I watched Silkwood last night for the first time. I mean, I knew it was going to be rough, but didn’t know just how rough. Meryl Streep + 1974 + Plutonium refinement...I certainly knew it wasn’t going to end well. But I had nightmares about it all last night. I woke up about every hour and a half in a cold sweat. In one of the nightmares, I hit two deer, a doe and a little fawn. I got out of my car and went to go survey the damage. The baby was dead and being carried off my a coyote, but the mother was writhing around, blood streaming out of her mouth, calling out with these low, mournful wails, twitching and shuddering in pain. And I stood there feeling absolutely helpless. I knew I had to kill her, but I didn’t know just how. My shoes were filled with lead and when I took them off, I just started stumbling around. I frantically scrounged around in my car for a gun, even though I knew that I didn’t have one. And then I found this kitchen knife under the seat, but my hands were useless and I kept cutting myself deep while trying to get a grip on it. I also tried to get my cell phone from the center console, but I soaked it in blood. I finally decided that I would just have to strangle her if my flayed hands would work, but when I went back outside, she was dead.
Last winter, at Bard, I was driving home to Tivoli from campus and I saw flashing lights at the intersection of Annandale Rd and 9G. I pulled up slowly thinking it was a license check (which, actually, they don’t do in NY), but then I saw this deer illuminated by his head lights. Everything went in slow motion. The police officer grabbed the deer by its hind legs as it flailed and shook and dragged it off the road into the grass. Then he pulled out his handgun and I saw the spark and the quiet pop. I’ve heard the head-rattling boom of rifles before, but that almost gentle pop in such a violent act made me lightheaded. I waited at the end of the road until he pulled off, leaving the deer there. I asked J about it because he’d once been a hunter, but didn’t find much comfort. I knew it had to happen, that it was the right thing. But the violence had been so shocking.
In Silkwood, Karen hits a deer on her way back from a shift at the plant after her second time being decontaminated. She watches the deer flailing around, blood everywhere. It’s foreshadowing her own messy end, and she sees in the deer the sheer panic that she feels. It was a powerful scene.
My other nightmare, the one I remember most vividly, was part decontamination, part job interview. It started out in a dressing room at TJMax. I was there trying on these dresses for my interview and was somehow convinced that this sheet with balloons all over it was good business attire. And soon after that, I was at my interview, except when I walked in, they told me to remove all my clothing and take a shower with this special soap, but the whole room was a shower. So I took off my sheet and stood against the wall and they turned the showers on. I washed with this soap that felt like a big wad of wet, crumbling paper pulp. When I was done, I kept trying to catch someone’s eye to tell them I was done, but no one paid me any attention. I stood there until the water went cold, icy cold, until I was reduced to tears. When they finally turned off the water, I had behaved so badly that I knew that I wasn’t going to get the job, and for some reason, that really bothered me. They told me to follow them into the exam room for a gynecological exam. It totally froze up and said that I wouldn’t do it and went to go find my sheet so I could leave, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I decided to leave anyway, and held up my hands to the radiation detectors and the siren’s started going off and I knew that I was about to die of cancer. And then I forced myself to wake up. It was around 5:15, so I got up and read some of one of Shosha’s old political theory books until I felt I could doze off again.
I’m so conflicted about nuclear energy, because it is not the environmentally-friendly solution to all our energy-crisis problems that it was promised to be in the late 60s and 70s and yet it doesn’t seem quite as ravaging and detrimental as coal mining or oil drilling. But we are still not talking sustainability . And while we know full well the environmental effects of the depletion of fossil fuels and the health effects of coal mining, the process of harnessing nuclear energy is really an inexact science at this point in its development.
Valerie Kuletz’s book The Tainted Desert changed my life. I told Andrew that he would have to pry it out of my cold dead hands. I eventually returned it to him before I graduated. I remember him taking me into his office and handing it to me, and saying, “Maura, you have to read this.” And I did. I rarely turn down such enthusiastic recommendations. In addition to really going into the nasty little secrets and details of uranium mining, production, testing, and waste disposal, she brought the concept of environmental racism/classism into light in the way that none of my other readings ever have. She talks about what it means to be a sacrificed people on a sacrificed landscape. The reason we think of nuclear energy as so clean and efficient is that we don’t live in Alamagordo, NM or on the Yucca Mountain Ute Reservation where you look outside to see the billowing smoke stacks of the Alamagordo Nuclear Laboratory or the trucks loaded with poorly-sealed canisters of plutonium-laced nuclear waste taken into the caves of Yucca Mountain. We always hear about Three Mile Island as the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. History, but that’s because the people most greatly affected by the spill were predominantly white and middle class. The largest actual spill was Rio Puerto in New Mexico (I’m thinking it was in the mid-80s), the river running right through the Navajo Rez. I can’t remember all the details, but I remember descriptions of chocolate-colored water lifting the lids off of manholes in a nearby town. Those affected were not informed of the spill (as if they had to be) until 2 days after.
I think mining may be the most environmentally detrimental and dangerous to human health. I’ve seen tailing damns, which are more like murky ponds of yellow-cake sludge evaporating and seeping waste into the air and groundwater. Not to mention the astronomically high rates of lung, liver, and bone marrow cancer among the Navajo communities that are predominantly employed by NM-based mining operations in Grant’s Uranium Belt.
In one of the recent Democratic debates, one of the candidates (maybe the Alaskan guy) said that we needed to model our nuclear energy program after France’s. While I’m not convinced in the least by this, I’d kinda like to do some research on their program and see if it might change my mind. Although, I have a sneaky suspicion that France (like the U.S. in recent years) is importing their uranium from less developed nations. We are getting more and more of our refined uranium ore from places like India, South Africa, and Brazil.
I was thinking we should take the White Sands Missile Range (which is roughly the size of Massachusetts) and fill it with windmills and pave the ground with solar panels. I bet you could light up the state of NY.
