35 years ago today the Three Mile Island reactor malfunction began. Heres an account from Hartwell Road: Bea and I had seen The China Syndrome two weeks before the reactor at Three Mile Island went south, and I was already pretty worked up about the issue before that. Nuclear energy just seemed like another greedhead, power-grab swindle being lapped up by the same gullible public that had been willing to believe it was okay to send me off to die in a cruelly absurd war, as long as some glib politician was willing to call it patriotism. Even though the fright fictionally conveyed by the movie was real and plausible, and the environmental implications of nuclear energy were beyond horrible, the real issue, as I saw it, was whether the generation and consumption of energy was to be small and local with an emphasis on family and community self-sufficiency, or whether it was to be large, monopolistic, and corporate with an emphasis on family and community dependency. What I didn’t know as we walked out of the movie theater was how my already tentative sense of security in the world was about to disintegrate. Abstract concern lurched suddenly out of the realm of the theoretical, into tangible fear. It was serious and it was nearby. Ninety miles away a white-hot hunk of uranium was on the verge of a fiery plunge through the floor of its containment into groundwater. The resulting steam explosion would turn the middle Atlantic region into a place I wouldn’t be willing to live in, regardless of what kind of spin the government might put on it. It seemed prudent to assume our asses and chromosomes would get cooked long before anyone official would admit the magnitude of the disaster. Bea and I knew we were on our own. I watched and listened with wariness and skepticism, hoping those in power would get a handle on the situation and when they did, I would be able to believe it. On the second day of the crisis, I was at the Phillipsburg outpost office. Ira left in a huff when I refused to admit to planting hidden electronic listening devices in his house. A food stamp recipient told me he would be going to jail for burglary soon. “Do you have a lawyer?” “No, don’t need one.” “Why is that?” “Cause I done the crime and I ain’t no liar.” A case of honor among thieves. I told him to be sure to advise his wife to apply for cash assistance as soon as he went to jail, sent him on his way, and turned on the radio. A news bulletin interrupted the music. The situation appeared to be worsening. State and corporate officials were being vague in ways I didn’t like. I called the main office, told my supervisor I would be taking a few days off, and told Bea to meet me at home as soon as possible. Intending to watch and assess the situation from the more comfortable distance of Warren, we packed my truck with camping gear, hunting equipment, artwork, and journals, and drove northwest. If there was a full-scale meltdown, we would travel westward into the prevailing winds in search of a new life. Although I certainly feared for all the threatened human loss among people both known and unknown to me, my personal fears were small. It was exhilarating in an odd way. A great spasm of worldly destruction would wipe my slate nearly clean and catapult my life into a whole new realm. I had been feeling increasingly stressed, oppressed, and desperate as a caseworker, but lacked whatever mysterious impetus was needed to generate an alternative—had been gradually losing faith in the possibility of a meaningful alternative. I didn’t want to go back into some kind of industrial labor steeped in sweat, stupidity, and toxic chemicals, but thought another position in state government would, at best, only kill the boredom for a year or so, which was only partially true. A welfare caseworker’s constant exposure to tragedy, pathos, misery, meanness, and filth is as insidiously toxic to the spirit as chlorinated hydrocarbons are to the body. It leaks out of the workday into the rest of your life and corrodes the very faculties that would enable you to see the path to a better way. You get bogged down in the weird stressed-out life of a caseworker in much the same way many of your clients get bogged down in poverty, addicted to their own dysfunction. Now an errant nuclear reactor was about to sweep it all away in a huge paroxysm of cruel irony. I might have huge struggles ahead, but despite the fear, despite the imminence of great tragedy, I felt liberation welling up out of grim stoicism. There were other concerns, too. My brother lived in Harrisburg. I couldn’t reach him on the phone, and neither could my parents. Phone lines into the region were hopelessly swamped. We dialed in vain, again and again, with mounting anxiety. My father and I agreed we had to get Dante out of Harrisburg. We had no faith in government evacuation plans and were concerned the National Guard might close off the roads. If we didn’t hear from him by the time I arrived at my parents’ house in Warren, we would get guns and gear ready and go after him. But when Bea and I arrived, Dante was already there. Dante had been comfortable accepting the generic reassurances of corporate and government spin meisters, until they announced that evacuation plans were being prepared while he was sitting in his office in the capital complex. In less than an hour he and his wife, Lily, were driving north in a well-packed car with a loaded shotgun. No forced evacuation for him. He would take care of that himself, thank you. For Dante, there was no exhilarating potential liberation in all this. The only potential was loss, the senseless destruction of everything he had worked for, of the things that defined his sense of self and worth. Once the adrenaline-fueled rush of ancient ferocity that powered his armed flight from Harrisburg and the prospect of being at the mercy of a forced evacuation wore off, he began drowning in anxiety, torturing himself with worry, pacing, and television. Anxious and increasingly dark speculations cycled and recycled through long loops of painful conversation far into the night, and again the next morning. By the following afternoon, it was obvious Dante was melting down faster than the reactor core at Three Mile Island. I was hardly a paragon of sympathy. I didn’t understand the attachments that were causing him such anxiety when the people he loved were, at least for the time being, safe. My biggest anxiety, beyond the obvious concern for the great anonymous mass of people who would die and/or suffer terribly in a worst, or even rather less than worst, case scenario was that Rachel was in Warren, still married to Liam, our love still secret. I was still with Bea. Our torturous love was nearing its final demise, but had been briefly brought back in sync by the force of shared disaster. If a full-scale meltdown did occur and the wind went the wrong way, how would I rescue Rachel? I had to trust her and Liam to know when to get out of Dodge. In the chaos afterward, how would I find her again? But Dante...Dante was the real and immediate torment. I was, shamefully, more concerned with the suffering inflicted on me by his relentless spasms of angst than with any honest sympathy for his very real pain. Secretly, I thought it would be good for him to get blown out of his attachment-ridden life—a self-righteous arrogance I knew I had no right to, but I didn’t decide to feel that way, I just did. I didn’t admit it to anyone but Hartie, who responded with a weary sigh and said, “He can’t help it. Bring him down here and stop at the liquor store on the way.” So that’s what I did. At the liquor store I asked, “Do you have any ouzo?” “No, we don’t.” “My brother here is from Harrisburg, and I thought ouzo would be just what he needs.” “Harrisburg? My God man, what you need is Yukon Jack. It’ll set you free.” At Hartie’s we opened the bottle immediately. Its death was quick and merciful. I lit a joint. Hartie and I toked hard and I rolled another. We sat on the porch, drank beer, and raved far into the night. Dante grew alarmingly agitated. He jumped off the edge of reason into manic, drunken incoherency, a truly bizarre spectacle for me to witness. I was supposed to be the scary, crazy one. He was stable, successful, and sane. It was Hartie who, by inscrutable means, reached out a hand and helped him step back up into rationality and laughter again. Dante had been blown briefly out of his attachment-riddled world by a very real meltdown in his heart and brain. It was good for him. It required the destruction of a few brain and liver cells, but his home and career remained intact. He hit bottom and climbed back up. The next day, he looked out through the haze of hangover with a newly stoic calm. I felt like shit, but was able to slip away from my parent’s house to the creekside for an herbal cure. I preferred the smoke of the weed to the hair of the dog. When the crisis subsided, we returned to the normal weirdness of our lives. Several years later, Lily was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Her treatment was successful.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 11:48:13 +0000
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