Category: Memoir

Naps

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I didn’t take naps. I don’t think I’d ever taken naps.

Father had church business with church elders next door, and he left me to play with the kindergarteners. At first, they stared at me, even though I wore the same clothes they all wore — blue shorts, white shirt, and round red hat.

Sapporo, 1978

The oldest boy called me a gaijin and then laughed.

“I was born in Tokyo,” I corrected him, “I’m a Child of Edo, you Son of the Soil.” Some of the girls laughed.

I played on the swing. The toes of all the other children had scooped the dry sand from under the seats, leaving furrows beneath my feet. At the top of each arc, I could see our blue Subaru over the concrete wall, parked in the church driveway. I played hopscotch with the girls who were nice earlier. I let them win.

A bell rang and we all went inside to sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” When we sang “The Elephant Song,” I waved my arm from my face just like everyone else. The others were learning to count, but I already knew all ten of them so I was bored.

A lady in glasses and a green dress brought rice balls wrapped in seaweed and we each took one. I loved the saltiness of the black seaweed and the tang of the pickled plum in the center of the rice. The taste reminded me of staying over at Aunt Kiwako’s.

The teacher and the lady in green took mats from a closet and laid them on the floor. The others lay down quietly, some on their sides, some on their backs, some on their stomachs with an arm cradling their face. I told them I didn’t take naps but they didn’t care. They told me to lie down quietly and close my eyes.

I watched the red and green swirls behind my eyelids. I practiced counting to ten. I thought about the day before, when mother and I went to the park to meet father after work. I jumped over ditches and didn’t fall in. My favorite slide snaked down the hill, and I raced mother, me sliding in my corduroys, she running in her plaid skirt. I always won. Father came swinging his black briefcase.

When I woke up, we were on the highway home. I opened my eyes and pretended I hadn’t been sleeping. Some old ladies were planting shoots of rice in a field that we passed. They were probably singing.

Father said, “Did you sleep well? You must have had a lot of fun with all your new friends.”

“I wasn’t sleeping,” I said. “I don’t take naps. And they weren’t my friends.”

Rain began to streak the windows. Father flicked a knob and the windshield wipers started playing sumo. The one on the left always won. I turned to watch the power lines dip down, and then up, and then down again.

Stuck in a Hanford reactor building elevator

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Nuclear physics fascinates me. The creative potential of nuclear power intrigues me. The destructive potential of nuclear weapons repulses me.

French Licorne thermonuclear test, 1970

Photo from Pierre J‘s collection of French nuclear test photos taken in 1970

Back in the mid-90s, I toured the Hanford Site in eastern Washington State with a small college class. (In the contemporary national security climate, I’m surprised to learn that tours of the Hanford Site are still available from the Department of Energy.) Eight or nine of us piled into a van and drove around the site unrestricted, stopping a few hundred yards from the plutonium production reactors that the Manhattan Project used to create the core of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. The reactors themselves (in the photo below) had long since been retired and their cores “entombed.”

Hanford Site in 1960

Photo of Hanford Site taken in 1960

Our professor drove us past the trenches in which sections of nuclear submarines were stored, awaiting disposal of their reactors. We stopped again in the abandoned town of Hanford, where the only structure left standing was the high school.

Hanford High School

Finally, we arrived at the commercial power generation plant, Washington Nuclear Power Unit Number 2, where we were met by a PR man from the Department of Energy. He guided us through security checks and into the reactor building, where we were issued little badges to wear that measured our radiation exposure.

Eight stories up in an elevator, we emerged into a room overlooking the pool, control rods hanging over the water and the reactor itself immersed below.

We didn’t spend much time chatting or asking questions. We quickly turned around and stepped back into the elevator. Halfway down, the elevator stopped with a jerk.

For 20 minutes, we laughed at each other’s increasingly outlandish hypotheses about an impending catastrophe, as the PR man grew increasingly drenched in sweat. The elevator finally jolted back to life and we descended to the clinically white lobby, handed in our dosimeters, and headed back out into that unique light that seems to hang over Eastern Washington in the fall.

More than a decade later, I would write a poem that incorporated the entombed reactors, the abandoned town, and the submarines. The DOE PR man and his flop sweat didn’t make the cut.

UPDATE: Read “Cathedrals” here on Andrew-Becraft.com.