I talked openly to the FBI two or three times a year for ten years without really understanding the effect it could have on other people’s lives. I was only a child. space shots and of scenes from science fiction books of secret military/scientific installations. But it also brought to mind horror movies, just before a huge beast With glaring eyes would roar out of the darkness to swallow up the unsuspecting townsfolk, or war movies showing the rough tenderness of camaraderie before a dawn raid. I would watch them from behind the bushes a block away until the bus came and took them away. The men got dropped off on the same corners between 6:00 and 6:30 pm. It meant that the men were away from home for twelve hours a day. It was not rare for the schools to close because of snow, wind or flood. But I don’t remember a single day that the A.E.C. buses didn’t run because of weather. The Arco Highway must have had top priority for snow clearance. There was a spell of much grumbling when the men had to start catching the bus half an hour earlier, and returning later, because the buses had been ordered to slow down. It seems the buses, travelling in lengthy convoys, were killing so many jackrabbits that the road was getting slippery and dangerous. The concern was for the buses, not for other vehicles. Gradually the speeds crept up, and in a few months the times were back to normal. Maybe the jackrabbit season was over. There may have been a hundred buses, maybe two hundred, parked nights and weekends behind a link fence across the street from our church. For an hour in the morning and evening, they dominated the town. Not just the thoroughfares were affected, for at least one bus from each compound had to stop within a couple blocks of every house in town. During split sessions, with school buses competing for space, there wasn’t much room for anything else. ^^ytomic War The men all being two hours from their families made our war preparedness complicated. We knew war would come and we knew we would be in the thick of it. We were resigned to the possibility of being separated from our fathers for the whole six weeks (or whatever it was) until it was safe to come out of the shelters. Mom once carefully explained that because there was no actual production of weapons at The Site, it wouldn’t be a first- strike target. In fact, the Russians would try to protect the facilities for their own use once they took over. She had spent a long time working that out; I didn’t believe it any more than she did. We never spoke of Our Side destroying The Site to keep it out of the hands of the Russians. A neighbor boy (he was a Mormon, one of thirteen kids—an uncle when he was born) once gleefully told me that the per- capita alcohol consumption of Idaho Falls was second highest in the country, after Las Vegas. I wasn’t old enough to question his information, and began speculating at once that it was because life was so boring out here in the sticks. The reason, he said, was that the Site workers knew they were helping to bring about an atomic war, and felt so guilty about it, and couldn’t talk to anyone about it because it was secret, that they had to get drunk every night. I’d never heard such a notion before. How could these great heroes of Science, of America, feel anything but pride in the wonderful work they were doing? How was it possible to feel guilt at doing good? The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized it was an attack on The Site by The Town, and felt compelled to defend us against the slur. For a few days I watched the faces of the men as they got off the bus, when we visited or they visited, as they sat in church. I watched Dad’s face, especially when he was drinking (he’d been an alcoholic as far back as I could remember). I began to see a weight of sadness in their cheekbones, a flash of terror in their eyes, a quiver of helplessness on their lips. I made a deliberate decision to stop watching before I saw any more. If these men were criminals against peace, against humanity, maybe even against God, I didn’t want to know about it. There was nothing I could do anyway. Over the next year or two I shifted my projected career from physics to writing, perhaps partly to avoid wrestling with that moral question. If that neighbor kid set out to convert me that day, he may have succeeded far better than either of us knew. yast Exit £ To Montana ^Jome years before that, our war con- sciousness nearly led us in a completely different direction. Our family took up with a peculiar family. Like us they had five kids—too many to be scientists, too few to be Mormons. Dad seems to have met the man in a bar. They had only recently come to town, and obviously weren’t intending to stay long: the man didn’t work, the kids didn’t go to school. They lived almost without furniture in a ramshackle house behind the Coca Cola bottling plant. We spent a lot of time with them, the adults drinking beer and talking intently for hours, their kids introducing us to mischievous freedoms we’d never imagined and parts of our hometown we’d never seen. As the relationship diverged more and more from our usual pattern of family friendships, Mom sat us kids down one day and explained. She spoke softly, almost whispering at times, but with determination. We knew she was purposely violating security and were awed into paying total attention. These people were part of a group that had bought (or planned to buy) a remote valley in Montana, where they could live almost entirely cut off from the rest of the world. Security would be even tighter than at The Site. No one would know their exact location. No one would be able to betray them when the Russians came. We kids didn’t think to ask about the political or religious origins of the group. They were in Idaho Falls recruiting, and they wanted us to join them. Particularly they wanted Dad, not only to dotheir electrical work, but also to design and build an electronic security system. Dad was a good prospect: a poor, uneducated social misfit with no strong political or religious commitments. Though still paid and treated as a maintenance electrician, Dad had by that time been relieved of his ordinary duties and spent his work time designing electronic circuits for toplevel scientists when the official electronic engineers couldn’t meet their requirements. I don’t know if this man ran into Dad by accident, or heard about him and made a point of meeting him. We kids were excited. It was science fiction come true: living deep in a forest threaded with electronic sensing devices, building log cabins with secret underground chambers, riding horses to the hidden helicopter pad. Of course we’d have a reactor to generate our electricity. And there would be no more interminable classes run by boring tyrants. We were severely warned not to speak of any of this to anyone, not even to hint at it to our best friends. We didn’t. We knew about security. As plans developed further, Mom finally took her stand. She had grown up on farms, left the moment she could, and would under no circumstances go back to one. I’m sure there were other reasons as well, but the safest one was enough. I held a long bitterness against her for denying us the paradise I thought we had almost found. I surprise myself by wishing even now that we had gone: heaven or hell, what an adventure we missed! The family vanished soon thereafter. I don’t think we ever heard from them again. The attraction of the scheme had nothing to do with fear of the Russians. I knew, as everyone knew, that atomic war would come someday. But we—Site people and their families—worked and lived around radiation all the time, and so were not easily spooked by the thought of it. We also had great faith that the government/ corporate organization we were part of would take care of us. I either imagined or was told that there were secret shelters reserved for Site people. When the time came, we would be told where to go, or picked up at home, or plucked out of our classrooms if necessary. War was inevitable. There was no point in being terrified of it. Some of my friends would get killed. But a war would kill more people I didn’t like than than people I did. Our house would get blown up, but I didn’t like it anyway. And a war would certainly break up those long monotonous days of school. ^yveryday Strange ^^Occurrences Living near The Site heightened some events and subdued others, most often twisting them into a different significance than they might otherwise have had. UFO sightings are a good example. Very late one night, Mom and Dad were sitting watching television. Suddenly a huge orange fireball flashed by the window. They both hit the floor, certain that a burning airplane was about to crash in the street in front of the house. It didn’t happen. They rushed out to find nothing more than the strong smell of ozone. It was a topic of family conversation for a couple days, and Dad may have talked to his colleagues about it. If it was connected to The Site, the less said about it, the better. It was just another curious, unexplained event, like the many others Dad had seen. A more serious sighting occurred one night when Mom happened to be driving home from Pocatello, fifty miles to the south. A UFO flared through the sky and disappeared (from Mom’s sight anyway) behind The Buttes, which rise abruptly out of the desert. There was a crash this time, and hundreds of people had seen the object. By daybreak, the whole area was sealed off by soldiers. I was in high school then, involved in a secret society of peers—an elitist group which broke through the Site/non-Site barrier—that was bonded by our mutual teen-aged cynicism. We first predicted, then observed, the standard government procedure of releasing vague and conflicting reports for several days until everyone had evidence to prove their own theory and disprove all the others. The common UFO theories had their adherents of course: meteor, atmospheric phenomenon, alien spacecraft, omen of the Second Coming, etc. But The Site figured into the two most popular theories. Many people thought it was an attempted attack by the Russians. But most people assumed it was a Site experiment that had gone awry, and knew that no more information would be forthcoming. When none was, they claimed the theory proven. The investigation was entirely in the hands of the federal government. After a few days, the soldiers slipped quietly back to wherever it was they had appeared from so quickly. Our secret society considered an expedition out to the crash area, but decided against it for three reasons: 1) About 100 square miles had been sealed off, and the specific location had never been pinpointed. It could be a long search. 2) If there was still (or ever had been) anything interesting to find, the government wouldn’t have pulled the troops out. 3) They were probably still watching the area, and if we got picked up our own secrecy—sufficient against teachers, principals, local police, parents and schoolmates—wouldn’t stand up long under FBI questioning. It wasn’t as though accidents had never happened before. Usually our first indication of a radiation leak was when someone on the block started hosing down the driveway and sidewalk. That was the signal for one of us kids to do the same to ours while Mom called a few friends and spread the word that radioactive fallout was coming down. Every once in a while it was Dad who called in from The Site to say, “I was just thinking it might be a good day to wash the driveway.” There was some prestige in being the first one on the block to wash down the driveway. • As I got older, I began to realize how ludicrous it was. “What about the grass?” I asked once. “We’d wash it off if we could,” Mom replied ruefully. I never thought to ask about the roof or the street. But I never stopped doing it. It had all the trappings of propitiatory magic, as mundane yet important a superstition as prayers before bed or not stepping on the cracks I don’t remember how often that happened. We didn’t mention it at school, partly because it was too common to be interesting, partly because of security. If neighbors asked why we were doing it, 6 Clinton St. Quarterly
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