"1 wanted to take my prom gown, but I couldn’t lit it into my suitcase. So 1got out a tew days' worth of clothes, and my jewel rv. I have a lot of turquoise and 1 thought if anyone broke into my house 1 didn't want them to take that. 1 took all the money I had in the house, and my mother took all our bankbooks and photo albums. We had a lot of beef from my father’s farm in the basement, so we took that. And we packed all the fresh fruits and vegetables we could find." Julie and her mother headed for the Reigles’ small cabin up in Tower City, in coal country. But she insisted on going in her own car. not her mother’s. "1 was so mad at her. I said. ‘I'm following you up. 1 don't want to he anywhere near you.*" One of the things that made Julie angriest was that she hadn't been able to see her boyfriend before she left. "He had my Howers and everything. I never saw them until they were dried out.” As she drove up to Tower City, Julie kept commuting between her normal, everyday consciousness and her increasing realization that each familiar detail was really a sign of something unknown and ominous. "When I was passing the Hershey arena 1 saw this carload of women. They were all pregnant. They all had little kids, little babies. That’s when it began to hit me really-Hard. They were evacuating and I was scared for them. Then, when I was driving further up the road, up Route 81. it seemed like I saw a caravan of people packed in loaded cars. At first 1 thought maybe they were going camping. Then 1 saw the things they’d taken and I realized what had happened. They didn't have tents or overnight gear in their back seats. They had sluffed all their clothes there. All of us were leaving home.” When they got to Tower City, Julie and her mother spent several hours trying to telephone her father. He insisted on staying in Middletown—and his reasons were echoed by hundreds of people in the lush dairy farming region near Three Mile Island. “ How could he leave his farm?” Julie asked. “What could he do with 150 cows? He couldn’t let them stay there without milking them—they'd die. He couldn’t take them up to Tower City.” Like the Hursts, the Reigles spent noisy, crowded days in exile. Eleven members of Iheir extended family—including grandparents and children—slept in a cabin that had been built for five. They didn’t feel very safe there—they felt they were too close to Three Mile Island to survive a meltdown. Julie's aunt drove back to Middletown to get her camper. The entire family made plans to meet in Florida in case they had to evacuate again. The tension kept building. Julie couldn’t stand “being pent up with all those people. They were all yelling all the time. One lucky thing happened, though. A good friend of mine from Hershey came up to Tower City with her parents. We spent a lol of time talking together. At least we Could share our fears. We kept wondering, what if we never go back? What if we never see our friends again? Even if they all evac uated, they’d be so scattered we could never find them.” When Julie did get back to Middletown, she wanted everything to go back to normal as quickly as possible. “The first day I went downtown to get a perm." she says with a laugh. "But my mom was still scared. We still have our bags packed and they sit by her bedroom door. We never let the cars get below three-quarters of a tank of gas. “ Most people are still worried about what happened, especially because all those other things about radiation are surfacing now. Did you see that television show about St. George. Utah? There was a guy on it who had lost seven members of his family to cancer. The odds against that must be astronomical. I keep thinking, is my family going to die? "One girlfriend of mine—her mother said to her, ‘Don’t be the first one in your age group to have children.’ "I wonder, was I far enough away from Three Mile Island when I evacuated? Then 1 think, if anything happened, it probably happened on Wednesday, when we all believed there was just a small leak down there. Sometimes I just want to get away. But where can I go? There is no place where there is no nuclear energy. Besides, everything I have is here.” Like many kids in Mrs. Christ’s class, Julie is not convinced that Unit One should stay shut down. "They say that Unit One worked fine. Sometimes I think we need it—that there's no other way to get energy. Then I hear something like the stories about Utah that makes me lean toward not wanting it. Each time I hear a new fact it tilts me one way or the other.” She is frequently reminded of her fears. "One night, my girlfriend and I were driving home from the East Mall. All of a sudden 1saw Three Mile Island. Before, when the sun set over it real nice. 1might notice it. But now, whenever I come off a mountain I see it, and it looks 10 times bigger than it did before the accident.” These days hundreds of people in Middletown wear brash T-shirts, like the one that says, "I Survived Three Mile Island.” Usually, Julie thinks they're “cute”—she bought one herself, to attract attention when she and her friends go to the shore this summer. “Somebody's making a lot of money off them,” she says with a laugh. "I don't see what's wrong with that. You make money off everything else.” But once in awhile she looks at a T-shirt and feels a quick rush of fear. “ h 's going to be on my mind for a very long time—I know that. Maybe not in the next couple of years, when 1 go to college. But I know that when I’m pregnant I’m going to be total raw' nerves. I think a lot of the kids here are going to be the same way. They might not express it outwardly, but I think they feel it deep down inside. For instance. 1 made a joke in class the other day. One of my teachers said, ‘Next week we’re going to have a full week of school— it will be the first time in three or four weeks, what with Three Mile Island and Easter vacation.' I said, ‘Don’t you know? They’re going to evacuate us because of the iodine radiation in the air.' Everyone got quiet. It was really strange. Then the teacher said, ‘Don't joke about th a t ." ’ Even though Julie loves Middletown, she doubts she’ll settle there. Right now, she’s eager to travel. When she's older, her fantasy is to leave the East altogether and settle in Colorado. As she talked about those plans and about her fears, a difficult question crossed my mind. What if she fel] in love with a man who didn’t know where she was from, or what she had lived through? What would she tell him? “ I’d say there’s some chance I might have .. .you know.. .that people who live here might get cancer or leukemia or have deformed babies. I’d tell him the truth. But it would bother me. "There’s something else that bothers me. A lot of the kids who live here will probably move away. I might not know what happens to anyone for years. My best friend might die of cancer. I don’t think we’re going to know the odds or the statistics about our own health. That scares ONE MORE TIME DISTINCTIVE CLOTHING SPECIALIZING IN EXCITING CLOTHING FROM '30s, '40s, '50s Olive Press 333 S.E. Third Portland, Oregon 235-7139 • posters • business cards • announcements • brochures • books • printing in colors a collectively run print shop phofo by Thecskei CUSTOM RENTALS NOW AVAILABLE 11 14 NW 21st 30
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