After detox and affirmations in Tacoma I accepted a new tennis teaching job at a Richland athletic club in the high eastern desert.
I lived between the Hanford Nuclear Reservation leaking toxic waste and a military high-grade uranium destruction site.
Sweet earth. Delicious water.
Glowing in the dark improved my writing visibility at night.
Clean and sober I wrote a small children’s book about trust and love.
Two Hearts On A Grand Precious Adventure has The Prince of Yogurt and the Princess of Chocolate on a quest for the beginning of the ocean. I self published it as an e-book.
I turned my attention to big work. I sifted through worn travel journals, old letters, faded yellow evidence papers, typed manuscripts, stories, fragments, poems, and photographs gathered from wandering Earth.
For two years I wove threads into a non-linear draft of epic adventures entitled A Century is Nothing.
I murdered my darlings and rearranged sentences in the farrago. They were stories about people telling stories about people in stories experiencing courage, transformation and impermanence.
I researched markets. I mailed out the synopsis with query letters. Fifty rejection letters from literary agents sang a refrain. “Sorry, doesn’t meet current mainstream needs. Too edgy. Needs more heavy, deep, real, personal Vietnam insight and growth. Fewer characters. Bottom line: I can’t make my 15% selling this.” Wallpaper. So it goes.
*
One morning I went to the Richland P.O. for stamps.
Taken from the Hubble Space Telescope they were named Eagle Nebula, Ring Nebula, Lagoon Nebula and Galaxy NGC 1316.
I enjoyed a stimulating discourse with a young unarmed postal woman about the amazing galaxies and how incredible it was to contemplate them living five miles away from fifty-five million gallons of buried radioactive waste left over from W.W. II seeping 130 feet down toward water tables along the Columbia River.
“Fascinating,” she said.
Editing material for my book I read a faded yellow page marked Top Secret Evidence.
“It’s called Technetium, TC-99m,” said an Indian scientist on a shuttle between reactors. “This is the new death and we know it’s there and there is nothing we can do to prevent it spreading.”
The waste approached 250 feet as corporations vying for energy contracts with D.O.E. discussed containment options and emergency evacuation procedures.
Scientists read Robert’s Rules Of Order inside the organized chaos of their well order communities. Hanford scientists, wives and children suffering terminal thyroid disease ate roots and plants sprinkled with entropy.
As the postal worker and I talked, a frantic mother yelled at her daughter, “DON’T touch the stamps!” because at her precocious age, curiosity about the expanding universe developed her active imagination.
Holding a Nebula space dust galaxy in my hand I told the postal woman how we are a third the life of a 13.7 billion year-old universe. She handed me change and said, “That’s interesting. I never looked at the stamps before.”
“What happens next?” said Plot.
ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir
Ethnology Museum, Hanoi
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