Former Washington poet laureate from Hanford area on how the ‘Atomic City’ shaped her life

Seattle poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland and worked as a civil engineer at Hanford in the 1980s. She served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. In her first year as poet laureate, she published a collection called Plume, which deals directly with how her Hanford area upbringing influenced her. The book explores the history of the site, the death of her best friend’s father from a radiation illness, and her childhood in “Atomic City.” Flenniken sits down with us from the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The poet Kathleen Flenniken has lived in the Seattle area for almost 40 years. But she grew up right here in Richland, and even worked as a civil engineer at Hanford in the 1980s. Then she became a poet. She served as Washington’s State Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. In her first year as a poet laureate, she published a collection called “Plume.” The book explores her childhood in “Atomic City,” the history of the Hanford site, and the death of her best friend’s father from radiation illness. Kathleen Flenniken joins us now. Thanks very much for coming back to your childhood home.

Kathleen Flenniken: Thank you so much for having me.

Miller: How far away from where you grew up are we right now?

Flenniken: We are about a 15 minute drive. I lived in the Ranch House District on Cottonwood Avenue. That’s a bit of a walk from here. But it feels very familiar. Actually, I’m very close to Hanford High School, which is not the high school I went to. I went to Richland High School. I was a Bomber.

Miller: I understand that you’ve said that there was a sense of secrecy that came from the site. What was it like to grow up with secrecy permeating the world around you?

Flenniken: Well, we didn’t know any better as very young children. That was the way it was. But I think as I grew older, I started sort of to be charmed by this idea that we were different than other communities, that we had something that other people didn’t have. And there was always this idea in the air that we were a scientific community. And we were called the “Atomic City,” so that set us apart. And very subtly you start to get the sense of “we are an ‘us,’ and the rest of the world is a ‘them.’” This idea that scientists understand what’s going out at what we called “the area.” But other people who might have fears or complaints, they didn’t understand the science. So they weren’t in a position to make comments about it.

Miller: They were alarmists or they were ignorant?

Flenniken: Yeah, exactly. Or they needed to be educated. And I felt that I was in good company. My parents and their friends – they were very ethical people, they were believers in science. So that is a very comforting thing to be around. It was a great place to grow up.

Miller: Could you read us your poem “Bedroom Community.”

Flenniken: Sure. Just to introduce it a little bit, Richland was known as a bedroom community to the Hanford Site. So I heard that many, many times growing up, not necessarily understanding what it meant. It does refer to my friend Carolyn at the end. She was my friend who grew up four houses down the street and whose father eventually died of a radiation illness.

[Reading “Bedroom Community”]

We were all bedded down

in our nightcaps, curtains drawn

as swamp coolers and sprinklers

hissed every brown summer hour, or in winter

sagebrush hardened in the cold. It was still dark

as our fathers rose, dressed, and boarded

blue buses that pulled away, and men

in milk trucks came collecting bottled urine

from our doorsteps. Beyond the shelter belt

of Russian olive trees, cargo trains shuffled past

at 8:00 and 8:00, and the wide

Columbia rolled by, silent with walleye

and steelhead. We pulled up our covers

while our overburdened fathers

dragged home to fix a drink,

and some of them grew sick –

Carolyn, your father’s marrow

testified. Whistles from the train,

the buses came, our fathers left.

Oh, Carolyn – while the rest of us slept.

Miller: That line about trucks coming to collect bottled urine … what were they looking for?

Flenniken: For people who are exposed on a weekly or daily level, they would get their urine checked for radiation on a weekly basis, or even more than that. My dad wasn’t one of those people, but Carolyn’s dad was. You would see those trucks, and they were like milk trucks. So, it was like a reverse milk delivery sort of thing.

Miller: And because you grew up with it, it just seemed like regular life? Of course, there are bottles of pee on some people’s doorsteps?

Flenniken: Well, I had other cities to compare it to. So I did know it was not what everyone did. But it was normal because it was our normal.

Miller: What can you tell us about Carolyn’s father?

Flenniken: He was a laborer and he was a very, very bright guy. He I think only had an eighth grade education, and yet he was, he brought himself up, he was a marine, and he eventually became the president of his labor union. He later worked as a representative of his labor council. He did very well by himself.

But he also raised a family on a relatively small income. And so he would go hunting and fishing to supplement the family table. And sometimes that was also a danger. He was a hard worker, and always looking for extra money. And occasionally he would get asked to go in and do what they called “run in and run out,” where he’d be cleaning some what they called a “crapped up” site.

Miller: Crapped up, meaning, a site that has been contaminated.

Flenniken: Exactly.

Miller: And that was a way to pick up some extra money, take another shift.

Flenniken: Exactly.

Miller: What happened to him, healthwise?

Flenniken: Well, he contracted this very rare blood disease, which I can never remember the name of. But it’s something that they saw in Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, so it’s definitely linked with radiation exposure. And he ended up getting treatment in Seattle at the university hospital where they sort of confirmed that diagnosis. And then when he came back to Richland, when he was seeing the Hanford medical staff, they suggested that maybe he had been exposed to farm chemicals in his youth or something like that. They didn’t really sign on to this diagnosis when he was ill.

Miller: That’s what we call gaslighting now.

Flenniken: Yeah. Yeah.

Miller: By that point, it was very clear to him what had happened to him?

Flenniken: I think so. This is all related through Carolyn, but she did tell me that at one point very close to the end of his life, he said that he “trusted the wrong people.” And that’s very hard for someone who’s devoted his whole life and career to a place, and really believes in that place. He was a true believer. So for him to make that adjustment and to sort of acknowledge that he couldn’t trust what he’d been told, that’s a giant shift.

Miller: I wonder if you could read us another poem that gets to this. It’s called “Deposition.” It’s a devastating poem, and it might need some kind of setup since like many of your poems, it’s based on historical fact.

Flenniken: Right. On February 3, 2000, the Department of Energy headquarters brought someone out to Richland to have a kind of open house or a deposition, where people who had been made ill by their work at Hanford were invited to come speak in a public forum about their illnesses. And I can’t overstate how difficult that would have been for people, for their entire lives and careers holding that in. I think, as a sense of their loyalty, they would not talk about their illnesses. It was a taboo to talk about your illnesses.

So on that evening, there was something like 600 people there who were there to talk and to listen and to share. I wasn’t there. My friend Carolyn was there. Carolyn spoke about her dad and a lot of other people spoke too. So this poem is sort of about me not being there, but thinking what it was like.

[Reading “Deposition”]

I wasn’t there. I’d packed my car with houseplants years ago, confident my rawhide neighbors would change

their campers’ oil, mow and edge their lawns like always, street after street of Hanford workers

who’d moved 30 years ago from West Virginia or Pennsylvania or Tennessee

for a job – no saying what it was – for a pre-fab landscaped with white rocks, for their kids

grown up like me, for their wives, hair freshly done, comparing prices at Safeway. You know one

you know them all, I said at 25 and moved away, brushed off the dust and breathed in the liberal city.

So I wasn’t there when one by one they rose, walked stiffly up the aisle in the Federal Building auditorium.

And yet I see them clearly, the same bastards who grinned when schoolgirls strolled by, who flirted

with John Birch, and hunted pheasant, and owned their stools at the cinderblock taverns downtown.

Whose sons and daughters would appear at school sometimes with bruises on their arms.

Carolyn was there to testify and even she can’t explain how anybody there met anybody else’s eyes.

It must have choked their throats like rotting meat, admitting to cancers

and hothouse-flower blood diseases, each a different suffering. How did they stand on stage and say

what nobody could say aloud? And the ones who came but couldn’t speak. It’s killing to think of even now.

Every one of them ashamed for falling ill the way the anti-nuke fanatics said we would,

who never knew crap about anything, who’ve never understood us and never will.

Miller: There are such complicated emotions embedded there. Anger, still, at some of these men for what they made you or your classmates endure, and also such tenderness towards them for what they endured.

There’s also a switch in pronouns. It starts “I wasn’t there,” and it’s about “I” and “them.” And at the end, it’s these people who’ve never understood “us.” You put yourself back there. Where do you put yourself now?

Flenniken: Well, it’s really interesting. I am still an “us.” It may not sound like that, but I am. And especially when I feel like there’s some onslaught of critical … a kind of blanket idea that people here are evil or they’re doing something terrible, that really brings in my old loyalties. And I feel like I have to defend this place. It is my hometown and these are my people. And so I feel at heart that I will always be part of the “us.”

Miller: You didn’t write your book about Hanford until a few decades after your parents died, as I understand it. Did you need that time to pass before you felt comfortable telling these stories?

Flenniken: I did. And I think partly I needed that time to even let myself start to investigate these stories. It’s very hard to understand what happened here to our community, or with our community. I don’t want to make it sound like we were done to, because in many ways we did it to ourselves.

Miller: That’s an important point that I think I have to be here to understand. That the managers of the Department of Energy, the contractors, it’s not like they were in Seattle or Spokane. They were right here. Everybody was together. This is your collective community, right?

Flenniken: That’s exactly right. And in fact, in my reading, when I was writing these poems, I found directives from the Atomic Energy Commission Commission saying “You don’t have to be so secret. It’s better for the science for you to be talking about some of the problems that you’re having so that we can bring in new fresh ideas.” But it was the people here who chose to keep things secret. That’s something I don’t quite understand. It might be linked back to the war and kind of just continuing on with that idea. But it just perpetrated and was everywhere in the air through my entire growing up, and through, I think basically the entire history of the production at the site.

Miller: I wonder if you could read us another poem. It’s called “Whole-Body Counter, Marcus Whitman Elementary.” What was a whole-body counter? And when would you encounter it?

Flenniken: So this is a shared memory that I have with the children of Richland that are my age. We all remember going into the whole-body counter, which we didn’t really understand what it was at the time. I actually found a quote from Health Physics magazine dated November 1965 talking about this mobile whole-body counter. And it described its “versatile capabilities for measuring internally deposited gamma ray emitting radionuclides in human beings.”

Miller: Mobile, meaning like a bookmobile, like a little mini bus would come to the parking lot?

Flenniken: Yes, exactly. It was like a semi-truck. And in the back there was this whole-body counter. It was like going into a little tiny office in the back of a truck that had this machine where you would lie down and then you’d go through the machine.

Miller: Like an MRI.

Flenniken: Yes, I think like that.

Miller: And you were five or six years old?

Flenniken: Yes, I was in kindergarten. I was five years old. We were all lined up to go in and we all did it. And the strange thing isn’t just that we went through this machine, but we never heard another word about it. To this day, I have no idea what they did with the data that they collected.

Miller: It reminds me yesterday we heard that from a farmer in Eltopia just across the river, who said that regularly his tomatoes and pumpkins and the other things he grows, they get tested, he never hears back. Which for him was good news. Although one does wonder if you would have heard bad news.

Flenniken: Right. And I don’t even have any idea if it was individualized. They were just collecting groups of data for all I know, just to kind of get an overview of what was going on.

Anyway, it is a very strong memory of childhood which I finally wrote down.

Miller: Let’s hear it.

Flenniken: [Reading “Whole-Body Counter, Marcus Whitman Elementary”]

We were warned to shut our eyes.

Everyone was school-age now, our

kindergarten teacher reminded us,

old enough to follow directions

and do a little for our country.

My turn came and the scientists

strapped me in and a steady voice

prompted The counter won’t hurt,

Lie perfectly still, and mostly I did

and imagined what children

pretend America is, parks

bordered by feathery evergreens,

lawns so green and lush

they soothe the eyes and pupils

open like love –

a whole country of lawns

like that. Just once I peeked

and the machine had taken me in

like a spaceship and I moved

slow as the sun through the chamber’s

smooth steel sky.

I shut my eyes again, pledged

to be still; so proud to be

a girl America could count on.

Miller: That’s such a powerful last line, twinning the dosages and patriotism, being someone America can count on. What did it mean to you to be a good American?

Flenniken: Oh, it meant holding on to secrets, even though I didn’t know what the secrets were. But that sense of being vigilant, and knowing that we were doing something. It wasn’t for me an active role, because I was just a kid growing up. But it went beyond … you know, raising the flag on Fourth of July. There was something larger. It was like we’re doing something important for the country. And I didn’t know what that was, but I knew that I was part of it in some way. And that felt patriotic.

Miller: The phrase you said before is that your friend’s father, he had told Carolyn, your friend, that he had put his trust in the wrong people. In a sense, what we’re talking about here is betrayal, on a grand scale. I’m wondering how living through all of this and having a different understanding of it as the decades have gone on, how it’s affected the way you think about people in authority, notions of progress, of science, of our country?

Flenniken: Well, I think that patriotism is a word I’ve struggled with on and off. And that will be an ongoing thing. I love my country. I feel it’s complicated. And that the main issue for me around this whole story is the idea of secrecy. That secrecy is an enemy of democracy. And that’s kind of where I landed. I had a number of people come to me and say, “oh, you must be so angry” as I was writing these poems, “your poems must be so angry.” And I tried writing angry poems when I was told I should be angry. In a kind of simplistic way I thought, “Oh, that’s right. I should be angry. I’ve been betrayed.”

And then eventually I worked through that and realized what I really felt was a kind of grief and that the betrayal was really … I had been part of the betrayal too. I feel like we had betrayed ourselves in many respects. And so I feel like it’s less a story about America and more a story about the human condition in general. That there really are no good and bad guys. But we do these things to ourselves. I guess that was the big takeaway for me that I’m still working on.

Miller: Kathleen Flenniken, thank you so much for coming down from Seattle just to be on the show in person. I really appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Flenniken: Thank you. I’ve loved it.

Miller: Kathleen Flenniken is an author who grew up in Richland, a former state poet laureate for Washington. One of her books, a book that’s full of poems about Richland and Hanford is called “Plume.”

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