Shell Game

At Cascadia Chronicle we are asking contributors to submit commentaries on Lou Karsen's remarkable short film "Shell Game" (2013), in which Washington state Poet Laureate Emerita Kathleen Flenniken meditates upon the legacies of the Hanford plutonium production site in eastern Washington, where she grew up.

Shell Game from Lou Karsen on Vimeo.

Commentary on the Video

Mark Auslander
Trisha Pritkin

Mark Auslander
Cultural Intimacy in the Nuclear Family
Feb. 9th, 2014

Having just finished Kate Brown’s magnificent book,"”Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters,” I’m struck by how skillfully poet Kathleen Flenniken and director Lou Karsen evoke the in-between states of knowing and unknowing that characterized life in the shadow of Cold War Hanford.

Brown emphasizes that Richland in its plutonium-producing heyday marketed itself as a utopian space for aspirant middle class families, and her subtitle cleverly plays on the multiple meanings of “nuclear”: these were simultaneously subsidized modern bourgeois family units freed of the constraints of traditional extended kinship, yet they were also family units stealthily irradiated by the by-products of plutonium production.

“Shell Game” nicely highlights the intertwined seductions and betrayals of this familial imagery. All families are to some extent built on secrecy, and none more so than the extended Richland family, which leached an ever growing body of secrets into its spreading, subterranean “plume.” Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld suggests that most social units are not held together by their shared, publicly voiced values, but rather by their sordid, dirty little secrets, that are at best only partially acknowledged among its members, sometimes with only the subtlest of meaningful, exchanged glances. Herzfeld introduces the term ‘Cultural Intimacy” to characterize this unspoken, shared terrain of tacit difficulty knowledge.

“Shell Game” may be read as a particularly evocative visual and spoken exploration of the enigmatic familial geography of "cultural intimacy." We begin with the poet’s childhood memories: she recalls the big word “Atomic”, without having heard the completed phrase, “Atomic Bomb.” In her mind’s eye, hoisted atop her father’s shoulders, gazing out at the New Frontier’s “sea of white,” she longs for approval from the national Father Figure, in the form of the soon-to-be-apotheosized JFK. And yet, hovering behind each uncompleted sentence, each ominous warning sign, and each patriotic exultation, lies all that can never be said, here visually captured by the ominous ascent to the darkened national attic, the wooden floor being quietly swept.

Here is foreshadowed the narrator’s epiphany, when she learns of the radiation-induced illness of her close friend Caroline's father: the intimate fabric of the family, which she and her peers had imagined Hanford to exemplify and to protect, is ripped away. For all the boxes she might build in her mind, for all the attempts to wall out the full import of the death, intimate truths begin to seep in.

It is striking though that Flenniken, while fully articulate in her critique of national security state deceptions, works through her poetry to honor the texture of that early and enduring state of cultural intimacy. Perhaps to the frustration of her more activist Tri-Cities friends and peers, she does not fully repudiate the utopian vision of her childhood but rather chooses, as her closing line has it, to live within the" in-between" state that poetry makes possible. For that is what it is to be, in her terms, “All-American,” simultaneously to believe and to disbelieve, to accommodate and resist, and to know one another through the half-acknowledged secrets that constitute our collective, buried lives.

Originally published on Mark Auslander's Blog on: BlogspotBack to Comment Author List

Trisha Pritkin
Commentary on Shell Game: Where Boxes Obscure Light
February 9th, 2014

Trisha, age 6, behind family’s “F” house in Richland (1956). Thompson Family Photographic Archives.

I am thankful that Plume, Poems by Kathleen Flenniken, has raised public awareness of the human toll of Hanford. I am likewise grateful that Shell Game, a film featuring Ms Flenniken’s reflections and poetry, also focuses on Hanford’s legacy. Like Ms Flenniken, I was born and raised in Richland, WA, where my father worked as an engineer at the Hanford facility.

I agree with the sentiment Ms. Flenniken expresses in Shell Game, that poetry and the visual arts have a way of penetrating barriers otherwise impermeable to compassion and understanding. When I viewed Shell Game, I was struck by the image of the box Ms Flenniken drew, a rectangle in which she encompassed the event during her childhood of the passing of a Hanford worker, father of her childhood friend, to “radiogenic disease.” With his death, Ms Flenniken’s Hanford childhood now became partitioned, as it were, in her mind. Outside the box lived her happy memories of childhood, and especially, of watching JFK’s dedication of the Hanford N reactor in 1963, seen from a perch high upon her father’s shoulders. Inside the box were contained the emotions generated by the passing of her friend’s father to radiation caused disease. A dark cloud had formed.

This death, thankfully, did not occur within her own family. Had she been born ten or more years earlier, as was I, she would have experienced childhood in Richland in an era of significant downwind radiation releases from the Hanford facility, and her story might well have been different. This is one of the complex aspects of our Hanford heritage upon which people like Ms Flenniken and I must eventually come to some kind of consensus.

For a child of Hanford, the specific years of birth and of childhood determine the health risks faced growing up there. Richland’s environment would have been most hazardous to health, particularly to children, during highest years of plutonium production (represented by start up in 1944 through 1946), lessening slightly in impact 1946-1960 as the accelerated plutonium production schedule ramped down, the risk lessening again thereafter. Charts of Hanford’s specific release amounts show gradual decrease in levels of “biologically significant” radionuclides discharged onto Richland and other downwind communities over these years as plutonium production schedules slowed.

I do not share what I perceive to be Ms Flenniken’s mixed feelings about our Hanford heritage. The toll on my family of our lives in the shadow of Hanford is so great that the awe of the scientific breakthroughs accomplished there has receded behind the wall of pain that arose from the loss of my father to aggressive thyroid cancer, of my mother to malignant melanoma, and of my brother to unknown causes shortly after birth.

Had I drawn a box like the one Ms Flenniken drew in Shell Game for each death in my family, I would have begun with three boxes; one for each of my parents, and one for my brother. Further boxes would have encapsulated the deaths of friends. I would probably also draw a box to encompass my own radiogenic illness. The mysterious health problems I have suffered most of my life were correctly diagnosed as radiogenic autoimmune thyroiditis only after the Department of Energy Richland was finally forced by public pressure in 1986 to disclose decades of secret offsite radiation releases. The appearance on my radiation damaged thyroid of a nodule containing precancerous Hurthle cells necessitated surgical removal of my thyroid, during which I also lost half of my parathyroid glands. My remaining two parathyroids have since failed, and I now deal with the tetanic seizures of hypoparathyroidism. My life has been severely impacted by Hanford’s radiation clouds. Had I appeared in Shell Game, I would have had to draw so many “death and illness boxes” that these rectangular forms would have filled the screen, obscuring the light.

Had my family emerged from our time in Richland unscathed, I would be more inclined to praise the science of Hanford, and the inventiveness of its engineers and chemists. But, with our health destroyed by Hanford’s secret radiation releases, it is hard to be reflective. For me, it only adds to the heartache that Hanford authorities repeatedly assured my parents, in mandatory worker safety meetings, that it was safe to live and raise children in Richland, while they simultaneously blanketed those of us downwind with invisible clouds of radiation. My parents were patriotic, and they trusted authority. We have paid a very high price for their loyalty.

I have learned, over the past twenty-seven years of attention to Hanford’s legacy and the toll on its exposed populations, that Hanford is and will always be a topic evoking controversy, discord, and pain. I have found that I no longer feel welcomed in my hometown of Richland, for what has happened to my family merely serves as a reminder to those in the Tricities of the price paid by those of us, deemed the “Downwinders,” who bear the physical scars of life downwind. The tragedy of the Downwinders is like a dark cloud that obscures the sun for many of those still living in the TriCities.

It is my sincere hope that, through her poetic artistry and continued interaction with other children of Hanford like me, Ms Flenniken will help facilitate a common understanding of our heritage, an understanding that resonates as much with the children of Hanford who remain in good health with productive lives as with those of us whose health and vitality have been significantly damaged by Hanford’s radioactive plume. .

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"Shell Game": A film by Lou Karsen