Daughter of Uranium

by Dayla Hepting

I am the atomic baby. I was born in 1942. I would never know the life of those who came before me because the bomb was a line — once crossed you do not go back, back to a time without the bomb. I cut my teeth on yellow cake. Shortly after I was born, Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He wanted to know (I suppose) what it felt like to kill hundreds of thousands of people simply by giving a command. The command was that the Enola Gay drop a single bomb into these cities, not military installations, but cities populated by people like us who just wanted to live their lives as best they could. They didn't want trouble. Oh I am sure they bad rapped the Americans right and left. But it was just talk. They wanted to go to work, get a paycheck and go out and shop until they got broke again, then go back and do it over. Work your ass off and wait for payday, just like you and me. Instead they got fried.

I knew nothing about the atomic bomb until I was twelve years old. My dad was driving truck and he chanced to get a haul to Moab, Utah, the Uranium Capitol of the World, or so it said on a sign above the highway just after you crossed the Colorado River and headed into town. He met up with a guy named Charley Steen in a bar.

Charley happened to be the guy who started the uranium boom. He was a geologist, graduate of the Texas School of Mines. Before Charley, the search for uranium was already on, but they used Geiger counters and found only small shallow surface veins. Steen had another idea. He thought the really good stuff was down deep where a Geiger counter couldn't pick it up. So he looked for rock formations that would fit the formation of uranium, then he drilled deep down before he used his Geiger counter.

Most of the guys in the Silver Dollar had a good laugh at this "educated idiot" starving his wife and kids and looking for uranium by rock formation. Besides, he looked a lot like a Mexican to them no matter what his name was.

But Charley hit it big time. He had thrown his core samples into his jeep after a long day drilling in hell and went back to Thompson (now called Thompson Springs) where his wife and kids lived in a tiny trailer. He stopped to gas up at the Conoco (the only station in town) and a guy says to him, "Hey did you strike it rich today, Charley?"

He said, "I don't know. Let's put a Geiger counter on it." So he was joking. He expected nothing. That needle went off the scale. He found it. He was an instant millionaire. He was a millionaire the moment he put that Geiger counter on that core sample. It just took a few months before his life was forever changed.

For the better? I can't say. I think Charley Steen was a searcher. I don't think he was happy as a rich man. He went bankrupt many times over. But that is another story.

That mine he named "Mi Vida" (My Life, in English). Uranium was better than gold. The Atomic Energy Commission was desperate to find large quantities of this stuff. If the a-bomb could kill hundreds of thousands of people, it was the ticket. No more American casualties, no more shipping grunts home in pine boxes. We could rule the world without ever risking the life of one soldier. Now that Truman had shown the world our ultimate power there was no going back. The only problem was they needed one little thing they didn't have, that was high-grade yellow cake uranium. So Charley Steen out there in the desert all alone drilling obsessively used his brain instead of his brawn and that skinny little half-Mexican made their dreams come true. He hit a big fucking vein deep down just like he knew he would. And he changed so many lives when he did that. In truth he changed the future of the USA. We are the super power of super powers and that is because Charley Steen found enough uranium to make a million Atomic bombs. We don't even mine it anymore. It has no value. Can't sell it. Why? Because Charley Steen gave us enough to last a thousand years. Nuclear Power plants? That didn't work out real well. They are just a-bombs waiting to go off and everybody knows it. I don't blame Charley for killing my Dad and so many other good men. I blame the corporations that moved in later. I knew the man. He gave us the house he moved out of after he got rich. He loved my dad. His life turned out no better than the rest of us. Now he is in a nursing home with Alzheimer's and his children are fighting over his money. But that is another story.

They all knew that we are a rogue nation. We dropped the bomb on Japan knowing that we were killing civilians. We now have so many bombs that the old ones must be detonated underground in Nevada to get rid of them. They are still doing that today. Those explosions have to be vented. They learned to wait until the winds were going east towards Utah because there was "no one" there. So goes the thinking of the Atomic Era. Better to sacrifice the lives of 23,000 people than the millions who lived in Los Angeles. This still goes on today. But in the 50s the bombs were actually tested above ground. On days when the wind blew towards the East.

In the town of St. George sheep suddenly lost all their wool and died in agony. The Utah ranchers thought it was caused by the great clouds from the bomb rushing past. They submitted claims to the AEC asking for reimbursement after a local veterinarian (brave man that he was) told them the sheep had textbook symptoms of radiation poisoning. The AEC held a kangaroo court in St. George and the final decision was that the sheep died from neglect and starvation.

Leukemia became epidemic. Breast-fed babies died like flies. Mothers developed thyroid tumors. Finally the Mormon Church was kicked into action. They commissioned scientists to analyze possible sources. They found that the local milk delivered to homes in St. George contained lethal doses of plutonium and other radioactive materials. The Mormon Church saved many lives when they did that independent study, so don't be so hard on them.

In Moab we knew nothing of these lawsuits and countersuits. We knew only that you could get a hundred dollars a day working in a mine. That was a lot of money in those days. Men hired on. They could never get enough men. Always had a slot for another man. Because men died, men were maimed. Everybody was in a hurry. Supports were spaced too far apart, half a mile down in solid rock. You need to be careful where you place your supports. Cables on the bucket were frayed. No time to stop the bucket and replace the cables. It was all about opening that mine and getting that ore out.

Bonuses were paid by the foot. Every foot beyond what was set for the week was bonus. Miners worked double shifts to get bonus. The train had no brakes. No time to stop the train and fix the brakes. You had to get that rock out. Two miners were crushed in the face because the train could not stop. One man had his legs crushed when it missed a turn and smashed him against the wall. The mine had an ambulance but one miner bled to death because the ambulance was out of gas.

We were used to the ambulance going by day after day. Just wondering who it was this time who ran out of luck. We had the bar just ten miles from the mine so we knew all of them. These men had no wives to go home to after work. They came to the bar. Their wives lived in Nevada or Colorado — if they still had one. These are tramp miners. They move from job to job. Wherever the money is, that is where you find them. They know what all the mines are paying because they hear it in the bars. They send their money home for the wife and kids after they pay the bar bill. They are not fools. They are just plying the edge. Only thing with hard rock uranium is there is a factor they can't see. That is radiation. But in those days radiation was something real hard to imagine. We had methane gas. Everybody understood that.

There were no canaries in the mine anymore, but there were sensors. Of course sensors don't help you much when you hit a pocket of methane while you are smoking a Lucky Strike. So men got blown up in the face. But men who work in the face get paid more money and if you are that stupid most likely you deserve to be blown up. That's the way men saw it.

One time a tramp from the Tennessee coalmines told me he was glad a Moab kid got blown up. "Why?," I said. "Why?" He said because he was a danger to the other miners who knew better than to smoke underground. I had to admit he was right. Miners chew if they are smart. If a miner isn't smart he doesn't live too long. All the old time miners I knew were smart — damn smart. The bosses didn't fool them. They knew the mine was not safe. They knew it wasn't safe because the company didn't care about them. They were replaceable. That yellow cake was all that mattered.

They hoped to play the edge and win. None of them did. Why? Because Uranium is different from all the other ore they ever went after. Uranium kills people. Especially high-grade ore. And that is exactly what we had. It was black when it came out of the rock. It was the highest-grade uranium ever produced in the United States. The very best — from the Colorado Plateau.

From right there in tiny Moab we produced the finest material ever made to destroy our enemies. But no more bombs were dropped after Japan and most likely no more bombs will ever be dropped again.

But all these miners died. Like clockwork. It takes 20 years for uranium to kill you. Uranium is not like the end product, which will kill you in a few days or weeks. Uranium is still the earth. But if you live in it 10 to 16 hours a day it will kill you nonetheless. Even if you used a breather, which none of them did, you would still die. The radioactive dust was on their skin, in their lungs. It was everywhere.

Once my dad put a Geiger counter to our couch and it went off the scale. He said, "I don't need to walk around the desert all day. I can just stake a claim on the couch!" That is how radioactive our house was. He wasn't even a miner. He was a truck driver. But he helped load the ore. So he died with them. Twenty years later he developed bone cancer, which was most likely caused by radiation. He never lived to see his grand kids born. They all died 20 years later. They were such beautiful men. Good looking. Thin. Good pool players. Always ready to stand the bar for drinks. They had so many stories. I could write a book about the stories I heard when I was bartending.

They are all ghosts now.

Moab is a boomtown again, but this time it is all about entertainment. Like Carmel. Moab is all about mountain biking, river rafting on the Colorado, cliff climbers, and sightseers gawking at Arches or Dead Horse Point. It is about Cappuccino in the morning and Alice Waters in the evening.

But I still see the old Moab. Anybody who has ever loved Moab knows it is a no-win situation. It is so beautiful you can not help yourself from wanting it. Yet there is an evil there under the rock. Don't dig in the rock. Whatever you take from this place has a price. That price will be more than you wanted to pay. Just go there and be there and leave the desert alone. The desert has a will of it's own. You can't steal anything here. You have no right to it.