Downwind In Utah, 1957 -- The Clan Of One-Breasted Women -- Cancer Forces Woman Raised In Tiny Desert Community To Question Her Mormon Faith And Her Government

I belong to a clan of one-breasted women. My mother, my grandmothers and six aunts all have had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who survive have just completed rounds of chemotherapy and radiation.

I've had my own problems: two biopsies for breast cancer and a small tumor between my ribs diagnosed as ``a borderline malignancy.''

This is my family history.

Most statistics tell us breast cancer is genetic, hereditary, with rising percentages attached to fatty diets, childlessness, or becoming pregnant after 30. What they don't say is living in Utah may be the greatest hazard of all.

We are a Mormon family with roots in Utah since 1847. The word-of-wisdom, a religious doctrine of health, kept the women in my family aligned with good foods: no coffee, tea, tobacco or alcohol. For the most part, these women finished having their babies by the time they were 30. And only one faced breast cancer prior to 1960. As a group, Mormons traditionally have a low rate of cancer.

Is our family a cultural anomaly? The truth is we didn't think about it. Those who did, usually the men, simply said ``bad genes.'' The women's attitude was stoic. Cancer was part of life. On February 16, 1971, the eve of my mother's surgery, I accidentally picked up the telephone and overheard her ask my grandmother what she could expect.

``Diane, it is one of the most spiritual experiences you will ever encounter.''

I quietly put down the receiver.

Two days later, my father took my three brothers and me to the hospital to visit her. She met us in the lobby in a wheelchair. No bandages were visible. I'll never forget her radiance, the way she held herself and how she gathered us around her.

``Children, I am fine. I want you to know I felt the arms of God around me.''

We believed her. My father cried. Our mother, his wife, was 38 years old.

Two years ago, after my mother's death from cancer, my father and I were having dinner. He had just returned from St. George where his construction company was putting in natural-gas lines. He spoke of his love for the country; the sandstone landscape, bare-boned and beautiful. He had just hiked the Kolob trail in Zion National Park. We got caught up in reminiscing, recalling with fondness the years our family had vacationed in this area.

Over dessert, I shared a recurring dream of mine. I told my father that for years, as long as I could remember, I saw this flash of light in the night in the desert. This image had so permeated my being, that I could not venture south without seeing it again, on the horizon, illuminating buttes and mesas.

``You did see it,'' he said.

``Saw what?'' I asked a bit tentative.

``The bomb. The cloud. We were driving home from Riverside, Calif. You were sitting on your mother's lap. She was pregnant. In fact, I remember the date, Sept. 7, 1957. We had just gotten out of the service. It was an hour or so before dawn, when this explosion went off. We not only heard it, but felt it. I thought the oil tanker in front of us had blown up. We pulled over and suddenly, rising from the desert floor, we saw it, clearly this golden-stemmed cloud, the mushroom. The sky seemed to vibrate with an eerie pink glow. Within a few minutes, a light ash was raining on the car.''

I stared at my father. This was new information to me.

``I thought you knew that,'' he said. ``It was a common occurrence in the '50s.''

It was at this moment I realized the deceit I had been living under: children growing up in the American Southwest, drinking contaminated milk from contaminated cows, even from the contaminated breasts of their mothers, my mother - a member years later, of the clan of one-breasted women.

It is a well-known story in the Desert West, ``The Day We Bombed Utah,'' or perhaps, ``The Years We Bombed Utah.'' Above-ground atomic testing in Nevada took place from Jan. 27, 1951, through July 11, 1962. Not only were the winds blowing north covering what the government termed ``low-use segments of the population'' with fallout and leaving sheep dead in their tracks, but the climate was right. The U.S. of the 1950s was red, white and blue. McCarthyism was rampant. Ike was it and the Cold War was hot. If you were against nuclear testing, you were for a communist regime.

Much has been written about this ``American nuclear tragedy.'' Public health was secondary to national security. Thomas Murray, Atomic Energy Commissioner, said ``Gentlemen, we must not let anything interfere with this series of tests, nothing.''

Again and again, the American public was told by its government, in spite of burns, blisters and nausea, ``It has been found that the tests may be conducted with adequate assurance of safety under conditions prevailing at the bombing reservations.''

A news release typical of the times stated, ``We find no basis for concluding that harm to any individual has resulted from radioactive fallout.''

On Aug. 30, 1979, a suit was filed entitled ``Irene Allen vs. the United States of America.'' Allen was the first to be alphabetically listed with 24 test cases, representative of nearly 1,200 plaintiffs seeking compensation from the U.S. government for cancers caused from nuclear testing in Nevada.

Irene Allen lived in Hurricane, Utah. She was the mother of five children and had been widowed twice. Her first husband had watched the tests from the roof of the local high school. He died of leukemia in 1956. Her second husband died of pancreatic cancer in 1978.

In a town meeting conducted by Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, shortly before the suit was filed, Allen said, ``I am not blaming the government, I want you to know that, Sen. Hatch. But I thought if my testimony could help in any way so this wouldn't happen again to any of the generations coming up after us. . . . I am really happy to be here this day to bear testimony of this.''

God-fearing people. This is just one story in an anthology of thousands.

On May 10, 1984, Judge Bruce Jenkins handed down his opinion. Ten of the plaintiffs were awarded damages. It was the first time a federal court had determined that nuclear tests had been the cause of cancers. For the remaining 14 test cases, proof of causation was not sufficient. In spite of the split decision, it was considered a landmark ruling. It was not to remain so for long.

In April, 1987, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Jenkins' ruling on the grounds that the U.S. was protected from suit by the legal doctrine of sovereign immunity, a centuries-old idea from England in the days of absolute monarchs.

In January 1988, the Supreme Court refused to review the Appeals Court decision. To our court system, it does not matter whether the government lied to its citizens or that citizens died from nuclear fallout. What matters is that our government is immune. ``The King can do no wrong.''

In Morman culture, authority is respected, obedience is revered and independent thinking is not. I was taught as a young girl not to ``make waves'' or ``rock the boat.''

For years, I did just that - listened, observed and quietly formed my own opinions within a culture that rarely asked questions because it had all the answers. But one by one, I watched the women in my family die common, heroic deaths.

I cared for them, bathed their scarred bodies and kept their secrets. I watched beautiful women become bald as cytoxan, cisplatin and adriamycin were injected into their veins. I held their foreheads as they vomited green-black bile and I shot them with morphine when the pain became inhuman. In the end, I witnessed their last peaceful breaths, becoming a midwife to the rebirth of their souls. But the price of obedience became too high.

The fear and inability to question authority that ultimately killed rural communities in Utah during testing of atomic weapons was the same fear I saw being held in my mother's body. Sheep. Dead sheep. The evidence is buried.

I cannot prove that my mother, Diane Dixon Tempest, or my grandmothers, Lettie Romney Dixon and Kathryn Blackett Tempest, along with my aunts, contracted cancer from nuclear fallout in Utah. But I can't prove they didn't.

My father's memory was correct. The blast we drove through in 1957 was part of Operation Plumbbob, one of the most intensive series of tests to be initiated. The flash of light I had thought was a dream, developed into a family nightmare. It took 14 years for cancer to show up in my mother - the same time, Howard Andrews, an authority on radioactive fallout at the National Institutes of Health, says radiation cancer requires to become evident. The more I learn about what it means to be a ``downwinder,'' the more questions I drown in.

What I do know, however, is that as a fifth-generation Mormon woman I must question everything, even if it means losing my faith or becoming a member of a border tribe among my own people. Tolerating blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.

ON March 18, 1988, I crossed the line at the Nevada Test Site and was arrested with nine other Utahns for trespassing. They still conduct nuclear tests in the desert. Ours was an act of civil disobedience. But as I walked toward the town of Mercury, it was more than a gesture of peace. It was a gesture on behalf of the clan of one-breasted women.

As one officer cinched the handcuffs around my wrists, another frisked my body. She found a pen and a pad of paper tucked inside my left boot.

``And these?'' she asked sternly.

``Weapons,'' I replied.

Our eyes met. I smiled. She pulled the leg of my trousers back over my boot. ``Step forward, please,'' she said as she took my arm.

We were booked under an afternoon sun and bused to Tonopah, Nev. It was a two-hour ride. This was familiar country. The Joshua trees had been named by my ancestors who believed they looked like prophets pointing west to the promised land.

The bus stopped short of town. We were released.

The officials thought it was a cruel joke to leave us stranded in the desert with no way to get home. What they didn't realize is that we were home, soul-centered and strong, women who recognized the sweet smell of sage as fuel for our spirits.

Terry Tempest Williams is naturalist-in-residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City. This essay is excerpted from a forthcoming book, ``Refuge,'' to be published by Viking in 1991. She is the author of ``Coyote's Canyon'' and ``Pieces of White Shell.''