We live in an "information age" of smartphones, laptops, facebook, and the twitterverse constantly updating us, keeping everyone abreast of the recent developments of the last ten seconds. So to us, it seems impossible that, throughout the operation of the Rocky Flats plant, the citizens living outside Arvada had no idea what went on there.
In
Full Body Burden, Kristen Iversen provides a glimpse of how this was possible, and gives faces to the human beings who were affected by the plant. I had a chance to ask Kristen a few questions about her new book.
Boulder Book Store: When I first started
reading Full Body Burden, I was struck by how much happened in the first
chapter. It really set the tone for the rest of the book when what would be a
climax in most books happened twice in the first twenty or so pages of your 350
page book. Why did you choose to structure things that way?
Kristen: I felt that the most important aspect of this book, right
from the start, was the connection between the personal and the political. By that I mean the intimate and devastating
connection between U.S. nuclear weapons policy and the story of my family and
my neighbors, and how we all paid a heavy price for secrecy and silencing. I knew I wanted to open the story with the
1969 fire, but I also wanted the reader to understand that this wasn’t just an
industrial fire at a factory—this was a terrible accident that had consequences
in the community and in people’s personal lives. On Sunday, June 11, 1969, my family was
having Mother’s Day brunch. We didn’t
know there was a radioactive cloud moving over our heads. But the reader knows. I also wanted to establish the two firefighters,
Stan Skinger and Bill Dennison, as very real characters. What were they thinking, what were they
feeling? Those guys risked their lives
to save Denver. These opening scenes set
the stage for the rest of the book, for the movement between the story of Rocky
Flats and U.S. nuclear weapons policy during and after the Cold War, and the
stories of people whose lives were impacted by those policies—local residents,
Rocky Flats workers, and activists.
BBS: One thing I found particularly interesting
(from a literary standpoint) with your telling of the story is the part that
water plays. Archetypally/customarily, water symbolizes purity and cleansing,
but every time you mentioned water in Full
Body Burden, it felt ominous and discomforting. Can you elaborate on that?
K: Water sustains life.
It is the lifeblood of the land, of the community, of the human
body. In literature, as you mention, it
often represents rebirth, cleansing, and a renewal of life or spiritual rebirth. When I was growing up, like other kids in the
neighborhood my siblings and I swam in the lake and floated on rafts down the
canals around Rocky Flats. For us, water
represented playfulness and freedom. But
the water was not pure. Plutonium is a
heavy metal, and it settled into the sediment of the lake. It was in the mud and the sand. Things were not as they appeared. The water contained invisible danger and
threat. Tamara Meza’s family drank
water from a well that was fed by Standley Lake, and the water was supposed to
sustain the family and also their animals and garden. They paid a price for depending on that water. Water meant something entirely different to
the firefighters at Rocky Flats. To use
water on a plutonium fire, which the firefighters often had to do, meant
risking a fatal criticality (nuclear chain reaction).
What happens in this story is a subversion of water as a
symbol of purity. When a government or
corporation allows the water supply of a community to become contaminated, it
strikes at the very heart of that community.
BBS: I love how
beautifully written many of the passages are, and how particular you are with
the language. For example, one point where you’re describing your mother: “I
love the way she says, ‘I gave up everything for you kids,’ or ‘I would do
anything for you kids.’ She is a displaced queen, unseated, usurped, somehow
denied what the world promised her, always waiting for her ship to come in. I
love the way she tells me I’m her best friend…I hate the way my mother simmers
with fear. The way she keeps up appearances and covers things up. The way she
slips off to her room at any sign of trouble and lies on the bed with her eyes
closed, saying prayers to herself. The way she says, ‘I gave up everything for
you kids. Everything.’” I’m just selecting the part about your mother, but that
whole section really demonstrates your precision with language, how the tone
and meaning change with the same words. It’s great! And the way you use
language combined with the material you’re discussing makes Full Body Burden a very powerful, moving
book. I nearly cried in public on the bus several times, and that does not
happen to me often.
K: I think the challenge of writing creative nonfiction or
narrative nonfiction is that you have to balance fact and art. That is, the language is just as important as
the subject, and vice versa. You have to
stay true to the facts, and facts matter—especially in a story like this. But art matters, too, and that’s what
differentiates literary nonfiction from journalism and other forms of
nonfiction writing where you’re not thinking so much about aesthetics. You have to tell the story as fully,
truthfully, and objectively as you can, but still write like a poet. Or try to, at least. The sound and rhythm of the language are just
as important as the footnotes you’ve triple-checked along the way.
BBS: I think the quote you provide from Niels
Bohr gets at the crux of the larger issue at hand: “I told you it couldn’t be
done without turning the whole country into a factory…You have done just that.”
To me, Rocky Flats seemed to start out simply as a defense operation. Then once
health concerns were raised, keeping the plant open became an issue of
sacrificing a few thousand Americans to “save” the whole country. And then from
there, that morphed into a monetary liability versus a health liability (which,
while the previous two are legitimate debatable ethics, this is where it seemed
that the lines were clearly drawn and then crossed). Is that your understanding
as well? Do you think these issues were a product of the different times/era?
Or is something else at play?
K: Bohr was right.
He, like many other scientists and physicists associated with the
Manhattan Project, including Robert Oppenheimer, came to regret or certainly
have very mixed feelings about what had been unleashed upon the world.
The AEC was aware of many of the dangers of processing
plutonium and the production of nuclear weapons from very early on, as well as
the effect that this might have on human health. In the 1940s, the government injected 18
people with plutonium (without their knowledge) to test its effect. Beginning in the early 1970s, beagles were
used for studies to determine the biological consequences of inhaled, ingested,
and injected plutonium, and what that might mean for human tolerance of
plutonium. Neither the human nor animal
subjects in these experiments fared well.
Nuclear weapons facilities were initially exempted from
environmental law and regulation, and private corporations like Dow and
Rockwell were (and are) largely indemnified from nuclear accidents or incidents. The production of plutonium pits was the
number one priority, and everything was hidden behind the veil of Cold War
secrecy. A great deal of money was—and
still is—at stake, and these companies operated on a cost-plus basis. The cultural and environmental cost of our
nuclear weapons program—a price that includes the health of workers and local
citizens—was there from the beginning, but it took a long time to come to
light. I hope that Full Body Burden
might help us more fully understand the history of Rocky Flats and what it
represents not only for the state of Colorado but for our country as a whole.
BBS: Another strong theme is “The government
would tell us if Rocky Flats was unsafe” with this complete trust in the
government. I don’t believe I’ve grown up during a time where the larger
American populous had such parental trust in the government (I was born in
1985, Reagan era). Does Rocky Flats play a part in that? But even with today’s
sort of rampant distrust, it’s still hard for me to imagine how much was
covered up and how harmful it was to the population. Admittedly, some of it was
unknown, but the things that were clearly dangerous – the tests that were done
-- it’s quite remarkable and very chilling that they continued to cover it all
up.
K: There were a number of reasons why people didn’t ask too
many questions about Rocky Flats, especially in the beginning. The Soviet threat seemed very real to people
like my parents, and they thought the government was keeping us safe. “Better dead than red” was a phrase I heard
more than once. Rocky Flats was also one
of the best jobs in town. When families
are dependent upon a factory for their livelihoods—to pay for mortgages and
food and everything else--and workers are told that their jobs depend upon
their ability to keep a secret, they keep secrets. Many workers thought they were doing the
right thing for their families, and doing the right thing for the security of
the nation during a time of threat.
But the most important point is that we just didn’t
know. No one really knew what was going
on at Rocky Flats, and we certainly didn’t know about environmental
contamination or potential health effects.
Even now, it’s hard for many residents to hear about what happened at
Rocky Flats. They worry about their
property values. They worry about their
health. They worry about their children.
I believe we’re all, to a certain extent, complicit in the
cover-up about Rocky Flats. Homebuilders
want to build houses. City planners want
to build highways and shopping malls. People
want to get on with their lives. I think
many people would like to believe that if we just don’t talk about Rocky Flats,
don’t put signs up out there, and pretend the whole thing never happened, it
will eventually go away. But plutonium
has a half-life of 24,000 years. Even if
the land looks pristine, even if we put a shopping mall on top of it, it is not
pristine. It is not safe. The story must not be forgotten.
BBS: Why do you think your book is the first
major publication about Rocky Flats? It closed twenty years ago and I’m
surprised there haven’t been several books written since then. I understand
you’ve been working on your book for ten years because of the amount of
research you put into it. Is that because there was so much to sort through?
Was it difficult to find people willing/able to talk to you about it?
K: It took me a long time to write this book. The research was almost overwhelming. I have enough boxes of research to make a
library! Just getting my mind around the
project was a huge undertaking. I had
practical considerations as well. For
much of that time I was a single parent, and I was also teaching full-time at
the university. I completed the final stages of the book during two month-long
residencies with Colorado Art Ranch, for which I am very grateful. One of the great surprises during my research
was to discover that people were not only willing to talk to me, but grateful
for the opportunity. There are so many
people whose lives were affected by Rocky Flats. They want to tell their stories.
My book is not the first book about Rocky Flats. There are several others worthy of note. Len Ackland, who teaches at the University of
Colorado, wrote Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West,
which is a very solid look at the history of the plant. The Ambushed Grand Jury: How the Justice
Department Covered Up Government Nuclear Crimes and How We Caught Them Red
Handed, by Caron Balkany, Esq. and Wes McKinley (foreman for the Rocky
Flats grand jury), is a fascinating look at the grand jury investigation. Making the Impossible Possible, by Kim
Cameron and Marc Lavine, tells the story of the management of Rocky Flats
during the controversial cleanup. There
are a couple of good films about Rocky Flats as well, including Dark Circle
and Rocky Flats: Legacy.
Full Body Burden, though, brings a very different
approach and perspective to the story of Rocky Flats. And I wanted the book to be highly readable;
to read almost like a novel, even though the book is heavily footnoted.
BBS: How do you
feel/What do you think about the Rocky Flats Museum they’re talking about
opening? Are you involved with that project in any way?
K: I think it’s very, very important to have a museum that tells
the story of Rocky Flats and the history of the Cold War and post-Cold War
years, not only for Colorado and the West but for the country as a whole. We must not let Rocky Flats be
forgotten. My hope is that eventually we
will have a museum that tells the story in all its complexities, with the richness
and accuracy that it deserves, and not fall too readily into the realm of blind
patriotism or polarized dissent.
You can hear Kristen Iversen speak about and sign Full Body Burden on Monday, June 18th at 7:30pm at Unity Church. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased in advance and over the phone from Boulder Book Store or at the door day-of.
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