T^xT. J 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. very successful in business and were nonexistent in politics. Site people were not involved in either. I had friends, close friends even, who were not Site kids, but there was always a distance between us. They could be smarter, stronger, faster, richer and even more ambitious than I was, but it didn’t matter. I was tied into Science and Technology, into Universities, Research and the Government. They were tied into cows and potatoes and irrigation canals, into the John Birch Society, the Mormon Church and the Chamber of Commerce. There was more chance for them to escape than for us to get bogged down, but not much. The only significant competition or association we Site kids had was with each other. ippopotamus । Tin The Pigpen Idaho Falls had many elements of what I now recognize as a company-town economy. The prosperity of local businesses fluctuated according to decisions made in Washington and based on national or international political concerns. The Nixon-Kennedy campaign was my first awareness of presidential politics. The main issue nationally seemed to be Kennedy’s Catholicism. Locally, however, the important issue was cutbacks at The Site, which Kennedy threatened. Sure enough, shortly after Kennedy took office, Westinghouse was closed down, and several of my friends’ dads lost their jobs. Some had to move. The closure threw the area into an economic recession for several years. Another otherwise unaccountable economic trough was attributed to the cancellation of a top-secret atomic aircraft project. Almost all of the men worked for one of the big companies. The few who worked directly for the A.E.C. (and especially if they worked at the A.E.C. Building rather than at The Site) were a little suspect to us kids—more like umpires than real baseball players. The line between the companies and the government was always a bit hazy. The companies, such as Westinghouse or Phillips Petroleum (who signed Dad’s checks) or other government agencies, such as the Navy, had some lease or f X. 1 x jr contract arrangement with the A.E.C. Workers for both public and private concerns needed government security clearances. Labor unions were outlawed at The Site, even though people were working for private corporations. The A.E.C. buses contributed to the company town feel. The men gathered on streetcorners at 6:00 to 6:30 am, waiting for the Greyhound-sized blue buses to come and get them. We often went split sessions and had to be in school at 7:00 am. One of my most vivid memories is these knots of men standing in the snow before dawn, smoking, talking softly, some reading magazines or newspapers by streetlight. The sight was both eerie and exhilarating. It reminded me of rising before dawn to watch the first 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 <or space, there wasn’t much room for anything else. tomic War I he men ail 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 ovep 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. ast Exit To Montana ^Jome years before that, our war consciousness 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 do their 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 ahyone, 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. veryday Strange Occurrences Giving 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, cer34 Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1988-89
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