Trace Elements
Jeff Porter
I hated milk. Its whiteness was as appalling as its taste, immensely insipid. I drank it but only to neutralize my mother’s high-alkaline red sauce. My aversion was not easy to maintain since I was up against a relentless marketing campaign sponsored by the dairy industry, government, schools and doctors, who all promoted milk as an essential part of growing up. Without sufficient milk in your diet, they said, you were doomed to horrible growth disturbances like juvenile osteomalacia or, worse, to secondary skeletal deformities like cerebral palsy, bowlegs or knock-knees. Four glasses a day or else.
What saved me were Fizzies, those multicolored tablets that transformed an ordinary glass of water into an effervescent novelty. Whenever I felt the world closing in on me, I popped a little soda-flavored Fizzie into a tall glass and watched it carbonate like Bromo Seltzer. There were eight flavors to choose from, including Groov’N Grape and Rock’N Rootbeer. Ooz’N Orange (vitamin C-enriched) was especially ebullient and zestful, sunshine units that burst like tiny rockets. Milk was for babies—Fizzies were for real men.
I was wrong about milk, it turns out. Milk was anything but dull. Milk, in fact, was hot. For nearly two decades, cows had been ingesting radioactive iodine deposited by nuclear debris on dairy farms across the country. A grim legacy of the Nevada nuclear testing program, large swaths of radioactive fallout traveled far beyond ground zero, moving across the land like an epidemic, touching nearly every state in the country. As cows and goats grazed in dirty pastures, iodine-131 contaminated their milk and concentrated in the thyroids of children.
Who were these children? I am talking about my generation, baby boomers all, unsuspecting kids with hula hoops and brightly colored yo-yos, these days paranoid consumers of oat bran and organic apples but back then innocent guzzlers of America’s favorite drink.
The milk crisis was but one incident in a much larger story, my favorite episode of which concerns a very bad movie and its sad outcome. Snow Canyon is hidden in the hills north of St. George, Utah, in an area of immense beauty bordered on the west by Red Mountain, a great mass of Navajo sandstone, and on the east by extinct volcanoes. Small settlements built by Mormon pioneers in the 1850s rim it. The land was hard and the winters were harsh but Mormons were famous for their ability to cope with severe challenges.
In 1954 the director Dick Powell chose Snow Canyon as the location for his ill-fated film The Conqueror. Produced by Howard Hughes, the film tells the story of the great Mongol warrior Genghis Khan, played—improbably enough—by John Wayne. Susan Hayward—just as oddly—was cast as the Tartar woman of his dreams. Powell selected Snow Canyon for the Gobi Desert shots and brought along large portable fans to stir up the desert sand, hoping to simulate wind-swept Mongolia for horseback-fighting scenes. Dust and dirt were continually whipped up during 13 weeks of shooting. The food was covered with fine grit and so were the people. Management was so enamored of the effect that it shipped 60 tons of canyon sand back to Hollywood for retakes, which turned out to be a very bad idea.
One year before the RKO film crew arrived in Utah, the Upshot-Knothole nuclear detonations had rocked Yucca Flats in Nevada, a three-hour drive upwind of Snow Canyon. There were 11 blasts from March to June 1953, the largest of which was Shot Harry, nicknamed “Dirty Harry” for the enormous amount of radioactive debris it dispersed over southern Utah. Unsuspecting ranchers, shepherds and their animals were blanketed by radioactive fallout. Dense pinkish clouds drifted over their grazing land, dropping radiant dust over mesas and valleys. Goats turned blue on the spot, sheep lost their wool, and weeks later ewes gave birth to bicephalic lambs. White-clad Atomic Energy Commission officials, Geiger counters in hand, monitored the St. George area with growing alarm. “This place is hotter than a two-dollar pistol,” said one. According to readings, Utah’s downwind livestock had been exposed to 30,000 rads (600 rads are considered fatal). Cedar City ranchers alone lost over 4,000 sheep and lambs to Dirty Harry. Back in Washington, Atomic Energy Commission officials were frightened by the ghastly implications, but despite off-the-scale Geiger-counter readings, the AEC told Utah’s ranchers that their sheep had died of malnutrition.
From 1951 to 1958, the government conducted 119 tests in all, worth several thousand kilotons—an enormous amount of nuclear debris to set in motion. That the government never issued warnings to nearby citizens moves the story of atom-bomb testing much closer to the theater of cruelty than to strategic policy. Radiation levels were constantly recorded, but even when they spiked, few countermeasures were taken. Instead, reassuring booklets were issued advising people to hose down their automobiles.
Nuclear fallout consists of particles funneled upward like a cyclone, which are then pulverized and irradiated by the jumble of radioactive materials set loose in the blast. Bits of this hot debris may fall back to earth within minutes while large portions might stay airborne for days. Some fallout particles remain radioactive no longer than an hour or two but many have much longer half-lives. The highly radioactive uranium-235 has an appalling half-life of 700 million years. The most toxic isotope in this deadly mix, plutonium-239, has a half-life of 24,000 years. It is estimated that over five metric tons of Pu-239, which does not exist in nature, have been released in the atmosphere after nearly 50 years of global testing.
The Conqueror has been dismissed as one of the worst movies ever made but its notoriety lingers on. By 1980 nearly half of the 220-person crew was either diagnosed with or had died from cancer, including Powell, Hayward and Wayne. This is not counting the 300 Native Americans hired as extras for the horseback battle scenes. Something had gone very wrong. The government aggressively denied that radiation was to blame for the high incidence of cancer along the Nevada-Utah border. As far as the Department of Energy was concerned, the discovery of birth defects in Arizona, leukemia in Nevada, thyroid cancer in Utah did not prove a thing. People die, some more quickly than others.
The government was prepared to wait out the downwinders, whom it cynically viewed as “a low use segment of the population.” Despite the shocking evidence, it would be impossible in a legal sense to link any specific human death to radiation. “They bombed Utah and we’re paying the price,” said Elmer Pickett of St. George. “They done to us what the Russians couldn’t do.”
A few years ago, the National Cancer Institute estimated that fallout from the Nevada testing program could very well trigger 75,000 cases of thyroid cancer in the long run, a 20-percent increase above the national average. These numbers are startling and grossly exceed earlier government estimations. Those dutiful children who, with white mustaches on their upper lips, drank four glasses of milk per day may have received 10 to 20 times the allowable exposure to radioactive iodine.
Building and testing nuclear bombs during the Cold War was a dirty and sometimes fatal business. What made an awful operation even worse was the government’s decades-long secrecy about atomic consequences, a policy that bordered on madness. As that secrecy unraveled in the 1990s, declassified documents revealed that matters were worse than anyone imagined. Not only were America’s nuclear bomb-making facilities (there are more than 50 sites) declared contaminated “in perpetuity,” but Americans everywhere (not just in southwestern Utah) were at risk from years of bomb-making and testing. We were all downwinders.
That point would be demonstrated by my own parents, innocently settling into married life back in Buffalo. While Powell was framing shots in a contaminated canyon, my father was about to rent a house next to a top-secret uranium refining complex, with results that, while not quite as dire as the deaths by cancer of Powell’s actors, nonetheless would raise doubts about his choice of real estate.
Two Mile Creek runs across the northern border of Buffalo and through the moist lowlands of Tonawanda, past the former Western Electric plant and Linde Ceramics. It winds through Sheridan Park Golf Course and then empties itself into the fast-moving waters of the Niagara River. On the northern side of the creek, Queen Anne’s Lace, cattails, pin oak, sweet gale and low-growing shrubs flourish. If you are lucky, you can see a northern shrike overhead monitoring the banks for small mammals. Land to the south tells a different story. This once heavily industrialized area today is a bleak wasteland of abandoned buildings, concrete slabs and rusted barrels, disturbed only by intermittent excavation. A fatal air hangs over the site. Eerie warning signs are posted with anxious regularity on the fenced-in perimeter. Sheds and warehouses in full decay tilt towards the river. The only straight lines are the Conrail tracks behind Linde Ceramics.
Sheridan Parkside, the low-income housing project where I spent the first three years of my life, was a quarter-of-a-mile from Linde Ceramics. Inspired by the green space of the golf course beside it, the Parkside developers borrowed from 19th-century novelists and poets to cast a pastoral glow over an area that was otherwise drab and dreary. We lived on Hardy Court, halfway between Thoreau and Shelley. Two blocks over were streets named after Thackeray, Twain and Longfellow, all just around the corner from Browning. The project came to an abrupt halt at Dickens Avenue, a stone’s throw from Linde Ceramics. I have no memory of scooping pollywogs out of the polychromatic waters of Two Mile Creek and that is probably a good thing. The creek was unsafe, though no one knew that until much later, when the story of Love Canal broke in 1978.
Ten miles north of us, Love Canal had been built in 1892 as a way for ships plying Lake Erie to bypass the falls a few miles downstream. The canal fell into disuse, however, and was purchased by the Hooker Chemical Company in 1920. After 50 years of unregulated dumping, Love Canal became a festering trench oozing a thick oily leachate into streets and storm sewers. This transformation was disastrous for a neighborhood comprised of more than 800 homes and three elementary schools. There were dogs with burned noses, rocks that exploded, children who scorched their feet at play in yards. It was southern Utah all over again, a few miles short of the Canadian border.
By the time Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden arrived in town, eyewitness allegations had traced the dumping of toxic waste at Love Canal all the way back to the beginning of the Manhattan Project. From 1942 to 1953, 42 million pounds of hazardous waste found its way into the canal. For this, the Hooker Chemical Company—which manufactured various pesticides and chlorinated by-products, including DDT, Mirex, PVC and PCBs—was largely but not solely to blame. Hooker’s chemical proficiency made it a key player in developing the atom bomb. The company was under contract to produce hexafluoroxylene, which was sent by train to Oak Ridge, and to process uranium slag. Liquid waste from the refining process flowed into Love Canal along with a multitude of other chemicals, including lindane, benzene, toluene, chloroform, trichloroethylene, tetrachlorethylene, hexane, xylenes and cesium-137. In the final count, nearly 400 different chemicals were identified in Love Canal and over half of the chemicals inventoried were so exotic they didn’t show up in existing toxicology data.
Some residents testified that, at night, the canal would blow up. Following the explosion, it was said, balls of fire and steam would rise from the water, hovering in midair like poltergeists. Though at first spooked by these strange eruptions, neighbors eventually got used to the fireballs and minor detonations.
In the years following the Love Canal catastrophe, radiological surveys uncovered an enormous and lethal network of hazardous waste sites in the region. One of the most dangerous turned out to be Linde Ceramics, just down the street from us.
An amalgam of two- and three-story buildings situated on a hundred acres of land, Linde Ceramics was bordered by small businesses, a park, Two Mile Creek and railroad tracks. There was something strange about the place. Like Egdon Heath, it was a wild and forsaken place.
For its size, Linde played an unusually large role in the Manhattan Project, handling “source materials” during the production of the first A-bomb, by converting domestic and highly concentrated Belgian ores into uranium tetrafluoride. This work was exceptionally toxic. Belgian pitchblende was so radioactive that in the places where it was mined in Africa legends emerged about its rare properties. It was said that “ghost warriors” spread the radium-rich dirt on their faces to glow in the dark, thereby intimidating rival tribes.
The volume of chemical and organic waste generated by the milling of uranium from crude ore at Linde was vast. Because uranium is naturally present in pitchblende at an average of only two parts per million, huge quantities must be crushed and chemically processed with acids in order to dissolve out the uranium. The refining process required a continuous cycle of solvent extractions and chemical conversions before the uranium reached weapons-grade strength. The crushed ore was first leached with sulfuric acid to release the uranium oxide, which was in turn washed several more times by various acids before conversion into a powdery green salt, uranium tetrafluoride. This was sent to the Electrometallurgical Company in Niagara Falls for further processing into uranium metal, which was then shipped to Oak Ridge for the final stage of purification in this unholy alchemy. Waiting at the end of the line in Los Alamos were Oppenheimer and his crew of scientists. The final destination was Hiroshima.
Manhattan Project officials exerted relentless pressure on Linde to produce large amounts of uranium tetrafluoride, knowing full well that plans to dispose of hazardous waste in underground wells and local drainage systems would permanently contaminate the area. It wasn’t long before local officials noticed that the absurdly concentrated alkaline waste from the Ceramics Plant was destroying the bacteria essential to the sewage treatment plant’s function. But with so much effluent waste and nowhere to take it, Linde simply continued dumping into wells and storm sewers. The extent of groundwater contamination remains unknown to this day and many fear that the aquifer is now toxic.
A few years ago my mother received a letter from the New York State Department of Health. “Dear Concerned Town of Tonawanda Resident,” it began. “As you may have read recently, a preliminary study conducted by the New York DOH was released in response to community concerns about radioactive contamination from the former Linde site in the Town of Tonawanda.” Radiation in Tonawanda? This was news to my mother, who thought she was living in leafy suburbia. “The preliminary study found that the total number of residents with cancer, both men and women, is higher than expected. This includes cancers linked with radiation exposure, colorectal cancer in men and colorectal, breast, and thyroid cancers in women.”
One thing missing from this list was the malaise that had snuck up on my father at about the same time as the Love Canal disaster was happening, just months after he had passed the Civil Service exam that would let him trade in his failing dry-cleaning business for the steady paycheck of a postal worker. As he started to walk his routes, the mail sack suddenly seemed heavy, too heavy. He fumbled to open mailbox doors and faltered while climbing porch steps. Surely this wasn’t normal, wasn’t part of the learning curve of all mailmen. My father was tired and scared, very scared.
On a visit home to Tonawanda years later, I dreamt one night of my father. He was lurking like a thief at the top of a staircase, all in black from head to toe, looking down as he squeezed his hands into tight-fitting leather gloves. His body was lean and spry, unaffected by the degenerative disease that had for so long bedeviled him. He was black as pitchblende, a shadow in the night, secretly infiltrating his own home.
Long after I said my good-byes the next morning, the dark image stayed with me, haunting my memory as I drove away from Buffalo. I was following the lake-effect clouds eastward, along the old barge canal, towards Washington, D.C. It was a dull Sunday afternoon. The traffic was heavy on the interstate, a steady drizzle falling on the spindly, leafless trees. I drove past Rochester and Henrietta. In the distance I could make out the defunct locks of the Erie Canal. Large crows perched on sagging phone lines. The canal once passed through farmlands and small towns like a picturesque stream. Passengers sat atop crowded packet boats destined for Buffalo, reading newspapers and romances, pulled along at 4 miles per hour by tow horses and mules. For eight dollars, they traveled 250 miles from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Theirs was a tedious journey but it was a fast ride in my Honda Prelude to Syracuse and then down I-81 to Binghamton, through small towns with big names—Tyre, Egypt, Macedon, Palmyra, Montezuma, Memphis, Marathon, Ithaca, Homer, Virgil and Nineveh—shadows of storybook wars and legendary conquests. The dream about my father stayed with me as I drove into Pennsylvania.
Over dinner the night before, my father had talked of his war years, what he did while holed up in the Philippines. He spoke in broken sentences, emphasizing nouns, omitting verbs. “Manilla... the Japs in caves... a Browning Automatic... Luzon... Okinawa... boat drop. I didn’t want to shoot anyone.” The effort to communicate agitated him. He flopped around in his chair. The Browning Automatic issued to him was too heavy. He was young and skinny, no match for a big gun. They landed on the beachhead under heavy artillery fire. He raised the Browning Automatic over his head like a barbell, pushing through five feet of seawater. “I got on the beach and found a hole. Bullets flying overhead. It’s a wonder I’m alive.” His illness squeezed the words out of him, past a throat and tongue no longer able to do his bidding.
The neuron is the functional unit of the brain. Information comes to it, in the shape of electrical impulses, through its dendrites. The impulse passes through the neuron’s cell body and out its axon to other neurons. Nerve cells need certain chemicals to make this intricate circuitry function properly. These neurotransmitters provide the connection between the axon of one neuron and the dendrite of another. Neurotransmitters, the Roeblings of the brain, allow electrical impulses to pass from one cell to another. When they fail, traffic comes to a halt.
In March 1979, the Government Accounting Office released a report warning of radiation disasters waiting to happen around military and commercial nuclear facilities. The report recommended that evacuation plans be undertaken to protect the public from the consequences of a serious accident. The GAO warning coincided with the release of the political thriller The China Syndrome, a film about a fictional nuclear power plant whose core reactor overheats and nearly melts down. Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas starred in the movie as broadcast news reporters who stumble on the meltdown while covering a routine story. Less than two weeks after the debut of The China Syndrome, the reactor core at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant on the Susquehanna River began to overheat—more than a hundred alarms were set off simultaneously—and quickly reached 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit, a partial meltdown. During the five-day-long crisis, which took place a few miles from where my sister was awaiting the birth of her first child, an unknown quantity of radioactive steam escaped into the air and river. Oddly enough, the film appeared to predict a nuclear accident that, according to a growing number of critics, was waiting to happen.
The partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, the most serious nuclear accident in U.S. history, set off a wave of public doubt about the future of atomic energy. The stock of Columbia Pictures—the studio that produced The China Syndrome—went up, and Jane Fonda hit the road crusading against the nuclear industry. Alarmed by these developments, Edward Teller began campaigning against environmentalists and antinuclear critics. The perennial champion of all things nuclear was slowed only by a heart attack in May of that year. But the indefatigable Teller bounced back in late July with a two-page spread in the Wall Street Journal whose headline read: I WAS THE ONLY VICTIM OF THREE MILE ISLAND. In the article, paid for by Dresser Industries (the hapless firm that had manufactured one of the defective valves at TMI), Teller once more proclaimed that nuclear power was a safe and clean way to produce energy. He also blamed his heart attack on Jane Fonda. “I was the only one whose health was affected by the accident at Three Mile Island,” Teller told reporters. “But it wasn’t the fault of the reactor. It was Jane Fonda,” he said. “Reactors are not dangerous.”
When he was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s, my father had a blood test and an EEG. Portions of his head were shaved and small electrodes were attached to his scalp with a creamy glue. An electroencephalograph typically measures the minute oscillating currents produced by the brain. A high-gain amplifier boosts the current, allowing the recording of brain waves as a continuous drawing on a paper strip. The neurologist was looking for traces of epilepsy or a past history of injury or trauma.
Next came the CAT scan. My father’s head was placed inside a narrow tube as a detector whirled on a gantry above his eyes, making several hundred readings of his brain’s internal structure, and then rotated beside his ear, taking multiple samples. The readings were fed into a computer, which calculated the intensity of the radiation at hundreds of points inside his head. The computer hummed as an image of my father’s brain appeared on a television screen.
I was as far away as possible when my father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, having gone off to school in Oregon, unconsciously moved perhaps by a desire to flee an environmental disaster in the making. As his disease progressed, I developed a clinical interest in the structure of the brain. In the university library in Eugene, I interrupted my study of Blake’s burning tiger to read books about neurotransmitters and cell deficiencies. I gazed at glossy photos of ganglions. I even purchased a plastic model of the brain. I learned about Broca’s area—a particular region of the brain regulating the muscles of the face, tongue, jaw and throat—and about the hypothalamus, which controls the entire endocrine system, delivering information about temperature, salt concentration, thyroid secretion, activity in the gonads. The language of the brain was exotic—precentral gyrus, occipital lobe, the pons, venous sinus, choroid plexus, myelin sheath, astrocytes, basal ganglia—and I was hypnotized. The countless lobes, chords, boneless cavities, the sinuous system of folds.
Much of this complexity relates to motion, defining how the body maneuvers in space. In a healthy brain the substantia nigra makes possible the self-regulation of the body. But in a person afflicted with Parkinson’s, the body no longer knows what it’s doing since a vital portion of the brain has lost contact with the motor and sensory cerebral cortices. The body loses its self-awareness. It can’t visualize itself, so to speak, and the Parkinsonian patient can no longer command his actions. I have seen my father tremble wildly and then rise from his chair but remain absolutely fixed in space. James Parkinson, who first diagnosed this disorder in 1817, called it the “shaking palsy.”
My mother called me one night with news of my father. Sitting down on a homemade sofa in the house on the Northwest Coast that I shared with a back-to-earth couple who insisted that we compost our own wastes, I listened to my mother recount from 3,000 miles away the latest fiasco. My father was carrying his upright bass from one room to another down in the basement without thinking. When he stumbled over the doorjamb, he fell hard, on top of his bass. He was okay, my mother said, no broken bones but he smashed his bass to smithereens. My father had stopped playing years before, when the spirit went out of him and the tremors settled in. Now his right arm swung up and down like a conductor’s baton. His left hand pointed at unseen presences. He was prone to launching himself out of his chair and into a stiff walk. Physicians call this bradykinesia, “slow motion.” As Parkinson’s freezes the muscles, slows the diaphragm, puts nerves to sleep, shuts the body inexorably down, with malicious inconsistency it propels its victims into feverish action. I keep the bass’s bridge as a memento on my shelf, where it stands next to a dictionary of medical terms.
With Parkinson’s, the real troublemaker is dopamine. Dopamine is produced in the darkly pigmented cells of the substantia nigra, then transmitted to the striatum, where it allows the complex computations of body movement to take place. My mother monitored my father to see if his dentures were in place. In agitated phone calls she told me about the funny grimaces he made while talking, as if his mouth were caving in. It’s nearly impossible for someone with Parkinson’s disease to carry on a coherent conversation.
No one ever talked about fallout when I was growing up. That and adolescent sexuality were off-limits. Radioactivity works in unseen ways—no one has ever observed the disintegrations of a beta ray—but its invisibility does not lessen its damage. Before uranium-238 reaches stability as nonradioactive lead-206, it will transform itself into 15 different elements, including radioactive thorium, protactinium and polonium. At each turn, it releases ionizing radiation capable of destabilizing anything within reach. Since ionizing radiation knocks electrons out of the orbits of neighboring atoms, it can shatter chemical bonds and disturb an organism’s metabolism and hormonal action. Cancer is not the only disaster set off by radiation. An agent of cellular disruption, radiation can trigger any number of problems, including neurological woes, especially in people with an inherent propensity towards this or that disorder.
Throughout the Cold War, the AEC upheld the fiction that only excessive doses of high-level radiation were hazardous for life. If you happened to be at or near ground zero during a nuclear blast, then (and only then) were you in trouble. Otherwise there was very little to worry about. In 1972, however, a Canadian biophysicist named Abram Petkau found that extremely low doses of radiation were far more damaging to living tissues than were high doses. Dubbed the “Petkau Effect,” the new theory explained how prolonged exposure to small amounts of radioactive substances can collapse cell membranes almost immediately by leaving cells vulnerable to damage by free radicals, which go about their nasty business far more efficiently in fewer numbers. Petkau discovered that the more chronic the exposure to radiation, in any form, the smaller the dose required to wreak havoc on cell life.
The Petkau Effect flew in the face of the AEC’s radiation dose estimates and so the agency suppressed the new information. But the rise in childhood leukemia and thyroid cancer following years of nuclear testing, along with the high incidence of cancer deaths in young adults, proved just how fatally misleading government information about radiation standards was during the Cold War. By the end of the 20th century, the AEC had long been defunct but the numbers of victims of fallout and low-level radiation exposure continued to rise. Worse, the list of hazardous radioactive sites scattered across America kept growing even as Hazel O’Leary’s efforts to disclose the government’s atomic secrets moved forward.
Stage eight or nine of Parkinson’s is when you start falling, my father would say, tracking his own deterioration. When you fall, you don’t try to get up right away. When you get up, you start falling again. It becomes a terrible situation. In a healthy brain, the substantia nigra produces enough dopamine to allow the striatum to perform its complicated activities. But in the brain of a Parkinsonian, the striatum does not receive enough dopamine to fuel the millions of synaptic transmissions needed to create smooth, continuous movement or to maintain proper posture or muscle tone.My father had a history of falls. Dislocated shoulder, deep gash above the elbow on his right arm, multiple bumps and bruises to the head from encounters with the corners of cupboards.
My father spent many an afternoon listening to a Christian dietitian on TV and organizing his cloth travel bag—sunglasses, pills, loose change for poker, a plastic urinal. It was important to him to arrange the items in his cloth bag; his obsessive activity was a temporary stay against the confusion of unstructured time all around him. Is it Wednesday or Sunday? he asked.
Dopamine-producing cells project up past the striatum into the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex where most of the memory, sensory and thinking areas of the brain are found. Some scientists believe that schizophrenia and other mental illnesses may be caused by an excess of dopamine in this region. Often the drugs designed to replace the lost dopamine cause hallucinations and other mental disturbances, sometimes resulting in symptoms that resemble schizophrenia.
When he walked, my father leaned forward and dropped his right shoulder. The classic Parkinson’s shuffle, as though he were marching to his own execution, a slave of nature, of the body that no longer behaved predictably. He was frightened by what lay ahead for him. “If I could sum up aging in one word, it would be absorption,” said a voice on the television. “We’re getting 2.2 billion pounds of pesticide poured into our food sources.”
There is something oddly robotic about those who suffer from Parkinson’s disease. My father possessed as many moving parts as a linotype machine, his right hand fidgeting on the table, adjusting the tablecloth, his left hand behind his neck, waving to someone who wasn’t there. “You’re a lucky man,” his doctor told him. “Most people don’t respond that well to medication.” My father shaved in the kitchen, tapping his left leg to the beat of big band jazz on the radio. There was a hole in the screen of his electric razor, covered by a small piece of duct tape. Few problems in his universe could not be remedied by duct tape.
The moment I arrived for a visit, after driving my Mercury Marauder through an endless succession of rest stops, across Montana, Iowa and Ohio, my father began polishing his golf clubs, the chrome shafts of the irons glistening in the sunlight. Hungry and road-weary, I would lace my sneakers and grab an apple while he filled his pillbox. There were any number of public courses to choose from but we usually drove to Sheridan Park Golf Course next to Linde Ceramics, teeing off within a nine-iron shot of nuclear sludge.
What golf requires of the body is astonishing, a paradox of force at rest, shoulders square, left heel firmly planted, knees flexed, grip loose and then the artful twisting of hips, the torque of the upper torso, the unwinding of arms, the stillness of feet.
It isn’t a sport made for a Parkinsonian. I remember one hole in particular. The distance to the green was some 160 yards but the lie was downhill. Steeply downhill. My father didn’t like that. He grabbed a four iron out of his bag, then changed his mind, replacing it with a three wood. Downhill lies are treacherous. The trick is to stroke the ball cleanly and leave the turf behind. It’s much easier said than done. I’ve never managed a downhill shot without pitching clumps of dirt. Woods are longer than irons and with the ground coming up at you fast it requires remarkable finesse to make a level shot. I tried to talk my father out of the three wood—the odds were against him—but he was determined to reach the green in two.
The laws of physics are unforgiving. My father approached the ball with evident misgiving. He leaned heavily on his right heel, adjusting to the radical slope of his lie, took two practice swings and then tried to crash the ball as if he were 25 and had a surplus of high-quality dopamine. It was not meant to be. His knees locked, his right shoulder dipped, his elbow buckled. As the iron dug into the turf, a fat lump of sod flew off to the right. Reaching down into distant memory, my father put everything into his swing—it was all or nothing—but the ball trickled forward only 20 feet. He had botched the shot. The shock went straight up his spine, throwing him so badly off balance that he tumbled to the grass. Much to my horror, he began rolling down the hill. “Dad!” I yelled, “wait!” My father had the stunned look of a boater who had ventured too close to Niagara Falls. I ran after him.
Whatever caused its destruction, my father’s dopamine was gone and now chemical substitutes filled in for the missing neurotransmitter: Docusate sodium, 100 mg per day; Levothyroxine, 1 mg; Carbidopa Levodopa, take two at 8 a.m., one and a half at noon, one at 4, and one at 8 p.m.; Amitriptyline, 50 mg at bedtime; Fosinopril, 10 mg; Elavil, 50 mg. My father takes his own blood pressure. On his arms, innumerable scars and pits—a map of accidents and mishaps charting the course of his disease.
There are traces everywhere, as if the Cold War can no longer keep its secrets.
I will never know if my father was a victim of the Cold War by proximity, no more than I will ever know if my own chronic nervousness and nosebleeds are just over-the-counter neuroses or traces of a bomb inside of me. These are the things we have been asked to live with, elemental riddles of life and chance, ghostly lines in the desert lit by the sudden glare of artificial dawns.
Excerpted from Oppenheimer Is Watching Me: A Memoir. University of Iowa Press, October 2007.
