out of local politics.… The public is confused about Rocky Flats, and I have to lay that directly in the laps of the local media.”

F
OR YEARS
I have prepared for my father’s death. There are all the DUIs, the fender benders, the nights of waking up late to hear him stumbling in the foyer. The night he comes home with a broken jaw after some fracas with a police officer. The late nights I race down from college—sometimes with Mark—to be with my mother when he pounds on the door. They have separated, more or less, and Dad is living in an
apartment in old Arvada. My mother changes the locks on the house and finds solace in long hours at work, and white pills and red wine when she gets home. Kurt is still living at home, and he watches and tries to intervene—sometimes physically—as the situation deteriorates. One evening he and my mother come home late to find that Dad has broken into the house and is lying unconscious on the bearskin rug, sick with alcohol poisoning, his distended abdomen churning. They rush him to the hospital.

“Why,” I ask my brother, “does he keep breaking in? Why does he keep coming around?”

Kurt shrugs. “I guess he can’t give up the idea of his marriage to Mom,” he says. “He wants to be part of the family.”

Maybe he wants help
, I think. But he’ll have nothing to do with rehabilitation programs or therapy. None of us knows what to do. I don’t know how I will feel about my father’s death when it happens, but it always seems imminent.

Partly through Mark, I have become interested in yoga and meditation. Yoga seems to help my neck, which often pains me, and meditation gives me a sense of calm. I start taking a meditation class at a local church one night a week that is led by a woman with a low, soothing voice, and I feel peaceful just being in the room with her.

One night, just as we are beginning our session, the class is interrupted by a voice in the hall. I hear my name. A young woman peeks in. “Is there a Kris here?”

Everyone exchanges glances. “I guess that’s me,” I say.

“You have a phone call in the church office.”

That’s odd
, I think.
Who would know to find me here?
I follow the woman into a small, carpeted room with a single desk and a telephone. I pick up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Kris?” It’s my mother. Her voice is clipped.

“What’s wrong?”

“Something’s happened.”

Bad news is not unanticipated. “What’s happened?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why?”

“You just need to come home.”

“Tell me what happened, Mom.” I sigh and look at my watch. “I’m in class until nine and then—”

“Get in your car and come home right now, honey.”

There’s something different about this time.

“Fine.” I set the receiver back in its cradle, think briefly about going back to the class to explain, and decide to head straight for the parking lot. This is unusual. My family is always in turmoil with one thing or another, but usually the news can wait.

I pull out of the parking lot and turn onto Wadsworth Boulevard. Few cars are on the road. At the first stoplight I debate whether I should run it. Is this an emergency, or just my mother’s dramatic overreaction to something? I pull up to the next light—why am I hitting all the lights?—and I reconsider the tone in her voice. I drive through the red light. By the time I reach our driveway and see every light in the house blazing, I know something is seriously wrong.

The front door is unlocked. I find my mother in the kitchen, alone in the bright light. She sits stiffly at the breakfast counter. Her face is pale.

“What happened?” I ask.

“Kris.” She stands.

“It’s Dad, isn’t it?” I say.

“Honey—”

“Just tell me. Just say it.”

“It’s Mark.”

“What?”

“It’s Mark, honey.” She speaks rapidly, her voice a dead calm. “It happened at Castle Rock.” Mark and I have been to that spot many times; it’s where he taught me how to use a carabiner. “He was climbing with his friend Gary, teaching him how to belay, and something went wrong. Gary was up top and Mark was on belay and he fell.”

I can’t speak. The floor seems to have dropped out from under me.

“Mark fell at Castle Rock?”

My mother nods.

“He’s climbed that a million times.”

“Something went wrong this time. He fell—”

“He’s in Boulder, then? At Boulder Memorial?”

“No—”

“At his mom’s?”

“No, honey.” Her eyes meet mine. “He died. He died at the scene. They sent an ambulance all the way up the canyon, but it was too late.”

The words seem impossible. My body feels like ice.

I hear the front door open and close. It’s my father. My mother must have called him. “I can’t talk now,” I say. I fly up the stairs to Karin’s room, the room we once shared as sisters. I shut the door and turn off the light and sit on the edge of the bed in the dark. It feels as if a knife has been shoved in my gut. The air roars around my ears. I hear my father’s voice and then my mother’s. “That’s your daughter,” she yells. “The least you can do is go up to her. Go to her! Go to her!”