Driving east, I'm lowered into the Columbia River Basin, dropped down through fog from Manastash Ridge, and take the road that bends along the river's banks, past barbed wire fences, a security checkpoint for the Hanford Site. The land stretches towards the horizon, blue hills dotted with taupe and sage, tumbleweeds blown into the fences' grids, the brittle limbs rounded like a chalice holding the earth's dust, topsoil's ash.

The Columbia River edges my atomic hometown of Richland, Washington, winding past the Hanford Nuclear Site on the way to its silt-strewn mouth and the Pacific, a wide blue swath cutting through a shrub-steppe landscape. The river teems with all sorts of blue: the green-tinged blue of veins pulsing in the arm. The flame's blue halo, its sparking tip. The roiling blue of Cherenkov radiation: the reactor core's hot glow.

I walk the path along the river through town, source of my early drinking water, and in its backwater, the lagoon, water hole of summer swimming days. As a child, I knew the power of the Columbia, the cautionary tales, those who were lost in the strong currents. For almost three decades, the river was the primary cooling source for eight of the nine nuclear production reactors dotted along its banks. Over time, millions of curies of radionuclides were discharged into the Columbia.

Growing up, we knew nothing of that: It was the river, and it shaped us. I played just beyond the riverbed along the dusty banks. The wind filled the air with sand, the rough grains embedding themselves in my hair, the sidewalk to home obscured yet visible beneath my feet; my eyelashes, nose and mouth coated with dirt and grit.

When we lived in Richland, my father worked as a nuclear physicist at what was then called the Hanford Nuclear Reservation: 586 square miles of sand-swept land taken for the government's Manhattan Project. The tribes, Yakama, Nez Perce, Umatilla and Wanapum, who hunted and gathered food and considered the land sacred, were prohibited from entering. It was the site of the B Reactor that in secret produced the plutonium for "Fat Man," the atomic bomb that took Nagasaki into air with a toll of 70,000 deaths, children etched into shadows on stone walls, birds in flight turned to flames.

My father arrived after the war with my mother and the start of their young family. Often after dinner at home, papers stacked on the kitchen table, he worked hours into the night. I grew up with four sisters in a government-built alphabet house, a ranch style "K' house on the corner of Torbett and Alder. The willow tree, cracked open in a windstorm, gone. Still there is the front door we opened to gawk at the mosquito truck, my older sisters running in the DDT cloud, the mosquito elimination thought to be especially important in case the insects were hot, radioactivity streaking through their blood. There, the windowsills that let in sand when the wind whirled through town, the flowerbed where I ran the hose in dirt and sunk my hands as far into the earth as I could reach.

My sisters and I grew up in the thick of the Cold War, duck and cover, school pamphlets that advised burying oneself with an inch of dirt for protection against the Bomb, and then the Cuban Missile Crisis. For decades, the country rushed to best the Soviets, piling up nuclear arms, and Hanford played its role, producing the plutonium for roughly two-thirds of the United States' nuclear arsenal.

For nearly three decades, from 1944-1972, radioactive particulates were released into the air, a combination of accident and intent, stacks without filters, reports locked in drawers and stamped confidential until 1986. On December 2 and 3, 1949, when my parents and older sisters lived on Butternut Street, the government conducted the "Green Run," releasing between 7,000 and 12,000 curies of radioactive iodine-131, and 20,000 curies of Xenon-133 into the air. The scrubbers, pollution control devices, turned off, quiet.

A top-secret military test, the reported objective was to test surveillance equipment to monitor the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons program. Although the weather didn't cooperate, officials pushed ahead with the test as planned. Radioactive gases clung to the region for days until a storm system finally pushed them aside. In humans, radioactive iodine-131 hones for the thyroid, as if the particulates were called to its two lobes, the gland's mauve wings like a butterfly, the particulates following like monarchs on their migration. Linked to thyroid cancer, once stricken, the body may exhibit signs: swollen neck, cough, difficulty to swallow.

For years, radioactive particulates settled over the land and found their way into vegetables and cows' milk. Invisible, they traveled downwind and drifted to earth, across gardens and swing sets, onto the clothesline pole my friend and I tried to shimmy. Slipping back down every time, our hands let go and we fell to the ground. Here, have a drink of water. Swallow. Swallow.

 

               2: lymphocytes, T-Cells

 

The pediatrician phoned with the results of the painful blood draws that had been conducted on my daughter, Maia, second of three children, and not quite two years old. There had to be an explanation for her constant ear infections, her cough, her eyes sealed shut with goop, and there it is: common variable immune deficiency. Her older sister, Meris, lines up her dolls in size order on the porch, and her baby brother, Gabe, coos in the walker, his mouth opening and closing around his biscuit, his fingers coated with the dissolving crumbs.

Chicken dipped in flour sizzles in the oven roaster. It will be done any time, but I stay on the phone as long as I can keep the doctor, eager for every detail. "Is it serious?" I ask, knowing that it's certainly more serious than an ear infection or a cold. "It's treatable," he may have answered, explaining that she would need to receive immune gamma globulin regularly and would be referred to an immunologist. "Okay," I say. "Okay. Thank you." When I get to the chicken, the skin is charred. Maia chortles among the pan lids scattered across the kitchen floor.

After several months of receiving immune gamma-globulin injections, the immunologist prescribes IV IgG for Maia. The main difficulty with administering the IV therapy is her troublesome veins. A challenge for a blood draw, they are an even bigger puzzle for inserting an IV. They roll, they collapse, they hide. Before grade school begins, she has surgery for her first port-a-cath, a small catheter implanted in her chest, receptacle for the gamma globulin which contains the antibodies her body does not have the cells to make. With skill and practice, the nurses can access it on the first, sometimes second, try—and the four-hour IV can begin. Still, she coughs and chokes in breath during the night; her ears drain a thick, green fluid. For someone with this illness, her doctor notes she does better than most, never hospitalized, and credits her ferocity, her visible will.

 

               3: blast circumference

 

When my father travelled for business to Japan, he brought back pearls. They arrived in brocaded satin packets, orbs attached to gold posts, small white circles clustered on pins shaped like leaves. He didn't visit Nagasaki or Hiroshima, and years later at the dinner table, disclosed he did not believe in nuclear weapons. In an article, he wrote of the dangers of nuclear proliferation, the secrets and materials ballooning out of control. Still, he stood by science, the infallibility of calculations and proof. In a photo, my father stands in his suit and tie, cutting a figure against the backdrop of the periodic table, smoke rising from the cigarette he holds in his hand.

On August 6, 1995, the thirtieth anniversary of the day the atomic bomb, "Little Boy," was dropped on Hiroshima, my family and I go to Seattle's Green Lake for the annual commemoration, "From Hiroshima to Hope." Meris, Maia, and Gabe take thin sheaths of lantern paper to the calligraphers for our messages to be inscribed: Peace, love, hope, and attach them to the flat wood bases and float them on the lake at dusk. Hundreds are lit with candles and pushed by the wind, some float across the lake, a trail of burning lanterns, and some catch along the banks, flames skimming the tree's branches and the long reeds arcing across the water's edge. A few feet from shore, photographs are suspended beneath a white canopy, a visual documentation of the wreckage and bodies burned: Atomic clouds erupt above the two cities, city blocks becoming a furnace of fire and ash. Over the years, the commemoration, held every year since 1984, has grown to be one of the largest held outside of Japan. Each year, we are among the crowd, carrying our lit lanterns to the lake. In my hometown, an annual memorial takes place on August 9, the anniversary of the dropping of the "Fat Man" bomb on Nagasaki. Held along the banks of the Columbia, it includes the ringing of a bell given to the city of Richland by the Mayor of Nagasaki in 1985. The bell is a model of the Bell of Peace recovered from the ruins of Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki, where it was rung to console the bombing's survivors.

 

               4: vitrification

 

Now the Hanford Site is dedicated to cleanup. Known as the most contaminated site in the Western Hemisphere, it is a huge task too often marred by contractor incompetence or disregard. Work is focused on building a vitrification plant to encapsulate the complex radioactive waste into glass logs that can be stored safely, airtight. Construction is marred by errors, gigantic cost overruns and whistleblower complaints highlighting serious design flaws. Cleanup at Hanford's plutonium processing plant has been especially fraught with difficulties. Dozens of workers have ingested or inhaled radioactive particles, and plant offices, vehicles, and homes have been found to be contaminated. Worker safety has been in the spotlight, with serious health problems linked to exposures to toxic vapors on Hanford's tank farms.

My father, who believed in the purity of science, would be looking for solutions were he alive, convinced that technology today would find a way to clean up the nuclear production that burst out of the gate before problems and solutions were understood, that remedies might still be found. The nine nuclear reactors of the early days are now decommissioned. Six have been "cocooned," placed in interim safe storage, and one, the B Reactor, has been declared a National Historic Monument. Another reactor, which began production in 1984, the Columbia Generating Station, operates on Hanford land leased to Energy Northwest, producing—along with its unavoidable byproduct, radioactive waste—electricity used to help power the Northwest.

 

               5: ruthenium

 

When Maia was in middle school, her IV regimen was increased. It helped her infections and her health, cleared her eyes and her nose. Now in her thirties, Maia continues her treatments, and we stay vigilant to make sure insurance keeps her. She also sees a pulmonologist for bronchiectasis, a condition that may be related to her immune disorder. She sings into her Acapella device and works to keep her lung muscles strong enough, pumping air.

Common variable immune deficiency is on the rare disease registry, as is my third-degree complete heart block. Her brother has asthma; her sister was tested for an immune deficiency, and the results were negative. Still, I'm never sure when or how something might pop up, some epigenetic detour from my past, or from my mother's past. The summer she was pregnant with me radioactive ruthenium, white wisps of matter, floated through the sky. I worry they might sneak into my family's blood or organs out of the blue.

 

               6: burial, atomic memory

 

In 2004, a glass vial containing one half-gram of plutonium-239 was found in a rusted metal safe buried in the ground at Hanford. The Hanford dirt has opened to hold many things, holes dug deep enough to cradle nuclear submarines.

Over one million gallons of radioactive waste have leaked into the Hanford ground, the plume advancing towards groundwater and the river. Approximately one-third of 177 underground single-shell tanks have leaked radioactive waste; one double-shell tank is leaking highly hazardous radioactive and chemical sludge between its two shells. Most of the tanks holding 56 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste have already exceeded their planned life spans.

My sisters and I pull out the family history from within the closed bookcase. There is a white shoebox, and written in ink in my mother's handwriting, the unassuming label "Nuclear Items." I lift the lid and pull out objects: an acrylic display case shaped like a wheel holding thumbprints of colored powders, samples of ore, yellow, ocher, orange. In a white envelope, photos from the flood of 1948, a section of the dust-blown town underwater, the Columbia taking more than the path of its bed, its waters flowing over farmland and streets. It is let loose.

There is a dosimeter badge to monitor radiation exposures, employee badge—"Loose Lips Sink Ships"—a souvenir program from JFK's visit, 1960s pamphlets for the N Reactor—"What's in N, N Means New," and a gold-colored pin swirled into an atomic symbol, the town's mascot. I place the lid back on, fasten it with a rubber band, and return it to its dark shelf.

 

               7: half-lives

 

I visit the Columbia on an autumn day, and scour the banks for a smooth, grey stone, the kind I used to skip erratically across the surface. I find a shell, a ribbed curvature, beyond a layer of ice framing the river's edge, cracking and vanishing as the water grows deeper.

At night, the harvest moon rises and floats across the river's back, an orange ball carried on the current. On the opposite bank, the dark hills fall into the river.

Whatever wind, river, earth have carried through this town, along these banks, I've taken in. I've opened my arms to gusts, my jacket flying behind me like a kite. Walked home in storms that cloaked my face with a sheen of sand. Swam in the lagoon, gulping in water as I played, staying afloat.

Here, a scrim of sand scuttles along the shore, the paved path, and streetlights cast a glow across the town's grid. In the morning, the wind stirring, the river will gleam, full of plankton and fish, carving its course past Hanford.