From the radiated crops of cherries and peaches that my grandparents grew on the banks of the Columbia River to the cockroaches my father was force fed in jungle survival training, the American mythology of pioneers has taken a toll on my family. My grandparents were frontierspeople, homesteaders and dustbowl refugees from Oklahoma who eked a living out of Oregon's dry desert landscape, eventually inching their way from sagebrush-bound homesteads closer and closer to water, finally settling in the 1940s on the banks of the Columbia River downstream from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The Columbia River is the most poisonous body of water on earth.
Radioactivity flows ceaselessly from the upper reaches of the river to the Pacific Ocean.
Although the primary elimination of waste into groundwater took place at Hanford between 1944 and 1972, leaking containers of contaminant continue to pollute the land and waters around it. The radiation brought with it to the people living downstream a culture of silence, acquiescence, and sickness. This culture is also a byproduct of the collision between images of frontiers and pioneers with the reality of life in Western North America. Ironically it is also a proud and noble tradition from which pioneers draw a positive and self-sustaining historical identity. My grandparents lost their lives to this ideology, as did my aunt who died of radiation sickness by the time she was twelve.