Savage Dreams by Solnit Rebecca

Author:Solnit, Rebecca
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2014-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

Keeping Pace with the Tortoise

TWO MORE THINGS HAPPENED TO ME IN NEVADA IN THE summer of 1992.

The first was that I got to Ground Zero.

I did it the easy way. I called up the Las Vegas Department of Energy and said that I was a journalist and that I wanted a tour of the Nevada Test Site. They had me come out and meet Darwin at six in the morning at the DOE office near the Strip in Vegas.

Darwin was a large, blunt-featured, public-relations middle-weight who seemed sincere, but not fanatical, about his job. He was well disposed toward me, but he dropped a pointed reference to my brother in case I thought I could pass as a nonpartisan. In fact, David wanted to come with me, but I wanted to see how the Test Site was presented when the presenter wasn’t being grilled, so I was alone. I asked some tricky questions, but didn’t press any points. I wasn’t out to make a convert or make him admit the error of his ways, only to see the place and scribble down the DOE’s version of things (no recording devices were permitted on the tour).

The first thing that I noticed was that he always spoke of the DOE as “we,” and that bombs were never called bombs, they were “devices.” By the time we passed the entrance to Desert National Wildlife Range, the wildlife refuge that overlaps Nellis Airforce Base, I also noticed that Darwin would readily concede that the DOE had once lacked “preplanning,” which had resulted in problems, but that he considered the out-of-control era strictly over. I heard a lot about animals. “Our biologists for the longest time have kept a running catalog of the wild horses, fifty or sixty of them. We know every one there is. They move away from where we’re working. We have very stringent rules. If you harm the animals, you lose your job. . . . All the employees have instructions on what to do if there is a tortoise. There is a federal law that no one is supposed to handle them.” It seemed as though the Test Site workers displaced their anxiety about their work into elaborate care for the wildlife. But their acts of concern didn’t allay the nature of their work. I remembered that Dan Sheahan once spoke of encountering a herd of horses that wandered east onto the Sheahan lands with their eyes burnt out, left empty sockets by a blast. And Citizen Alert was publicizing a warning to hunters that deer meat from the region might well be too radioactive to eat.

We drove across the cattleguard after Darwin showed a pass and on to a guard station. Inside, I got an identity badge that was also a radiation badge. It would measure how much radiation I was exposed to, and if they considered it too much, they would notify me. (They didn’t.) There were handmade signs everywhere, jaunty letters on painted plywood with cursive script for emphasis.

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