The Reckonings Page 12

  My son’s fear is cyclical. The evil comes and goes, resurfacing each time he reaches the edge of his moral geography. A classmate bites him on the playground. Would it be evil to retaliate? A friend no longer wants to play together. Does that make them enemies? His sister says she hates him. Does this mean he is unloved? He has an invisible friend named Mr. Nobody, on whom he blames all of his worst misdeeds: a broken vase, greasy handprints on the wall, that time he pulled out my hair by accident or curiosity or mistake.

  At night, I hold him by the hand, and we look together under his bed, where we find only his own toys; behind the chair are only the dust bunnies I missed during my last time coming through with the broom. Under the shirts folded in his closet we find only more shirts. I ask him to tell me all about the evil he imagines there. There is a monster made entirely of bombs. “His head is a bomb and his hands are bombs and his feet are also bombs,” he tells me.

  I understand why this monster would frighten him. Each day we are told our enemies are monsters, that our annihilation is imminent, and it’s hard to remember a time when I didn’t feel myself living under that shadow. A plane passes overhead and I watch it, expecting to see I know not what. I hear several loud bangs in a row down the street and I freeze, waiting to hear a scream, a siren, or the distant brilliance of a firecracker overhead. A paper bag left on the corner might contain discarded leftovers or a homemade bomb. I don’t think I’m alone in imagining the terrible ways each of us might fail in our responsibility for being human.

  “What does the monster want?” I ask my son. He tells me the bomb is looking for a place to live. “His own home was exploded by bombs,” he explains. I ask, “What should we do?” His brow folds on itself, a sign he is thinking very hard. “Maybe we should help him find a place to live,” he says. I agree, and together we draw a map to this place.

  My son will grow out of this particular fear. Already he is made a little braver by the story we have told together. Just now he walked alone into the darkness of his own room. And as perhaps we all should, he turned on the light.

  THE FALLOUT

  Dawn Chapman first noticed the smell on Halloween in 2012, when she was out trick-or-treating with her three young children in her neighborhood of Maryland Heights, Missouri, a small suburb of St. Louis. By Thanksgiving, it was a stench—a mixture of petroleum fumes, skunk spray, electrical fire, and dead bodies—reaching the airport, the ballpark, the strip mall where Dawn bought her groceries. Dawn could smell the odor every time she got in her car, and then, by Christmas, she couldn’t not smell it. In January, the stench hung in the air inside her home when Dawn woke her children for school every morning. “That was the last straw,” she told me recently. Dawn made a call to city hall asking about this terrible smell. The woman on the phone told Dawn she needed to call the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, gave her the number, and abruptly hung up. Dawn called the number, left a message, and then went on with her day.

  Her youngest son was napping when the phone rang. Dawn was sitting on the top bunk in his bedroom folding laundry. The man on the phone introduced himself as Joe Trunko from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Joe spoke gently, slowly. He told Dawn that a landfill near her home is an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site contaminated with toxic chemicals. He said there has been an underground fire burning there since 2010. “These things happen sometimes in landfills,” he said. “But this one is really not good.”

  Joe told Dawn that this landfill fire measures six football fields across and more than 150 feet deep; it is in the floodplain of the Missouri River, less than two miles from the water itself, roughly twenty-seven miles upstream from where the Missouri River joins the Mississippi River before flowing south and out to the sea. “But to be honest, it’s not even the fire you should be worrying about,” Joe continued. “It’s the nuclear waste buried less than one thousand feet away.”

  Joe explained that almost fifty thousand tons of nuclear waste left over from the Manhattan Project were dumped in the landfill illegally in 1973. He explained, so gently, that Dawn should be concerned that the fire and the waste would meet and that there would be some kind of “event.”

  “Why isn’t this in the news?” Dawn asked.

  “You know, Mrs. Chapman, that’s a really good question.”

  * * *

  As soon as she hung up the phone, Dawn picked it up again and called her husband. He thought someone must be making a mistake. “Dawn, this is the United States of America,” he said. “The government doesn’t just leave radioactive waste lying around.”

  Dawn agreed: there must be some mistake. “They wouldn’t do that. Our government would never do that.”

  She called the regional office of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to ask about the status of this Superfund site, and when staff there returned her call days later, they knew surprisingly little about the fire, Dawn thought. In fact, they wouldn’t even call it a fire, but kept using the term “subsurface smoldering event” and shared almost no information about what they called the “radiologically impacted material.” They told Dawn it wasn’t dangerous, that the landfill wasn’t accessible to the public anyway. But Dawn had studied the documents Joe Trunko had emailed her after their call, so she knew there was more to the story. Joe had even called the next day to make sure she’d received all the files. That made her feel more worried than anything else. “It’s like he wanted this information to get out,” she told me. “Like he was waiting for someone to call and ask.”

  Dawn printed out everything Joe had sent and took it to her parents’ house that weekend, where she and her mother were planning to host her daughter’s fifth-birthday party in a few weeks. Dawn had planned to talk to her mother about balloons and cupcake recipes but instead spread out all the documents on the kitchen table. Her brother and husband and both her parents pulled up chairs as she explained about the landfill and the waste. They shook their heads in disbelief. “Someone should have told us about this,” said her father, shaking his head.

  * * *

  After her daughter’s birthday party, Dawn Chapman got to work. Each day she would wake up, make breakfast for her two school-aged children, and put them on the bus. While her younger son watched Sesame Street and ate Cheerios out of a plastic bowl, she searched the Internet, printing out any information on the landfill she could find. During her youngest child’s nap time, she spread the documents out on the kitchen table, leaving the floor unswept, the dishes unwashed, the laundry unfolded in a basket by the couch. She learned that in 1990, the EPA had listed the West Lake Landfill Superfund site, which encompasses both the West Lake Landfill and the nearby Bridgeton Landfill, on its National Priorities List. Eighteen years later, when it finally got around to making a decision on the site, its proposed remedy was to install an engineered cap and leave the waste exactly where it is. At that time, in 2008, only a few people in the community knew there was a nuclear dump in their backyards, and the EPA did little to alert them. “If it weren’t for the fire,” Dawn realized, “we never would have known.”

  Weeks later, she found herself standing outside the chain-link fence that surrounds the landfill with half a dozen environmental activists who had gotten some air-sampling equipment. A news crew had come, and there, shivering in the biting cold of the February wind, Dawn gave her first interview about what was causing the terrible smell. She shivered partly from the cold but also because by that point, her concern had become righteous anger. She stood with the others on a patch of frozen grass watching the meters and dials on the handheld monitor jump and buzz and whir. She looked up and locked eyes with a woman she’d never seen before.

  * * *

  Karen Nickel didn’t know much about the landfill—she’d only just learned about it a few weeks before—but she knew about the waste. Unlike Dawn, she’d grown up in North St. Louis County, and this waste had been here, making her neighbors sick, since before she was born. Karen was nine years old wh
en her parents moved to North County in 1973 in pursuit of good schools, a safe neighborhood, and a big yard for all the children. Her father worked in the lumberyards, and her mother stayed home to care for Karen and her siblings.

  On their quiet cul-de-sac in North County, sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty children would play kick the can in the street or chase lightning bugs in the park until the streetlights clicked on. A creek ran behind the houses on one side of the road, and the kids splashed through the water in the mid-August swelter. They fished in the creek for minnows and crawdads and often followed it all the way to McDonald’s to get shakes and fries. All the children attended the same elementary school, which also backed up to the creek, and heavy rains would bring the water into the field behind the school, a field where they played sports when it was dry. Karen played softball throughout middle school and high school. She was healthy and active and outside all the time.

  When Karen and her husband bought a house in North County for their own growing family, they chose one not far from the neighborhood where she’d splashed through the creek as a girl. But one summer day in 1999, she ran across a parking lot in the rain and then couldn’t get out of bed for days. Maybe she had come down with the flu, she thought. Her doctor didn’t know what to make of her symptoms, but Karen’s blood work showed signs that antibodies were attacking the proteins in the nuclei of her cells. “Lupus,” the doctor finally told her years later. He prescribed steroids to manage the symptoms of the disease, and mostly they did manage them. She felt healthy more often than ill. But in July 2012 she collapsed at her daughter’s softball game and didn’t bounce back, didn’t return to work, or to feeling healthy. Her doctor said this might be the new normal.

  Karen went to a new doctor, who told her that there’s increasing consensus that lupus can be brought on by environmental triggers, including exposure to contaminants and chemicals like cigarette smoke, silica, and mercury. In particular, he said, recent studies have shown a link between lupus and uranium exposure. That night over dinner, Karen’s husband asked if she remembered a story on the news from a few months before about the creek that ran through her neighborhood. She remembered only vaguely. “Well, it was something about uranium contamination,” he said, looking up from his plate.

  “And?” she said.

  “And, well, maybe you should look into that.”

  Karen did look into it and learned that many of her classmates and neighbors and childhood friends had died of leukemias and brain cancers and appendix cancers—rare in the general population but apparently common among those who live or have lived near the creek. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.

  * * *

  On the day they met at the air sampling event at West Lake Landfill in early 2013, Dawn followed Karen back to her house and the two stood out in the driveway talking for hours—Dawn about the landfill, Karen about the waste. The next day, first thing in the morning, they were on the phone together. “I’ll bring my kids and come over,” Dawn said. They stayed until late in the evening. “That’s what life looked like, and has looked like ever since,” Dawn tells me on the phone.

  When Dawn and Karen learned what the EPA had proposed years earlier in the Record of Decision, they immediately pushed back. They called the media, gave interviews, started a Facebook page. “I remember getting so excited when we hit two hundred members,” Karen told me. “Now we have over seventeen thousand.” They all lobbied their representatives, their senators, city council members, mayors—even Missouri’s attorney general at the time, Chris Koster, who responded to Karen and Dawn by hiring his own scientific teams to reinvestigate the EPA’s findings and then sued the landfill operators. At one point Karen and Dawn had become so fluent in the relevant jargon that public officials began to suspect they were working for some kind of law firm. “Who are you again?” the officials kept asking. “What group are you with?”

  “We’re just moms!” Karen and Dawn would answer. “We’re just citizens concerned about the health and safety of our kids and our community!”

  Soon after, Karen and Dawn, along with another resident, Beth Strohmeyer, officially formed Just Moms STL, an advocacy group that hosts monthly meetings to update their neighbors and community on the progress of their collective efforts. They learned that many of their neighbors near the landfill had developed respiratory diseases and chronic nosebleeds, and some had lost all the hair on their bodies. When they asked the EPA about these illnesses, officials refused to acknowledge any link or even entertain the possibility that the “exothermic reaction” might be causing them. Their scientists had studied the site, they kept saying, and concluded that there was nothing dangerous happening at the landfill, that there is no disaster approaching, that the landfill poses no threat.

  But each day, Dawn and Karen could see the containment vehicles that arrived to siphon off the thick black leachate seeping from the burning refuse into the ground. The vehicles took the leachate to be treated off-site before it was dumped into the sewer or the river, which supplies the water they drink.

  Dawn and Karen decided to look into the fire for themselves. During the day, Dawn downloaded temperature reports from the well monitors at the landfill. At night, she and Karen would sit at the kitchen table with crayons and markers, mapping the temperatures of the wells, using graph paper and trying to remember how to calculate equations they had learned in high school. After a few weeks of making these graphs, they realized the fire wasn’t under control; it wasn’t going out. It was, in fact, moving toward the waste, inching toward the known edge, spreading through the old limestone quarry: now one thousand feet away, now seven hundred. In the best-case scenario, the fire chief told them, people need only close their windows, turn off their air-conditioning, and shelter in place. In the worst-case scenario, there is nuclear fallout. A disaster is coming, they realized. And worse than that: nothing is standing in its way.

  * * *

  As the plane circles downward toward the city, a familiar green stretches for miles in every direction, familiar enough to me that I could call this home. I’m not from St. Louis, but I grew up near enough that I came often to watch the Cardinals play in the second Busch Stadium and ride in a claustrophobic tram capsule to the top of the Gateway Arch. In high school I drove to St. Louis on the weekends to see my favorite bands play in what was then called the Riverport Amphitheatre. A few years later, as a senior in college, I flew out of St. Louis Lambert Airport with a man I loved on a two-month trip to Europe and flew back here changed and alone.

  It’s July when I land this time at the airport. I take the bus to the rental car office to collect the car I’ve reserved, an exercise in patience since the pace of all things—conversation and business and traffic—moves more slowly in St. Louis than in Houston. The calm navigation voice coming through the car speakers leads me onto and off the highway, down a business strip of big-box stores lined with swarming parking lots, onto a narrow road past a farm, and into a subdivision of ranches and split-level homes. I stop in front of a raised ranch at the end of the street.

  Robbin Dailey opens the door and welcomes me into her home, less than half a mile from the burning landfill. She reminds me of so many other mothers I’ve known: the same hair, the same loose-fitting shirt and capri pants, the same open-hearted laugh. Robbin’s husband, Mike, stands to greet me in the entryway, shakes my hand, and then gestures for me to follow him into the living room and sit on the couch. He leans into his brown corduroy recliner, eyes on the muted TV. Robbin sits in a stiff chair across from me, crosses her legs.

  Robbin and Mike moved to this house in 1999, after their kids had moved out and started families of their own. It’s a relief their children never lived here, she tells me. In this neighborhood, children fall ill. There are brain cancers and appendix cancers, leukemias and salivary gland cancers. Up the street from Robbin and Mike is a couple with lung and stomach cancer. They bought their home just after it was built in the late 1960s.

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p; I ask what they think might happen if the fire ever reaches the waste. The question hangs in the air for a moment as the TV flickers from the far wall. “Look, we know it won’t explode,” Robbin explains. “We’re not stupid. We know that’s not how it works. But just because there’s no explosion doesn’t mean there won’t be fallout.”

  “They let Pandora out of the box,” Mike interrupts. “Splitting the atom opened the box.” It’s actually a jar in Hesiod’s version, but I don’t correct Mike here. “Pandora’s box” has a better ring to it anyway, makes a better metaphor for original sin. The box, like the atom, he is saying, each contained within itself a capacity for ruin beyond imagining.

  Eventually Robbin claps her hands on her knees and says, “Well, let’s take a look.” We leave the house and climb into her maroon SUV. She lights a long cigarette, then rolls down the windows. We drive up the street a few houses, pause as she watches a uniformed man open a gate into one of the backyards and enter—“Testing,” she explains—and then she drives out of the mouth of the street, left at the corner where the street meets the old farm, and suddenly we’re there.

  “Jesus,” I say out loud. I’ve looked at thousands of pictures of this landfill, aerial photos and historical photos, elevation photos and topographical maps, but nothing has prepared me for seeing it in person, this giant belching mound of tubes and pumps and pipes. There’s some kind of engineered cover over the dirt itself, which is supposed to suffocate the fire and capture the fumes. It looks like little more than a green plastic tarp patched together over a hundred acres of sagging hills.