Category: Writing

Geographic memory

· Leave a comment ·

I’m in Redding, California now visiting my wife Beth’s parents, who moved here earlier this year. It’s an odd feeling, coming back decades later and still having geographic memory about where things are.

Dad pointed me to his old house on Victor Ave, which is still a dentist’s office today (Grandpa & Grandma sold it to a dentist back in the 70s). I stood in the parking lot on Sunday morning as he pointed out the bedroom he shared with his older brother, where he stuffed towels under the door so he could read late into the night.

Cow Creek BridgeWith a little help from my mom (“Head east on 44 and turn left…”) and the Internet (pictures…from space!), I managed to find the old ranch in Millville, east of Palo Cedro. I recognized it right away from the white fence behind the house.

What’s even odder, I realized on the drive back into town, is that Grandpa & Grandma moved from Millville into Palo Cedro by the time we visited in 1984, so my very clear memory of where the ranch was and what it looked like dates all the way back to 1979.

Beth took a picture of me next to Cow Creek, where Grandpa pulled me out of the water after I’d stepped off the shallow shoal into the deceptively deep (for a five-year-old) main channel. I wrote a poem about that a few years ago, and I now have a few more details to add from the unchanged scene I saw today, 30 years later.

I called my brother Nathan from the shopping complex where Grandpa & Grandma B got their groceries, which still has an odd windmill structure I described to Beth even before we saw it come up next to the highway. It’s a Verizon store now.

We went up to the dam at Whiskeytown this afternoon (we did Shasta Dam yesterday), and stopped for a few minutes among the ruins of Shasta — exactly as I remember them, despite several recent fires that swept through the area.

Wall

Ultimately, the only place I’ve been unable to find here in Redding is that little Mexican restaurant Grandpa used to take us to, La Casita, I think. The only La Casita in the area is way out in Weaverville, 40 miles east. Redding has changed a lot in the last twenty to thirty years, but nearly all the places I remember — and even some new ones, like my father’s childhood home — remain essentially unchanged.

Bodies of Water & Things I Learned on St. Margaret’s Bay

· Leave a comment ·

Posting your poems on your own website can block them from being published in literary journals, because the journals consider doing so “first serial publication.” Now that two of my poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, I thought I’d go ahead and post them on a new Poems page.

I’ll update the Poems page as other pieces are published.

Stuck in a Hanford reactor building elevator

· 3 Comments ·

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.