Sensing Radiation

My world is mapped by Hanford. Its nuclear topography runs along the Columbia River where I was born—reactors, cooling towers as tall as grain elevators, laboratories, electric substations, pumps, tanks, concrete, steel, and hundreds of miles of fencing. In the heat of war and the race for weapons, Hanford grew from a farm town to a nuclear reservation in little more than a year. Hanford’s first reactor was completed in September 1944; its first plutonium was produced within six weeks, then refined and shipped to Los Alamos for the Trinity Bomb Test. More plutonium from Hanford went into the Fat Boy atomic bomb that fell on Nagasaki. That was during the hot war. When Hanford saved the day.

Then came the Cold War. By my birth Hanford was etched deep into our map. Reactors ran in the background of our lives like eternal engines, producing power—and plutonium. It was the local factory, where every dad worked.

I live in Seattle now, separated from Hanford by the Cascade Mountains; by opposing forces of geology, climate, politics; and by two hundred miles. In October comes my birthday. In October 1984 came my dad’s cancer diagnosis. That October we were put on notice, called home. Each October since, instinct calls me to where my world began.

It is October. I leave Seattle and drive east, past Issaquah, into the foothills, and rise to the summit at Snoqualmie. Vine maples—veins of gold—light up the mountainsides. Against the dark forest of Douglas firs the maples signal their mutable state. I am a pilgrim, a seeker, a prodigal daughter, drawn across the mountains, drawn to the desert and its river, drawn by power.

Radiation lives east of the mountains. Like tea stains long steeped into the teapot’s craquelure, radiation seeps through cracks in the dry land along the Columbia River. Radiation lives out its half-lives—many multiples of our whole lives—in the expanse of land that is Hanford. There, below ground, radiation is contained in tanks, barrels, ponds, pits, and pipes that—following immutable laws of entropy and gravity—leak into the water table and weep into the mighty river.

Now, we speak of radiation. Sometimes. At least west of the mountains we do. People learn where I am from. They crack their jokes about glow-in-the-dark rabbits and double-tailed rattlers. Or whisper their shuddering fear. Hanford is creepy, they say. I nod and change the subject.

Then, we didn’t speak of radiation. In those days everyone’s dad worked at Hanford, doing science that was nuclear, pure, patriotic, and secret. Once trained to secrecy, men held to it. My father was one of these men. A chemical engineer. Dad wore his security badge clipped to his shirt pocket, coat collar, or jacket lapel, and he daily passed through the gate to work at Hanford and daily returned home. He didn’t talk about his work; that was just how it was.

You can’t see radiation. Yet you sense its dance, a jittery zigzag across the sagebrush, tumbleweeds, yarrow, like a visual migraine. It ripples through cheat grass on Rattlesnake Mountain. It blows along the Horse Heaven Hills, carrying its dust, mixing that dust with all that has become dust, with all that will become dust. A thin, dry layer coats cars and houses, coats the leaves of cottonwood and sycamore trees, even throats. You might try to catch it straight on, but radiation remains in the periphery, like distant lightning that disappears before you can turn your head. Or is it always there, deep within the rose-red sky that stretches out beyond evening, beyond memory and gravity and time?

I knew what kids in the 1950s knew about Hanford: that nuclear power is good, that it can heat and light the country with its brilliant, clean energy; that it can extend the shelf life of foods; that it can sterilize insects that kill cattle or destroy crops; that it can treat cancer. Particularly, we knew that it can make plutonium for a nuclear bomb, that it already had. That...