Raised on a small family farm in the fertile Palouse country of eastern Washington as the great-granddaughter of pioneer homesteaders, Teri Hein grew up in the ideal America -- a Norman Rockwell type tableau of friendly neighbors and kids on horseback and potluck church dinners.
This was an important part of the America that the World War II generation fought so hard to defend and, ironically, through the production of plutonium at the Hanford Atomic Plant just 100 miles to the southwest, helped to destroy.
In a bittersweet memoir, Atomic Farmgirl, Hein writes about her bucolic childhood and the bonds her people forged with the beautiful landscape that nourished them... while also detailing the slow dying of family members, neighbors and friends from rare and incurable diseases like lupus, leukemia and multiple sclerosis.
Within a square mile of the Hein farm lived just ten families. Of those ten families, seven have suffered a least one -- and in some families several -- cases of cancer in the past 30 years.
"It's not that we're certain our neighbors are dead because of Hanford," Hein writes. "Maybe it's DDT or bad genes or just plain bad luck. But maybe our little neighborhood is what the Hanford investigators call a 'hot spot,' a place that by virtue of such factors as wind patterns, precipitation on key days, existence of hills and mountains, or simply being the location where the winds died out, subjected us to unusually high doses of radiation."
Hein tries to connect the radioactive fallout from Hanford with the hanging of a Yakama tribal chief, Qualchan, that occurred on the land where her grandfather homesteaded decades later. She tries to equate the conquest of the area's Native American tribes by the U.S. cavalry with the Cold War plutonium production at Hanford.
"Who would have thought that Qualchan's death, my father's bleeding brain 160 years later, and all the other horrible events that happened in our neighborhood could have anything in common? But they do -- at least I think they do, as do most of our neighbors."
Atomic Farmgirl fails to demonstrate this connection, or at least explain it very clearly. The Cold War and the Indian Wars were fought for different reasons in far different ways. Both involved the U.S. military and both produced casualties, intentional and accidental, but Chief Qualchan was fighting invaders who cleared the way for the settlers whose descendants were Hein's family and their neighbors. And the "invasion" from Hanford was largely the result of imprudence and indifference.
The connection that Hein does convey well is the marriage of people to the land, how they shaped and supported each other, and what a blessed union it was during the years of her childhood. She tells of spring planting and harvests, of parades and ponies, of chicken coops and Christmas plays, and how it felt to be part of the Palouse at that point in time:
"Wheat is our thing, and a thousand acres of it swaying in the breeze is, for us in the Palouse, about the most beautiful thing on Earth. We put pictures of wheat on our Grain Growers Association calendars and write poems about it when we go off to college. We try to describe the soft lime green in the spring and its golden color in summer, the way it rolls out over the hills in a carpet of agricultural wonder, moving slightly in sync with the breeze, and ripening in accordance with the sun."
Hein's touching portrait of her home and friends and family, and the struggles they endured, makes the aftermath of this tale all the more tragic. Many of her friends and neighbors died young, or suffered horribly, and few remain connected to the place and the farms that supported them. Even Heins' parents have left the family farm, after more than 50 years, and moved to Spokane.
This is the story of good people, strong and resourceful, who lived in one of the most beautiful places on earth in the best possible way... at the wrong time.
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Atomic Farmgirl by Teri Hein reviewed by Michael Hofferber