TOXIC CHILDHOODS

That is my Dad and brother standing in front of the powerlines that were sprayed with Agent Orange

I recently made a comment about growing up in Oregon where they were used Agent Orange. Never mind the mercury…kerosene…loved the smell of gas and oil…cleaning supplies, I worked in visual for many years…very toxic job…and with painting….a whole different toxic scene hard to imagine that beautiful blue is soooo toxic.

I decided to look up Agent Orange Oregon YOUTUBE and behold here is a video of 25,000 55 gallon barrel drums that were stored at Alkali Lake and are being punctured by a bulldozer!!! Not where I grew up but close to some relatives…

Amazed I am still alive!! Ordinary Sparrow sent me this poem
(Lizzy this is a poem by Dr. E. that came to mind when you made the comments about the spraying and environmental toxins. . . )

WE ARE THE ATOMIC CHILDREN AND WE ARE STILL DANCING
It began before we went to school…
we asked for live ponies, but
received inflatable whales made
of polypropylene instead.
But it was okay.
We waited and waited for April
so we could dance
can-can tournaments in the rain.
We wore eerie iridescent swim suits
glowing like uranium. Our swimsuits
were always too big and showed
everything,
or they were always too small and showed
everything. But it was okay. We were happy
drowned bird-girls with balding feathers.
We played with all those bright colored toys,
So cheap in price, so rich in lead, those
lead toy soldiers marched all over our
bed clothes and we slept on the sheeted
and pillowed battle field, night after night.
And our mothers were so beautiful…
and the tobacco people ran ads
showing happy pregnant women smoking
and saying this was very good,
and fathers brought love cartons of the stuff
as special treats so mother-with-child
would never run out of her ciggies.
In October we hid under leaves and stalks
just beginning to rot,
and shushed each other there.
The silence made the wrinkles
on our feet itch. The wet of the leaves
washed the hyaline insect spray
right into our skin.

It was such a time of dancing.
We danced our feet on x-ray machines
in shoe shops. What sport
to see our own growing bones
in those shadowy boxes.
Hours we spent x-raying our feet for fun.

In January, in snow forts,
our forefingers held endless ammunition.
The winter wheat had power
to heal any wound it was laid upon.
We ate the snow that fell from the sky
seeded and seeded with field chemicals.
Our dear mothers made snow cones
for us with red dye food coloring,
and the youngest Hérnandez girl
fell through the pond, and was no more.
It began to be not alright.

After five years in school we saw, too late,
the road before us.
Our hearts demanded all
our attention. We built into the mountain,
we dug grieving caves.
We were in the cemeteries more often
than in the wedding halls.
The cells of the stomach turned
against the grandfather. The cells
of the breasts made wildfire
in the three aunts; the jitters
came to uncle and two farmers to the west,
falling down came to the farmer to the east,
a child not formed came to the cousin,
the loss of breath visited the dairy man,
and there were many mysterious
deaths of infants.

We set up camp, but never slept.
The animals began
to speak in foreign tongues.
We were still children. We hid
under our desks to practice for the bomb.

We were pulled on snow sleds behind
our beloved fathers’ big slope-backed cars
with lead spewing into our faces
from the mufflers’ smoke.

We walked in the beautiful sunset haze
left by the orchard crop duster
canvas and leg-bone aeroplanes, and yet…
We still came out children, just children.
As our breasts came on,
No one offered happy red umbrellas against
an invisible strontium rain, and we drank
the white milk without knowing, anyway.
We continued
to wash floors and doors with acetane,
washed our nails with acetone,
packed aniline dyes
onto our freshly washed scalps,
and drew coal tar onto our lips
Like good women everywhere, we daily
washed the house and all the things in it,
and outside it as well, as carefully as though
these boards and tiles were our own bodies.
We put our young hands into jars holding
gudge and junk, held our heads
into buckets and jars
filled with the sacred fumes of cleanliness;
ammonia, lye, butane, bleach, formaldehyde.
We visited doctors and hospitals
hoping to hear the news. But so far,
there were only bodies, no causes…
except for these:
They said we lived wrong at home…
That we were ignorant…
That we were sick because we did
not exercise enough, the farmers, factory
workers, dock workers, men and women
who had no cars, those who worked
from dawn to midnight, lifting, hefting,
hauling everything hot and smoking,
or else putrid or frozen in dry ice.
And in the creek, the animals
grew bulbous eyes,
their skin cracked off, and over they died.
The oil tankers broke up in the Great
Lakes, and yet we frolicked in the waves,
but never came out clean as before.
Instead, we rose up oil stained
by the floating gibbets and globs of oil
on waves, and those sunk into the sand.
Our mothers scrubbed our bodies bright red,
using turpentine to remove the black tar.
Summer after summer we returned.
The black tar always waiting for us…
And the turpentine.
After a time, our wild gypsy-hair
was too often covered
with our white mantillas
for the black Requiem Mass.
And, it became worse
as we got more years.
But even today,
with all our hurts and haltings,
April is still divine,
And there is still a museum
in the unconscious where
September still carries the cargo
of a decent childhood.
No greedy bureaucrat nor lying politician
has found the tree
we once buried treasure under.
It is still there… still mine, still yours.
Though the atomic age was mighty
and 100 wealthy men
had poisoned all the water
and fish grew all crooked
and too often the human babies
beginning fine and by their eighteenth month
could no longer speak nor relate to other humans…
sometimes still, the trees come
to the gate in the garden
and ask can they come in and
rest with us for the night.
Reason enough for some wild dancing.
For the unknowing, and for those who knew,
the destruction we were fed and immersed in,
did not bring us down…
And even the atomic wind unleashed
Across the western states,
blowing its poison all across the entire nation,
did not blow us away.
For reasons we cannot fathom,
many of us are still here,
living in the glowing cell of the life force
that ever remains inside us.
No atomic wind can pervert or change
this meaning that is ours.
No commission or omission can destroy
what we are making
Though they have brought wild cells,
we are the wild gods,
and we are dancing, dancing…
dancing the dance of the purest cell,
and glowing– not from radiation–
but from divinity,
the divinity set into us,
the divinity that has ever been ours,
that ever presses us to live,
to live more, and then more…
no matter whatever else.
_________
CODA
The collage above, is one of mine in a series of 118 collages of La Señora… for protection of humankind from the harmful matters that surround us. There are 118 collages in the series because that is the number of elements in the Table of Elements. This collage is called Our Lady of The Atom, and her nimbus is an actual representation of the electron shell structure of the lead atom…
Our bodies need certain metals, traces of copper, and zinc and certainly iron in order to keep the heart, muscles, blood and circulatory system strong and to renew cells well. But lead is like kryptonite to our bodies, and when exposed to lead (those of us from rural areas handled lead shot for hunting, lead sinkers for fishing and any number of toys made of lead as well as lead batteries et al,) it travels through our skin, through our breath into our lungs and causes a terrible ruin to the fragile balances of the neural and other developing structures of the body…
especially in children, but in adults also once their bodies begin to slow in the cellular regeneration process. The ill effects of lead on the brain are devastating… and are equal to severe stroke in many cases, with loss of language, loss of brain power, loss of reason, and loss of bodily functions.
Our Lady, in apocrophal stories, is said to have been able to withstand any toxin, including rattlesnake’s bite and scorpion’s sting, for such was her Xtreme strength for life and her purity. She was said to be able to withstand poisons and even ‘wear’ them, so we can see them better and remember that though great magnitude can carry such, we cannot ingest these and thrive, perhaps not even the angels can.
All the more reason, we, the unknowing, despite our ticks and travails, our challenges of health and our losses, are quite so the walking miracles… still present on earth, still here. Still, in some way, even at rest, dancing.
Poem, We are the Atomic Children and We are Still Dancing, and collage, Our Lady of the Atom, both from the manuscript La Pasionaria, ©1975, 2009, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, All Rights Reserved. Licensed here to The Moderate Voice only. Permissions: projectscreener@aol.com

December 7, 2009 | Categories: activism, Oregon | Tags: Agent Orange, Alkali Lake, Dioxin, Dr. E, Indian Reservation, NATURE, Oregon, poetry, toxins | Leave A Comment »