pumped in reverse.
CHAPTER 26
I went back to the motel feeling deeply hungry and unsatisfied. I watched some TV and read a book, and then slept that fitful sleep you get when all of your body is still and resting except your stomach, which is saying, 'WHERE THE FUCK IS MY DINNER? HEY, BILL, ARE YOU LISTENING TO
ME? WHERE THE F-U-C-K IS MY EVENING SUSTENANCE?'
HERE, APROPOS OF nothing at all, is a true story. In 1958 my grandmother got cancer of the colon and came to our house to die. At this time my mother employed a cleaning lady named Mrs.
Goodman, who didn't have a whole lot upstairs but was possessed of a good Catholic heart. After my grandmother's arrival, Mrs. Goodman grew uncharacteristically sullen. Then one afternoon at finishing time she told my mother that she would have to quit because she didn't want to catch cancer from my grandmother. My mother soothingly reassured Mrs. Goodman that you cannot
'catch cancer' and gave her a small pay increase to compensate for the extra work occasioned by my grandmothers clammy and simpering presence. So with ill-disguised reluctance Mrs. Goodman stayed on. And about three months later she caught cancer and with alarming swiftness died.
Well, as you can imagine, since it was my family that killed the poor woman, I've always wanted to commemorate her in some small way and I thought that here would be as good a place as any, especially as I had nothing of interest to tell you about the drive from Wells, Nevada, to Twin Falls, Idaho.
So, goodbye, Mrs. Goodman, it was nice knowing you. And we're all very, very sorry.
Twin Falls was a nice enough place-Mrs. Goodman, I've no doubt, would have liked it; but then when you think about it a dead person would probably appreciate any change of scenery and the landscape in southern Idaho was greener and more fertile than anything Nevada had to offer. Idaho is known for its potatoes, though in fact Maine, just a third its size, produces more. Its real wealth comes from mining and timber, particularly in the higher reaches of the Rockies, up towards Canada, over 500 miles north of where I was now. I was headed for Sun Valley, the famous resort up in the Sawtooth Mountains, and the neighboring town of Ketchum, where Ernest Hemingway spent the last year of his life and blew his brains out. This has always seemed to me (not that it's any of my business, mind you) a particularly thoughtless and selfish way to kill oneself. I mean to say, your family is going to be upset enough that you are dead without your having to spoil the furniture and gross everyone out on top of that.
In any case, Ketchum was touristy, though Sun Valley itself proved to be most agreeable. It was built as a ski resort in the 1930s by the Union Pacific Railroad as a way of enticing people to travel to the region during the winter. It certainly has a beautiful setting, in a bowl of jagged mountains, and is supposed to have some of the best skiing in the country. People like Clint Eastwood and Barbra Streisand have houses there. I looked in a window in a real estate office and didn't see anything for sale for less than $250,000.
The town part of Sun Valley-it's really just a little shopping center-is built to look like a Bavarian village. I found it oddly charming. As so often with these things in America, it was supe rior to a real Bavarian village. There were two reasons for this: (1) It was better built and more picturesque; and (2) the inhabitants of Sun Valley have never adopted Adolf Hitler as their leader or sent their neighbors off for gassing. Were I a skier and rich, I would on these grounds alone unhesitatingly choose it over Garmisch-Partenkirchen, say. In the meantime, being poor and skiless, there was nothing much for me to do but poke around in the shops. For the most part these sold swish skiing outfits and expensive gifts-things like large pewter elk for $t00 and lead crystal paperweights at $150--and the people who ran them were those snooty types who watch you as if they think you might do a poo in the corner given half a chance. Understandably, this soured me on the place and I declined to make any purchases. 'Your loss, not mine,' I murmured sniffily as I left.
Idaho is another big state-550 miles from top to bottom, 300 miles across at the base-and it took me the rest of the day just to drive to Idaho Falls, near the border with Wyoming. En route I passed the little town of Arco, which on December 20, 1951 became the first town in the world to be lighted with nuclearpowered electricity, supplied by the world's first peacetime nuclear reactor at a site ten miles southwest of town at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. The name is misleading because the so-called laboratory covers several hundred square miles of scrubby chaparral and is actually the biggest nuclear dump in the country. The highway between Arco and Idaho Falls runs for forty miles alongside the complex, but it is lined by high fences interspersed with military-style checkpoints. In the far distance stand large buildings where, presumably, workers in white spacesuits wander around in rooms that look like something out of a James Bond film.
I didn't realize it at the time, but the US government had recently admitted that plutonium had been found to be leaking from one of the storage facilities on the site and was working its way downward through the ground to a giant subterranean reservoir, which supplies the water for tens of thousands of people in southern Idaho. Plutonium is the most lethal substance known to man-a spoonful of it could wipe out a city. Once you make some plutonium, you have to keep it safe for 250,000 years.
The United States government had managed to keep its plutonium safe for rather less than 36 years.
This, it seems to me, is a convincing argument for not allowing your government to mess, with plutonium.
And this was only one leak out of many. At a similar facility in the state of Washington, 500,000
gallons of highly radioactive substances drained away before anyone thought to put a dipstick in the tank and see how things were doing. How do you lose 500,000 gallons of anything? I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know that I would not like to be a real estate agent trying to sell houses in Pocatello or Idaho Falls five years from now when the ground starts to glow and women are giving birth to human flies.
For the time being, however, Idaho Falls remains an agreeable little city. The downtown was attractive and still evidently prospering. Trees and benches had been set out. A big banner was draped across one of the streets saying, IDAHO FALLS SAYS NO TO DRUGS. That's really going to keep the kids off the hard stuff, I thought. Small- town America is obsessed with drugs, yet I suspect that if you strip-searched every teenager in Idaho Falls you would come up with nothing more illicit than some dirty magazines, a packet of condoms and a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's. It will help them to cope when they find out there's plutonium in their drinking water.
I had an excellent dinner at Happy's Chinese Restaurant. The room was empty except for one other party consisting of a middle-aged couple, their teenage daughter and a Swedish ex change student who was simply radiant-blond, tanned, softspoken, hypnotically beautiful. I stared at her helplessly.
I had never seen anyone so beautiful in a Chinese restaurant in Idaho before. After a while a man came in who was evidently a passing acquaintance of the family and stopped at their table to chat.
He was introduced to the Swedish girl and asked her about her stay in Idaho Falls and if she had been to the local sights-the lava caves and hot springs. (She had. Zey were vairy nice.) Then he asked The Big Question. He
