The Desert's Elements

It is a river, the Columbia, that forms my most vivid memories of the desert. As a child, I spent evenings on its banks, skipping stones across its shallower and tamer waters. In my family's version of a jaunt to the park, we would pile into the car with the dog, and head across town to the empty lot. Strewn with weeds, wildflowers and the riverbed's pebbles, this lot held the possibility of a future home, ours. Yet we moved away first, and for me, it has remained unkempt and beautiful, an extension of the river.

Evenings, arriving at the lot, we scrambled noisily from the newly paved road to the rocky bank. With our German shepherd on the loose, my sisters and I tossed sticks and tempted the river's low borders. A ribbon through the desert's solitude, the Columbia anchored the course of fish and the flight of birds, as well as the nuclear plants that flanked its shores.

The river's surge and speed carried my eye to the far horizon and back again. I looked through the surface for some visible danger. This sense, this crux of velocity and turbulence, gave credence to tales of the river's menace, its threat to even the strongest swimmer. Down river, water pressed against sky, two distinct planes losing their separate claims.

In my recollections, it is my father's face, a trademark fedora slanted across his brow that lingers in the background, his shadow cast across the sandy lot. The nuclear plants sat miles down the rocky shore, the direction of his gaze. Although it was here, in this expanse of land between the Columbia and the Horse Heaven hills, that the plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was produced, the nuclear reservation's presence was perceived as more commanding than ominous. At least, that is how it was seen by me, unaware then of the full implications of Hanford's existence, yet fascinated by its mysterious elements. Hanford activities had long been shrouded in secrecy. Surrounding the security clearances, there was a shadow of silence and intrigue, of neighbors and friends being quietly asked about one another.

This aura of the unknown threaded through telephone conversations that were clipped and oblique: they may have occurred in front of me, yet nothing was revealed. The black rotary phone hung on the hallway wall. One of the most inexplicable services this phone provided, was as a "roll call" for my father and others who worked at Hanford. At some specified time, the phone would ring, and my father would listen for his name; we would catch his alert response, "here." The workings of it were indiscernible, it simply occurred, the way my father wore his badge, both to enter the security regions of the reservation, and to measure exposure, to tally the evidence of daily risk.

He had brought my mother and infant sisters to Richland in late 1948, the year of a secret military test dubbed the "Green Run." Implemented to help develop surveillance for Soviet atomic bomb plants, the project released huge amounts of radioactive iodine into the air. Other releases, both planned and accidental, continued throughout the four decades in which plutonium was produced at Hanford. In addition to reaching air and soil, radioactive materials flowed through the reactors' cooling waters into the Columbia. Now, radioactive wastes threaten the ground water, which was once thought safe, at least for a buffer of many years.

The releases were something I learned about when they first hit the news in 1986. My father, who may have known many of the Hanford secrets, died before the first reports regarding radiation releases were made public. During our debates over energy and politics, he never spoke of any insider confidences.

Nights after work, my father wore an expression, a countenance borne not only in his face, but in the slope of his shoulders, that was, in some ways, inscrutable, yet hinted at the weight of the work, and its side effects - exhaustion and an impatience edged with irritability. His brow tensed, his browned arms folded, he often sat looking into the distance, as if towards some invisible point, held by a canopy of thoughts that drew him further and further away. A nuclear physicist, he worked long hours at the office, and then at home, with his papers spread across the kitchen table. The lined tablets held rows of equations in a terse scrawl: a slate of modern hieroglyphs.

In discussions and conversations, both then, but especially later, years after we had moved away from Hanford, his sense of personal responsibility for the breadth and impact of this work emerged, along with a profound belief that the science was pure. His perspective seemed to be that whatever dangers there were, seemed posed by human fallibility, and these could be viewed as remote. At the same time, he was concerned with the issues that increasingly erupted around nuclear production. While he held on to a dream to see Hanford become a national nuclear energy "park", the dangers of proliferation, and the unsolved dilemma of radioactive waste, seemed to occupy his mind for the rest of his life.

The idea of radioactivity was one colored with awe, fear, and curiosity. Some of the dangers were beyond the realm of the proven, and had not been fully pulled from the heft of the scientist's papers. Some hazards, links between radiation exposure and illnesses, have since been more thoroughly documented by the weight of evidence. Yet even now, how much is known of the ways of the "invisible," how it winds through the body, sidetracking the commonplace with the unexpected, and transferring itself to another generation?

I have since thought about the radioactive releases when I recall afternoons spent in the local swimming hole, a backwater of the Columbia called the lagoon, and the dust storms, the ones that hit when walking home from the library or school.

On summer afternoons that approached the 100-degree mark, the lagoon was a destination of choice for hordes of children, teenagers and their less enthusiastic parents. One could dip below the murky water for a swim, or float in an inner tube for hours. Given the popularity of splashing and dunking, the afternoons were punctuated by yelps and laughter. With the shore a berm of dust, the air stifling, and the lagoon unshaded, to break the surface sheen was entry into water's cooling rush.

When desert calm breaks, sand skitters across ground to air. If caught in it, the grit holds to every surface: eyes, mouth, ears and nose. It forms a brine over face and hair. One day I reached home - a government-built "K" house - to find a layer of sand had pelted the windows. The film clouding the glass covered my face as well.

Our house sat on a corner lot where a weeping willow filled the outside angle of the yard, until lightning one day split it in two. The windstorms were often sudden and strong, and they tossed up tumbleweeds, the way an ocean storm throws logs up onto the beach. Once loosened from their pockets of earth, the dried brush scattered over whatever it encountered - street, yard or the river's shore. Sometimes, the tumbleweeds landed pressed against the house, caught and held by the branches of rose bushes.

The roses, along with pansies and snapdragons tucked into the house's dirt borders, made our garden. Between the flowering plants and the evergreen shrubs, we could dig down far enough to draw water. The earth was porous, soft and dark, and made a rich mud that we plied into tins for pies, or molded into temporary sculptures. Left on the cement walk, the formations would eventually dry and crack in the hot sun.

Some evenings, with the sun lowered in the sky, we would leave the house, the yard, and the willow's shade, and each take our place in the car, not only to stop at the river, but to drive through miles of desert. The earth held the browns of desert sand tinged with orange and ocher, like uranium streaked with gold. At every turn, the hills ebbed and climbed; they met the sky in a point that blurred, a shadowed band that grew into lavender, and deepened into purple. Filled with blues and pinks, the horizon curved: the underside of a shell, as if the sea were held within this interior land, this distant sky.

When walking along the river's edge, I tried to hang onto the sky's endless ceiling, and to gauge proximity and distance. How far to the hills that swelled from desert ground? When the water pulled back, it uncovered a thin tidal flat, a scrap of silt brushed by overhanging branches. It was here that the desert's elements coalesced, the air heavy with dust and the river's spray.

During our river visits, the air remained calm. I never quite perfected the wrist snap required to skip a stone from shore to mid-stream. As we drove away, the Columbia cut its way through the hills. The low mountains were marked by the scent of brush and earth, the violet hue burnished into hillsides, sagebrush defining the blurred distance.

What lingers beyond memory's details is the sense that, along these banks, the world had changed. The heat-struck earth remained with us, pocketed in the realms beyond breath. Still vast and powerful, the Columbia continues making its way to the sea. Mile after mile, it lays down turbulence and blue. The land keeps its muted colors, and the brittle plants thrive in the dry air. Both river and desert hold what they are given.