On the outside of the fence, for everyone passing by to see, was a giant yellow smiley face. On the other side was a yard with a sandbox and a jungle gym. An English sheepdog named Charlotte. Rabbits and turtles and kittens. Out back we played Red Light! Green Light! and had Easter-egg hunts and birthday parties. Inside the house, my mother, a budding photographer, set up a darkroom to develop film, as well as a workout room where she practiced karate. I snuggled with my parents in their bed and watched TV. The cozy kitchen was where we had family spaghetti dinners.
Smiley face on the fence, happy people in the house.
But as with so much of my life, the truth is a little more complicated. Clutter—plastic toys, yard equipment, bikes, an old jalopy—filled up our side yard. The neighbors complained, so my parents were forced to put up a fence to hide all our crap. My mom didn’t like thinking the neighbors had won some kind of victory, so she painted that garish yellow happy face as tall and as wide as the fence would allow. The smiley face wasn’t a reflection of internal happiness. It was a big “Fuck you” to our neighbors.
II.
How did we all arrive there, in a tract house on Marshall Street in Richland, Washington?
My mother came for the same reason most people settled in Richland: because of the nuclear reactors. Richland, Washington, looks like a normal American town, with neat rows of streets along the banks of the Columbia River. But behind that unremarkable facade is a complex history, a town created in the dark shadows of the American dream. During World War II, the U.S. government searched for an isolated swath of land with an abundant water supply and plenty of electrical power where it could hide a highly classified extension of the Manhattan Project. They found what they were looking for in an arid stretch of emptiness two hundred miles southeast of Seattle. Hanford is in the high desert, on the confluence of the Columbia and Yakima Rivers, not far from the Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams. It had water, electricity, and not much else. It was the perfect place to build the world’s first plutonium production reactors.
The U.S. government forced the relocation of about 1,500 residents from the small farming community of Hanford, which became the 586-square-mile site of the nuclear campus. Workers were imported and housed in tent barracks, and later, in small tract houses in nearby Richland. Within a few months, the workforce swelled to 51,000, and three nuclear reactors were producing the plutonium that, once shipped to Los Alamos, was used to build some of the first atomic bombs. Most workers had no idea what they were helping develop. No one was allowed to speak of it: husbands and wives weren’t even permitted to tell each other what their jobs were at Hanford. Residents had phony mailing addresses in Seattle, hung blackout curtains at night, and spoke in whispers inside their own homes. There were signs posted in public places: CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES.
Old-timers tell stories that have been handed down over the years, of neighbors seen chatting in public before abruptly disappearing without so much as a good-bye. The secretive origins of Richland seem to have filtered down into the dusty riverbanks of the Columbia and infiltrated our ordinary lives.
Ours was a patriotic place. In 1944, every employee of the Hanford Works donated one day’s pay to buy a bomber—a B-17 that was christened Day’s Pay and flew more than sixty missions over Germany. There’s a huge mural of the aircraft on an exterior wall at my high school: we are the Richland High Bombers. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, was filled with Hanford plutonium. Six days later, the Japanese surrendered and World War II ended. Around most of the globe, that victory, manufactured on the banks of the Columbia River, is viewed as an apocalyptic moment for mankind. But in my hometown, that incineration is still celebrated. The logo of my high school is the nuclear mushroom cloud—it’s painted on the floor of our basketball court, emblazoned on T-shirts and the backs of varsity jackets and defended vigorously by Richland citizens against periodic attempts to change it to something more politically correct. The Richland motto is “Proud of the cloud.”
We don’t do politically correct in Richland. When I was in high school, one of our school cheers was “Nuke ’em, nuke ’em, nuke ’em till they glow!”
My family didn’t help manufacture the annihilation of Nagasaki. My grandfather, Pete Shaw, was in the navy during World War II and went on to become an electrical engineer in the nuclear industry in Southern California during the 1950s and ’60s. But Hanford stayed busy throughout the Cold War, so in 1969 Grandpa Pete and Grandma Alice moved to Washington with their four children. Their oldest daughter, my aunt Kathy, lasted only a few weeks. She left Richland as soon as she turned eighteen. My mother, the second oldest at sixteen and about to start her senior year of high school, was so distraught about the move that she had tried to run away beforehand, concocting an adolescent fantasy of escaping with a boyfriend. But the plan only lasted a few hours—the boyfriend was interested in someone else. When Judy Lynn Shaw looked out the plane window at the brown barren landscape below her, she groaned in despair, “What is this place?”
III.
How did my father come to Richland? I wish I knew the entire answer to that question.
Here’s part of the answer: my mother, who had moved to Everett, Washington, as a young woman, married my father and became pregnant with me during a conjugal visit while my father was serving a prison sentence in Washington. My brother, Marcus, was a toddler at the time. Overwhelmed, my mother had no choice but to move in with
