We left Seattle as the late summer sun was setting: a car filled with three women and our stuff, heading east into the darkening Cascades. Trading off driving, eating, gossiping, rehearsing the upcoming events, the drive to Richland went quickly. The moon rose, turning the Columbia River into a bright sash across a dull landscape. It must have been having an effect on the local police that night, as they stopped us twice before we arrived at the agreed-upon meeting spot.
The first stop was for a taillight malfunction. The second was to let us know our car was over-packed, limiting our visibility, especially that one sign “NO MORE NUKES,” that we'd positioned so that it was readable through the back window. We congratulated ourselves on making them nervous, figuring they were expecting an influx of troublesome activists for the upcoming weekend of demonstrations at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The next day was the 41st anniversary of the dropping of the “Fat Man” nuclear weapon on Nagasaki, Japan. The plutonium that gave the bomb its killing power had been produced here. By the time everyone arrived at the sprawling ranch house on the edge of town, there were five women and five men willing to go over the fence, and more than a dozen who would work support.
We talked late into the night, reviewing non-violent tactics and principles of passive resistance; reassuring ourselves about rattlesnakes, scorpions, barbed wire, land mines, spooked armed guards, and ground contamination. Even the officials at Hanford didn't know where all of their toxic wastes had been buried over the years and recently, unmarked dump-sites had been found leaking into the ground water. I remember a troubled hour or two on a mattress in a child's room before whispers pulled us together in the driveway. We divided up by gender into the two cars that would drop us at the spots we'd marked on our maps.
It was 3 a.m. on August 9, when we stepped out of the idling cars and ran to the fences, lifting wires to help each other through. We turned and watched the cars drive off down the road where they would drop the men. Sleep-deprived and intoxicated by the warm desert night air we walked slowly, whispering jokes, reassurances, prayers and songs
The big moon was high, but what I remember mostly of that night was how dark it was. I remember using my skin more than my eyes to guide me and my friends across the uncertain landscape. I was a small animal, not thinking about where I was or what I was doing. Acutely aware of the smells, the sounds of the four other women, breathing, whispering, giggling, I was brave and whole. We 'd talked for weeks about what we were doing there, why, what it meant to us: raising awareness about the danger of keeping Hanford in operation, remembering Nagasaki, reminding ourselves that the land, though saturated with radioactive waste, was like us. We talked a lot those days about how poisoned we ourselves felt, twisted and contorted by social pressures, fucked up by our families, confounded by the lies we'd been told about the history of our nation. But that night, the poisoned, imprisoned, toxic land, was, like us, whole, impossible to defile.
For me, up until that night, it had been a year of finding footing on new ground. It was the year I came out to my mother, the year I refused to let my father bully me any more, the year I resisted everything that felt false: fashion, sexual mores, police, authority, social expectations. It was the year I was locked up, knocked down, choked by police, threatened by soldiers, confronted by machine guns for sitting in the middle of a road, singing. And that night, for the first time, I felt innocent. Out in the desert, in the middle of the night, I felt the world changing all on its own, without my slogans, without my signs, without my resistance.
