As I stood under the shower’s spray this evening, allowing the warm water to wash away the day’s dust and travel, I found that as the dirt left me, so did peace and security.

I looked at my hands, and as I passed them along my arms, I suddenly felt an urgency, emergency, imagined I was rushing to remove an invisible poison — radioactive decay — that had collected on my skin and sifted through my clothing, as I sat cowering inside my home, whose chinks and gaps would never be airtight, whose doors and windows were designed to breathe as a human breathes, to move air in and around me so that I might have fresh oxygen to light my blood and to quicken my pulse.

Instead, like motes of burning magnesium, so small I could never see their icy blaze, they filtered in, even though I had stuffed clothing in all the seams, and wadded newspaper against their insidious threat. Even though I was told there was no “danger to human life”, there was danger to life, to this life: when things spiral out of control, reason and words escape control as well, and too much is said, or too little. In the end, as friends and neighbors die, you trust what you see, not what you read.

I stood under the water trying to flush the glass-shards of poison — whose needles I knew would work themselves invisibly into my body, corrupting every cell they touched — tried to wash them away from me, down the drain. Then I realized: the water itself was similarly polluted: I was washing poison with poison.

When there is nowhere to run, you do not run. I stepped from the shower. I took the towel, covered with invisible atoms, tiny burning suns, and dried my limbs. I imagined I could feel a change; I imagined I began to feel unwell. That can’t be right: naked to what I had been exposed, however briefly or fatally, it would take days or weeks to know… wouldn’t it? It must have be fear I felt.

~

What if… what if it were not me alone trying to escape that inevitable taint? I think (as I write) of my son, just finishing High School, preparing to step out into his beautiful, awaiting adult life; I think of my daughter, just welcomed to join any of several top-flight private schools… I would protect them as much as I could protect myself: which is not at all. I imagine the silver snow filtering down, in its deadly, horrific perfection, its horrific, man-refined perfection, over their hair and over their faces, lighting on their lips just there where they lick them. I imagine watching their nostrils widen gently as they sleep, with each easy breath taking in their own gradual deconstruction. I imagine them drinking water — you have to drink water: from the ground, from the lakes — and flooding their perfect young bodies with perfectly horrific, man-refined, uncontrollable decay. I imagine their eyes hollowing and their hair falling out. I imagine the sores that would cover their bodies. I imagine my despair. We all decay together.

You find this melodramatic? It is probably as distasteful to read as it has been to write. What do you think is happening in Fukushima right now? Do you imagine it to be uniquely Japanese? A fluke caused by one of the worst earthquakes ever recorded? Do you imagine nothing of that nature could ever happen here? That something could fall out of the sky and make a crater? Did you ever imagine a hijacker would fly a plane into a tower? That a man would strap explosives to his body and walk into a crowd? That a boy would? That a woman would?

If you feel the events in a far-off island nation have little to do with you, you may be living the same unhappy security that allowed those events to occur. Japan’s tragedy is our future. Because the unforeseen will always happen. Because the safeguards we put in place are based almost in their entirety on the disasters of the past. Because we cannot know what we do not know. Because our tendency is to reach and reach until we are out of balance. Because the world always corrects imbalances, whether they are social or financial or physical. Because only those courageous enough to own all of humanity’s mistakes can learn from them. Because many of us believe that, when others stumble, it has little to do with us. Because many who call themselves conservatives are anything but conservative; and because many who call themselves liberal are anything but careful.

~

If I owned a device to measure radiation, and lifted it to the towel, I could not have dried myself. I would let the water drain from me, and the sheen as it dried would leave what I knew to be a crust of cesium. If I put on my clothes, they would rub particles against my skin like deadly salts. If I walked out the door to run, the potent air would more quickly fill my lungs. Somehow the instinct to survive would not allow me to take my own life; but if I could see the future…? For that self, for his children?

I can feel the fury — I don’t need to imagine that — the justified and impotent fury at those who were given warnings, both experiential and explicit, and held fingers to their ears and put golden blindfolds over their eyes; allowed themselves to believe (like children?) not me, never me; allowed their wisdom to be diluted by a conspiracy of complex social needs and powerful expediencies.  When the small voices (like prophets’ wild-eyed voices? ignored?) urged caution again and again… when a runaway invention in the Ukraine left a dead zone on the planet to underline the dangers, most emphatically… when reports on these very reactors were sent to officals who rubber-stamped then discarded them… when the unforeseen which must always be expected is unexpected… The identical reactor design is in the Vermont Yankee Nuclear plant, site of radioactive leaks in the past, and trying for recertification for another 20 years as we watch, numbly, while a distant technology melts down.

~

Here in unimagined Massachusetts, I finished my shower. The water I bathe in is taken from a well near a clean, freshwater reservoir, a few miles from the sea. Although there is an aging nuclear facility a dozen miles away, and the Big Hurricane is the unexpected certainty that waits to flood its generators (someday, not in my lifetime), I am asked to believe my children will not wither before my eyes, that the ground around me will not become a untouchable wasteland. To take it on faith from those who want to gamble, and on authority from those who will not learn that the future is history.

My government, my energy cabinet, my utility companies, have not been saying the right things. They use the same words that the Japanese utilities and government have been speaking for some years. The same words. “Ours are safe.” While we may not be immediately threatened by the unspeakable events taking place in Japan, it is not a Japanese tragedy, but a human one, and it stands to repeat itself: since we can only know what we know, a truly conservative, sustainable, secure path is one where unexpected events may cause emergency, but not catastrophe.

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