Full Body Burden

The Rocky Flats factory keeps its barrels of waste in an open area where the radioactive material can contaminate groundwater, soil, and a local rabbit population. Iversen states that, “some workers privately call it the Launching Pad, where all sorts of things are launched into the environment” (48).

Iversen returns to the year 1969, the national unrest at hand, and her family’s detachment from concerns like the Vietnam War. Her father acquires horses for each sibling; the creatures are alternately dopey and misbehaving. The family also adopts more dogs, including the nervous sheepdog Shakey.

Her mother also comments that Iversen’s father “is going down the tubes” (51). Her mother reminisces about marrying her father after one date and his two-year stint serving in the Korean War. Iversen’s mother’s family disapproves of her father, since he is Danish and her mother is Norwegian. After their wedding, they move to Colorado for a new life away from family tensions. 

After the Mother’s Day fire, protests begin outside Rocky Flats. An activist and member of the Sisters of Loretto, nun Pat McCormick numbers among the citizens demonstrating against Rocky Flats. A local woman named Ann White learns of the demonstrations from her cousin, who will photograph the five-day protest. 

Iversen’s family menagerie remains large, with young Iversen charged with caring for the animals in the morning. She begins collecting rabbits, including two Siamese Satin rabbits that win a prize at a local competition, but that she must sell soon after.

The citizens of Arvada enjoy their suburban comforts, and many locals work at the Coors beer factory nearby. Several others have well-paying jobs at the secretive Rocky Flats plant. Iversen’s father hires someone to dig a well at their new home, but the man cannot reach the water table. Iversen and her sister Karin find their father’s bottles of liquor hidden around the house and empty them in the sink. Their mother forbids them from handling “the bottles we’re not supposed to know about” (59). 

A nuclear chemist in Boulder, Ed Martell, wonders if the Mother’s Day fire has caused more damage than the AEC admits. He and a group of scientists, the Colorado Committee for Environmental Information (CCEI), make inquiries from the plant’s co-owner Dow Chemical. Dow refuses to disclose more information. Martell speaks with a Rocky Flats overseer who puts his mind at ease about the fire’s possible hazards.

At Iversen’s childhood home, she develops a crush on singer Bobby Sherman and a neighbor named Randy Sullivan, who also rides a horse. Her mother meets with other Bridledale women, many of whom are also housewives. The Denver Lawyers’ Wives Club accepts her as a member, but Iversen’s mother withdraws after realizing she cannot host a party with her husband’s hidden bottles throughout the house. 

Young Iversen becomes friends with a rebellious girl named Tina, who takes her to a local canal where kids jump from a pipe into a small pool of water and mud. Iversen nervously stands on the pipe and, despite Tina’s challenges, refuses to jump. 

Ed Martell and the CCEI conduct an investigation on soil around Rocky Flats. Locals, including a rancher named Bini Abbott who Iversen admires, also express concerns about deformities and other health issues in their animals. The CCEI’s investigation finds high levels of plutonium in the soil and water. The committee discloses these results to the Colorado Department of Health and Rocky Flats. 

Rocky Flats identifies the plutonium contamination as the result of the 1957 fire and leaking waste barrels. The AEC, which finds similar results as the CCEI, states that the plutonium levels in the atmosphere do not endanger the public. Iversen counters that this is untrue. Martell and his associates at the CCEI express concerns for the citizens of Denver and surrounding areas; they worry about contamination as well as a nuclear accident at Rocky Flats. 

Two local activists, a Sister of Loretto named Pam Solo and a Quaker named Judy Danielson, go door-to-door and ask for soil samples to be tested for radiation. 

During the winter at the new Iversen household, Tonka shivers in the cold, and mice seek refuge in the house. The family celebrates Christmas with a church service and a meal with several Scandinavian dishes. After the children open presents on Christmas morning, their father leaves for work. 

Iversen rides Tonka bareback and gallops through the prairie. She finds a high hill with a beautiful vista then canters down the slope. She and the horse stop, finding a dead cow lying in water. She starts sixth grade and fears talking to boys like Randy Sullivan. Teachers instruct the students in bomb drills, in case Russia attacks. Iversen identifies a plutonium plant in Mayak, Russia, that is Rocky Flats’ counterpart and the site of a nuclear explosion in 1957.

After school, Iversen races to groom and ride Tonka. At times her mother stops to talk with her before she can escape to the barn. She tells Iversen secrets about her family and Iversen’s father, the object of her mother’s fear, anger, and worry. While Iversen digs a grave for a baby muskrat, a neighbor boy shoots at her family’s horses. The boy leaves, and her mother refuses to intervene. 

Although Dow Chemical and the AEC claim the plutonium levels in the environment are safe, experts on the element say it can cause long-lasting and devastating damage to the body. Even a microgram of plutonium poses a risk to human life, and the element’s radioactivity lasts for many thousands of years, since its half-life is 24,000 years. 

Rocky Flats moves its waste barrels and paves the area where they once sat. However, the contaminated soil remains, and the wind blows it around the Denver area. A scientist and contributor to the Manhattan Project, Dr. John Gofman, researches the health effects of radiation and concludes that “federal safety guidelines for low-level exposures to radiation be reduced by 90 percent” (77). 

Now in junior high, Iversen struggles in gym class and remains nervous about boys. She and Tina walk to school the day of a dance, with Iversen struggling to keep her pantyhose up. The girls cross the railroad tracks and wade through an unusually high irrigation ditch. At school, they take a French exam, and Tina attempts to cheat off Iversen. Their teacher collects the paperback copy of The Godfather that Iversen stole from her mother. 

In anticipation of Tina’s “boy-girl party” (81), Iversen’s mother takes her to get a makeover and insists on buying a purple blouse she dislikes. At the party, the group plays spin the bottle. 

Iversen reflects on herself as a 13-year-old, listening to Joni Mitchell, riding her horse, seeing her father leave for work, and noting her mother’s habits at home. She feels self-conscious about her appearance; she also resents her father’s drinking and disapproval of her, as well as her mother’s fear. 

Although officials call on Rocky Flats to improve its facilities after the Mother’s Day 1969 fire, the plant changes little over the following three years. Dow’s new general manager of Rocky Flats assures the press the factory remains safe. 

Iversen and her sister Karma race on their horses. One night, Iversen cannot find Tonka and searches until she finds him trapped in a swamp. A neighbor, Walt, places a rope around Tonka’s neck and attaches the other end to his truck. He backs up the truck and, after shocking the horse to attention with Iversen’s call, successfully pulls Tonka out. Later Walt develops cancer and dies—like many other neighbors have—although no one connects this to Rocky Flats. 

A local biologist and professor named Harvey Nichols conducts tests on pollen at Rocky Flats, and his 1975 report concludes that “there [is] so much radioactive particulate matter out there, it [doesn’t] matter whether pollen [is] transporting it or not” (89). Another study tests snow around a three-mile perimeter of the plant and finds radioactive material in all layers of snow. A Rocky Flats official tells Nichols that the snow’s top-layer contamination comes from the plant’s continuous plutonium output in the air. The official denies that this poses health risks to the public. 

A neighbor named Adam challenges Iversen to a race between his dirt bike and her horse Tonka. Iversen and Adam ride his dirt bike and have a brief romance. 

Iversen’s mother helps ready her children for one of their Sunday drives, loading Kurt and his broken leg into the back of their station wagon. They wait for Iversen’s father, who emerges to sit behind the wheel and drive the bickering family to Rocky Mountain National Park. After lunch, the car hits a deer. Although Iversen remembers her father killing the injured deer with a large rock, her family members later tell her it is a man who pulls up behind the car after the accident. Iversen admits, “I want to believe it was my father” (95). The accident re-breaks Kurt’s leg. 

A Colorado Department of Health employee, Al Hazle, tests water from a nuclear site called the Rulison Project, as well as water coming from Rocky Flats. Both water samples contain the radioactive element tritium, which results from a nuclear explosion, and Hazle wonders why the element resides in Rocky Flats' water. 

Tina takes Iversen to a haunted house at Jackson’s Turkey Farm at Halloween. The boys in the family attempt to scare the girls with props resembling dismembered body parts. Iversen is terrified, while Tina brags that she knows these tricks. Iversen runs out of the haunted house, and a boy in a monster costume follows her, throwing Vaseline in her hair. 

Iversen notices that Adam moved and asks her mother why. Adam developed testicular cancer, and his family moved to California. He is not the only local male with this ailment, as a later study reveals. 

The Colorado Health Department conducts a second test on the water coming from Rocky Flats. The test finds that tritium has seeped from Rocky Flats and infiltrated a major local reservoir (100). Urine testing indicates the presence of tritium in several locals. Both Rocky Flats and the newly founded Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claim that the reservoir’s tritium levels do not present health risks to the public. Dr. Ed Martell protests that the affected Great Western Reservoir does, in fact, contain a dangerous amount of tritium and that the AEC has misjudged the acceptable amount of “normal background radiation” (100). 

Iversen cites an interview with a local woman named Laverne Abraham, who refuses to drink the water from Great Western Reservoir despite Rocky Flats’ claims. Rocky Flats later discloses that it has buried “hundreds of tons of contaminated material” (101). This waste introduced harmful radioactive elements into the Denver area for nearly two decades. 

In 1973, Dr. Carl Johnson becomes director of the Health Department in Jefferson County, the location of Rocky Flats (102). He learns not only that Rocky Flats uses a dangerous substance called curium, but also that developers seek to build homes on a site that has tested positive for plutonium. Johnson oversees a new test of the area, which finds plutonium levels higher than those found by both the Colorado Department of Health and the CCEI. Johnson also worries that construction near Rocky Flats will disperse contaminated dust that locals could inhale; he denies construction on the residential development. A news article the following day shows officials questioning Johnson’s methods and claiming that a build near Rocky Flats is not dangerous. 

The government pressures a rancher named Marcus Church, who owns land near Rocky Flats, to sell his land when the plant begins construction in the early 1950s. Years later, the growing concerns about hazardous contaminants diminishes the Church family’s property values, and Marcus Church files suit against the government. Broomfield, the site of Great Western Reservoir, requests that the AEC purify their water and prevent further contamination (105). 

The contractor of the Rocky Flats plant, Dow Chemical, removes itself from the factory after its many ongoing problems. 

Iversen’s adolescent crush Randy Sullivan also enjoys his childhood and time outdoors in Arvada. He can see Iversen’s home from his own. When he sees Iversen’s bedroom light turn on, he rides his horse over to her house and yells that he loves her. 

Iversen and her sister Karma prepare for a competition in horse riding called a gymkhana. After they groom their horses and get dressed, their father drives them to the fairgrounds with the horse trailer behind the car. Her father drives fast, and the car runs off the road. Iversen, her sister, and her father emerge from the wrecked car; Iversen feels pain in her neck and her father complains about his back. A man in a car stops and helps the unconscious horses from the overturned trailer. The girls walk their horses home. 

Iversen’s family does not discuss the accident, as her father often drives recklessly and must keep this a secret for the good of his business. The sisters do not see a doctor, although Iversen has a headache and neck pain. Their father has broken a vertebra, and many years later, a doctor tells Iversen the accident broke her neck.