My Year of Meats (30 page)

“You went in there?” she said. “Ooh, that’s a no-no.”

Hanford was one of three atomic cities hastily constructed in 1943 to produce plutonium for the Manhattan Project. Over the next twenty-five years, massive clouds of radioactive iodine, ruthenium, caesium, and other materials were routinely released over people, animals, food, and water for hundreds of miles. In the 1950s, it was discovered that the radioactive iodine had contaminated local dairy cattle, their milk, and all the children who drank it. As the incidence of thyroid cancer grew, the farmers in the surrounding areas—“downwinders,” they’re called—began to wear turtlenecks to hide their scars. It was the fashion, the waitress told me.

When I recounted this story to the boys later on in the bar, Suzuki’s narrow eyes widened. He’d had relatives in Nagasaki, all of whom had died.

We were lucky we didn’t get busted. These sites are hazardous, and I’m not even talking about the environmental fallout. They are well and jealously guarded by men who make a Rodney Dwayne Peairs, the Louisiana butcher who shot the Japanese exchange student, look reasonable and benign. Paradoxically, they have conserved these desolate parts of the country. Often these landscapes hide underground bunkers, but on the surface they are rich with flora and fauna that have flourished, protected from families with fat-tired recreational vehicles, grazing cattle, and other ruminants.

 

 

We drove through Colorado in our fifteen-passenger Ford production van, past towns called Cope, Hygiene, and Last Chance. For this trip, it was the eastern part of the state that I was interested in. Early explorers called it the “great American desert,” mile upon softly undulating mile, breathtaking and beautiful. Of course, it looks nothing like it once looked, when the first settlers came. The vistas, unbroken then and alive with grasses, are now cropped and divided into finite parcels whose neat right angles reassure their surveyors and owners while ignoring the subtle contours of the land. The fences stretch forever.

“You see that?” Dave, my local driver, interrupted my plains-induced reverie. He pointed to an immense field we’d been passing for several minutes or maybe hours. It looked like all the others, stubbly hacked wheat stalks in neat rows as far as the eye could see. It made me dizzy, like a bad moire pattern on a videotape, and the back of my eyeballs ached. I squinted, trying to see what, in particular, he was pointing to.

“What?”

“There. The way wheat’s been planted up that hillock, with the rows perpendicular, up and down the side?”

“Oh ... Yeah?”

“Bad. Very bad.”

“Why?”

“Erosion.” He shook his head morosely.

Dave was an agricultural student at Colorado State University. His last name was Schultz, and he looked remarkably like a baby version of Sergeant Schultz on
Hogan’s
Heroes, with an enormous breadth of chest and calm hands like sun-warmed rocks, made for comforting large terror-stricken animals. Suzuki and Oh liked him because he talked slowly and didn’t use a lot of words.

One of the first things I ask a prospective driver is whether or not he likes to talk. Then I ask him what he knows about. Dave said, “Nope” and “Farms.” I hired him on the spot.

Dave gave me the facts about farms:

The United States has lost one-third of its topsoil since colonial times—so much damage in such a short history. Six to seven billion tons of eroded soil, about 85 percent, are directly attributable to livestock grazing and unsustainable methods of farming feed crops for cattle. In 1988, more than 1.5 million acres in Colorado alone were damaged by wind erosion during the worst drought and heat wave since the 1950s.

“I remember it. I was on my dad’s farm,” said Dave. “I was just a kid then.”

“Dave ... 1988? That was just a couple of years ago.”

“Yup.”

Drought and heat waves happen, Dave explained. Erosion didn’t have to. Not like this.

“You know what we have here?” Dave asked, an hour or so later.

“No, what?”

“A Crisis. A National Crisis.”

“A national crisis?”

“Yup. Nobody sees it yet, but that’s what it is, for sure.”

“Dave, what are you talking about?”

He turned his head and stared at me, disbelieving, for a long time, so long that I started to get nervous, the Ford was rocketing down this country road, and Dave, though behind the wheel, wasn’t watching at all. Finally he shook his head and turned to face forward again.

“Desertification,” he pronounced glumly. He had more than his share of profound German melancholy, which seemed at odds with his sunny blond, pink face. He’d wanted to enter the Beef Science Program at the university and had written a paper on the effects of cattle on soil erosion. The paper was called “The Planet of the Ungulates,” and it started out from the point of view of a Martian botanist who is circling the planet Earth in his spaceship, making a report on the creatures he sees below, only he’s made a terrible mistake because he thinks that Earth is ruled by these large-bodied hoofed mathematicians who own small multicolored two-footed slaves; the slaves work from morning to night to feed their masters and to fabricate over the land their vast intricate geometries. Of course, the Martian never gets to see the inside of a slaughterhouse. But then again, who does?

Dave’s professor failed him on “The Planet of the Ungulates,” suggesting that he might be better off in the humanities rather than in agricultural sciences. As a result, he was taking a semester off, which was why he was free in October to work for us. He was thinking of dropping out entirely. Dave was not so popular at school because of his “take on things.” This depressed him. So did his landscape.

Cattle are destroying the West, he told me, and whenever we passed a grazing herd, I could hear him groan. According to a 1991 United Nations report, 85 percent of U.S. Western rangeland, nearly 685 million acres, is degraded. There are between two and three million cattle allowed to graze on hundreds of millions of acres of public land in eleven Western states.
Public
land, Dave said, shaking his head.

“I read this thing by a guy in a magazine once,” Dave said.

“Oh, well, that sure sounds interesting....” Sarcasm, I figured, would be lost on Dave Schultz.

“Yup,” he continued blandly, then gave me a dirty look. “It was an article in
Audubon
magazine. The guy was Philip Fradkin. Anyway, what he said was: ‘The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways and sub-division developments combined.’”

“Wow.” I took out my notebook to copy it down. Dave was odd, but I was impressed. “Tell me, Dave, did you happen to ... I mean, did you memorize that?”

“Yup.”

“How come?”

“I dunno. Guess I musta thought it was neat.”

We drove in silence for another mile or two.

“Did you know seventy percent of all U.S. grain is used for livestock?” Dave suddenly burst forth again. His big hands clutched the steering wheel and he stared straight ahead, as though struggling to control some powerful emotion.

“And with all the tractors and machinery, it ends up taking the equivalent of one gallon of gas to make one pound of grain-fed U.S. beef?

“And do you know that the average American family of four eats more than two hundred sixty pounds of meat in a year? That’s two hundred sixty gallons of fuel, which accounts for two point five tons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and adding to global warming....

“And that’s not even taking into account that every McDonald’s Quarter Pounder represents fifty-five square feet of South American rain forest, destroyed forever, which of course affects global warming as well....”

“No kidding.” I was writing it all down. He looked over and gave me a smug grin.

“Nope.... Are you at all interested in methane gas emissions?”

Okay, so he’d lied about not liking to talk. I could forgive him, because Dave was obsessed.

“Ready?” he continued. “Scientists estimate that some sixty million tons of methane gas are emitted as belches and flatulence by the world’s one point three billion cattle and other ruminant livestock each year. Methane is one of the four global warming gases, each molecule trapping twenty-five times as much solar heat as a molecule of carbon dioxide.” He finished on a triumphant note, then sighed, and his powerful shoulders sank.

“This is great!” I said, scribbling wildly. I was excited. I had the beginnings of a solid Documentary Interlude that I could work into the Bunny Dunn Show. “Go on....”

“I just don’t know,” he said sadly, as though the sight of my enthusiasm had somehow quenched his. “All these figures, but who cares? So what? It doesn’t help one bit. Nobody is going to do anything about it, and then slowly, bit by bit, it will be too late.”

“I really wish you hadn’t said that.” I put my notebook away and stared out the window.

 

 

Too late. Until Dave said that, I’d been feeling lucky. After Akiko’s call, I had rounded up Suzuki and Oh, called the travel agent, and phoned Bunny and then Dave to tell them we’d be on the next plane to Denver. Next I called my obstetrician—I was due for a second ultrasound, as I was approaching the twenty-week mark, but he said it was fine to postpone for a week, until after the shoot. He asked how I was feeling and I told him just fine, which was true. In fact, I’d never felt better physically; although my belly was rounding out, it still wasn’t really visible under my clothes and wasn’t getting in my way at all. And emotionally I was oddly calm. And happy. And we had a four-day head start on Ueno. Somehow everything seemed to be falling into place.

Akiko stood in the bathroom with her bottom to the mirror, bent in half, peering over her shoulder. She drew her underpants slowly down around her knees. Two days later, and her rectum was still bleeding. She looked at it now. Little flakes of black crusted blood stuck to the insides of her buttocks, and as she watched, a trickle of bright-red blood oozed from the center. Like a bleeding eye, she thought. She studied it, twisting her body to get a better view. Then she lunged toward the toilet. Tripped up by her underpants, she fell to her knees and vomited repeatedly.

Life is bloody, she thought, wiping her mouth. I don’t mind, because it can’t be helped.

She got up and shuffled to the sink. She gargled some water from the tap to rinse out the sour taste, then sat down on the toilet. She stuck a fresh sanitary napkin to her underpants and waited. The worst was this terror of bowel movements. It hurt so much. She’d stopped eating almost entirely, hoping to avoid them until she healed, but it hadn’t worked. She still had to go. She sat, shoulders clenched to her ears, fingers laced in prayer. Her knees trembled in anticipation of the pain. Instead she felt a sudden flooding sensation. She got up from the toilet seat. Her eyes went starry, and the world went black. She stood there for a moment, like a cartoon character who gets socked in the nose and sent reeling round and round while all the pretty little birds twitter, then her knees buckled and the floor disappeared altogether.

The problem with Bunny Dunn was one of framing. Specifically, it was her hair. Suzuki looked perplexed. I watched on the monitor as he framed in tight on her features, studied his composition, then widened out to encompass the perimeter of her hairdo. But this required such a radical expansion of the frame that now her face seemed dwarflike in the center, a small, bright diamond set in cotton candy. Suzuki sighed in frustration and zoomed back in again.

Balanced on the split-rail fence that surrounded her ranch house, Bunny Dunn was amplitude personified, replete with meats, our ideal American Wife. She had dressed for the interview in purple stretch jeans, hand-tooled alligator cowboy boots, and a purple checked shirt decorated with fringe and mother-of-pearl snaps that fought to stay attached across the expanse of her bosom. The upper snaps had popped open to reveal a massive depth of cleavage. The fringe had beads on the tips, which dangled from the edge of her breastline like raindrops clinging to the eaves of a house. Her perfume bent light like an aura. And then there was her hair, golden, like spun metal forged into a nest by a mythical bird of prey, impossible to capture on television. And this was only the head shot. When Suzuki widened out once again to show me a bust shot ... Well, Bunny gave new meaning to the phrase. Her structure invited a CAD/CAM analysis of its component parts, and watching the monitor, I could imagine the digitized 3-D frame, slowly rotating. Oh waited on the sidelines, fiddling with the pin mike. He was going to have to go in and attach it inside Bunny’s shirt. He was stricken with terror.

Maybe she heard Suzuki snicker or saw Oh shake his head in dismay.

“You think I don’t know?” she cried, teetering on the rail. “You think I don’t realize I look like a goddamn cartoon character with these inflated boobies and this big old butt? You ain’t got no idea what it’s like. Why do you think I dress like this?”

She was waiting for an answer. “Bunny, I ...”

“Well, I’ll tell you. ‘Cause if I don’t, I just look fat. Like a block on stilts. At least if I wear tight things I got some shape. You’re probably laughing at my hair too. Don’t worry. Everyone does, but do you know how limp and pinheaded I look without it?”

“I’m sorry, Bunny. We didn’t mean ...”

“Forget it,” she said, recovering her balance. “I’m used to it. Hell, I used to be an exotic, remember? People were always laughing and staring. And darn it, they oughta stare. These babies are Nature’s Bounty. That’s what John calls ’em. No artificial growth enhancement here.”

She cupped her huge breasts and lifted them toward Suzuki, made a little moue into the camera, and then turned on Oh. “Come here, boy. Don’t be scared, they ain’t gonna bite you. There’s plenty of room to hide that little gadget of yours down here. Just stick it in wherever you want.”