Natural disasters and wars do their damage spectacularly and quickly--shaking, crushing, burning, ripping, smothering, drowning. The devastation is plain; victims and survivors are clearly distinguished, causes and effects easily connected. With the unnatural disasters caused by environmental toxins, however, the devastation is seldom certain or clear or quick. Broken chromosomes are unseen; carcinogens can be slow and sneaky. People wait for years to find out if they or their children are victims. The fears, the uncertainties and the conjectures have a corrosive quality that becomes inextricably mingled with the toxic realities.
To find out what it is like to live in the same neighborhood with toxic wastes, Associate Editor Kurt Andersen visited three communities with similar concerns but profoundly different circumstances. Times Beach, contaminated years ago, is now a Missouri ghost town; Holbrook, Mass., is discovering that it has a serious problem, but perhaps not a catastrophe; in Casmalia, Calif., toxins arrive each day at a modern treatment site, producing annoying fumes and fears about the future. People from all three places share chronic anxiety. Are they sick? Will they become sick? In all three there is anger, at businesses, at government, at unsympathetic neighbors. Yet like Tolstoy's unhappy families, each town is unhappy in its own way.
Times Beach, Mo.:
Overgrown and Ghostly
On Interstate 44 in Missouri, motorists heading east toward St. Louis glide past the giant Six Flags amusement park and the big fireworks emporium across the road, past the eager little town of Eureka, past billboards inviting them to visit the Black Madonna Shrine and the Meramec Caverns. But then comes a quick stretch where the familiar green interstate signs are disfigured by blank areas, apparently painted over. There down to the left of the highway by the river, weeds and tall grass obscure a whole area.
Is it a town? Was it a town? There are streets and street signs and houses, but no people. There are trailers at the Easy Living Mobile Manor, and the Easy Living Laundromat has a sign out front that says, THANKS FOR COMING, but there are no people. Windows are unbroken, and a few have curtains, neatly sashed back. There are some cars, a bird feeder made from a plastic Seven-Up bottle, a hammock tied from an elm to a sycamore, a riding mower with a Six Flags sticker on it, and FOR SALE signs all over the place. Pinned up on one front door is a printed passage from Psalms: "This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it." But there are no people at all.
Wandering these eerie late-20th century ruins, a visitor becomes a kind of archaeologist of the present. In one window, the paper Santa Claus dates the cataclysm that drove everyone away: just before Christmas 1982, the people of Times Beach discovered that their town had been drenched in dioxin, a poison so potent that one drop in 10,000 gal. is considered a dangerous concentration. Under political pressure, the EPA agreed to pay off all property owners; homeowners got between $8,800 and $98,900 apiece. And the town died. On one street remains an ex-resident's bright white graffito: GOODBYE TIMES BITCH.