When I was born in 1950, our family lived in company housing at the Triumph Mine, six miles up the East Fork of Wood River between Hailey and Sun Valley. My father worked as a hard rock miner, spending his days blasting, mucking, and hauling ore out of the mountain behind the town. It was hard and dangerous work. Years later, he had bruise-like tattoos on his arms and shoulders where black ore had become embedded in his skin, and X-rays showed where two cervical vertebrae had been cracked when a rockfall landed on his head. The broken neck had healed by itself. He had not gone for treatment because unpaid convalescence wasn’t something he could think about.
According to one of his pay slips, he made $44.00 for a 40-hour week in the mine. A few months before I was born, he quit smoking cold turkey because one morning he had gone to work with six cigars and a pack of cigarettes and by noon he had smoked them all and was bumming smokes from co-workers.
My mother had earned an R.N. degree from Holy Cross in Salt Lake City, and soon as I was old enough for a sitter, she started back to work at the hospital in Sun Valley, which was then located on the third floor of the Sun Valley Lodge. Her work environment and my father’s couldn’t have been more different.
I can remember times when my parents joked about her rich patients who had, on occasion, fallen in love with her (one of her occupational hazards) and offered to take her far away from Idaho and give her the kind of life she deserved.
My parents could joke about such things because once married, they could not imagine becoming unmarried. Love was a part of it, but not breaking a promise was a bigger part of it. Marriage, in their minds, was permanent. With permanence came peace of mind. With peace of mind came the courage that allowed them to have children in the face of poverty and face a world where your job could kill you, and so could atomic bombs and rusty nails and polio and the neighborhood lead smelter.
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The lead and silver ore produced by the Triumph Mine was galena. Its lead compounds aren’t as bioavailable as some ores, although that changes when it’s smelted. You shouldn’t breathe air near a lead smelter. You shouldn’t play near smelter ponds, and many of the local children did. It was the only beach in the area.
Lead poisoning in children causes learning disabilities, emotional instability, and seizures. Adults with lead in their bodies are prone to high blood pressure, heart and kidney disease, joint pain, anger disorders, difficulties with memory, depression, and abnormal sperm and spontaneous abortions.
But here’s a lucky thing: the smelter at Triumph Mine, which had put high levels of lead in the air for decades before I was born, burned down in 1948. Its overgrown concrete walls and terraces loomed above the company housing like war ruins.
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When the giant Kellogg smelter in Idaho’s Silver Valley lost its baghouse—a pollution control facility—to a 1973 fire, it was run for two years without filters, depositing an additional 35 tons of lead in the area around its smokestack. Horses died from grazing on new grass along the valley’s river, and trees wouldn’t grow on the hills around the town.
Of the 175 children who lived within a mile of the smelter, the average lead blood level was 67.4 micrograms/deciliter. The CDC used to say that any lead level above 3.5 mcg/dL was “of concern,” but they quit doing that because they’ve concluded that there is no safe level of lead for children. The lead levels in the blood of children in Flint, Michigan during its acidic water/lead pipe crisis a decade ago averaged 1.3 mcg/dL.
Because the Triumph smelter, which never had a tall smokestack or a baghouse, burned completely to the ground, I escaped breathing in a bunch of lead, and I’m a bunch smarter than I would have been if the smelter hadn’t burned.
But it’s safe to assume that my childhood lead levels were “of concern.” Probably not as much as those of the neighbor kid, who was one of my playmates. He used to eat the local dirt, which is yet another symptom of lead poisoning. The smelter smoke penetrated the soil, the buildings, and the roads and fields around the Triumph Mine. Anybody in the company town who breathed the dust of passing cars had lead in their bodies.
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We’re all familiar with the good news/bad news joke, where an event that looks lucky turns out to be unlucky in a larger arena. And then, often, the unlucky event turns out to be lucky in a larger arena yet. And so on.
You can play the good luck/bad luck game forever, although you’ll probably eventually decide that the only arena that’s important is your own life and the lives of the people you love and who love you. If those lives are lucky, that’s good. If not, that’s bad.
My father quit working at Triumph Mine after one of his co-workers was tipped out of a hoist when it caught on a steel pipe sticking out into the hoist shaft. The man fell eight hundred feet to the bottom of the mine and my father was one of the miners detailed to bring him home. After carrying out the body, he decided to become a salmon fishing guide. Risking his life savings and then some, he purchased a small acreage in Sawtooth Valley so he’d have a base to guide from.
That’s how I’m sitting at this desk right now, writing. Julie is getting ready to cook dinner in the kitchen. Juno, having gone with us on a long hike yesterday, is sleeping in the sun on the deck like the good, tired dog that she is. Good luck indeed, unless you were in Triumph Mine in the early 1950s, riding the hoist platform when it hit the pipe.
Luck is a zero-sum game.
Need more evidence? I’m a replacement kid. I had an older brother die six years before I was born. It was a loss my mother never recovered from. Between the time of my brother’s death and my birth, she had four stillbirths. I cannot believe how desperately she wanted a child to repair her life, and how much my existence depended on her desire to escape her near-boundless grief. I was told that those stillbirths were because of RH incompatibility, but RH antibodies make each subsequent pregnancy less likely to carry to term. I was fifth in line.
I’ve concluded her stillbirths stem from her life in Triumph Mine housing during a time when the smelter was running full-tilt. Two years after the smelter burned would have been enough time for enough lead to leach out of her blood to let a child survive to term.
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Good news: I’m alive. Bad news: my mother never trusted me to stay alive, even after I was born. She was an intelligent woman, but she could be thrown into a frenzy of worry by her imagination, and what she imagined was my death, and more grief. Her fears stunted her life, and it complicated our relationship, to say the least—I had a nasty, tumultuous adolescence where I did everything I could to put myself in danger. Even now, I can scare myself into a sleepless night by counting my deliberate teenage brushes with death.
The greater danger, however, came before I was born. In 1950 it was common for women with risky pregnancies to be prescribed massive injections of diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic estrogen approximately 5 times as powerful as the stuff they put in birth-control pills. As a result, the first 8 months of my life were spent in an estrogen bath.
In medical terms, I am a DES son. That’s lucky, because if I were a DES daughter, I would have exponentially higher chances of reproductive-organ cancer and other physical abnormalities.
I am also not a parent. That’s lucky, too, because DES grandchildren continue to have hormonal and physical abnormalities (epimutations) that in turn get passed on to their own children. Again, female offspring get the worst of the effects.
DES was banned as a human carcinogen in 2000. It’s been implicated in gynocomastia and pseudopuberty in children, changes in reproductive organ development, pancreatic and cardiovascular disorders, neurodevelopmental alterations, problems associated with socio-sexual behavior, and something called hormonal imprinting. In 1953, a study demonstrated that DES was ineffective in bringing pregnancies to term, although it was prescribed for that purpose until 1971, when the DES daughters’ problems became too overwhelming to ignore.
I seem to have escaped any physical DES effects, although it’s hard to be certain about neurodevelopmental alterations. It’s possible that DES somehow prevented my early exposure to lead from wrecking my brain. For much of the first half of my life, I was a walking socio-sexual problem, but that could have been a side effect of the 1960s.
It’s possible that my hormones have been imprinted: the worst DES side effect I’ve experienced was years ago in an English Department meeting at the College of Idaho, during a patronizing discussion of feminism by the female members of the department. I noted that I probably had more estrogen receptors in my brain than anyone else in the room, and I should be consulted on feminism and related issues. My suggestion did not go over well. It’s likely another reason I’m sitting here at this desk, writing this journal instead of lecturing to bored students video-gaming on their phones in an overheated classroom.
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We—as a civilization—had no idea what we were doing when we invented organic chemistry. We had no idea we were creating molecules that evolution had refused to make for three billion years. We had no idea we were permanently incorporating those molecules into our bodies.
We didn’t know the full panoply of side effects of DES when we prescribed it over three decades. We didn’t know how damaging lead could be to fetuses and children and their parents. We didn’t know that leaded gasoline would go straight from a car’s tailpipe into your lungs and then to your blood. At various times in the 20th century, we didn’t know that smoking could hurt you, or amphetamines could hurt you, or narcotics could hurt you.
Some people knew, but they kept quiet about it for as long as they could profit from it.
Our contemporary chemical environment is every bit as dangerous as it was in 1950. It’s full of phthalates, the forever chemicals found in flameproof pajamas and furniture fabrics and shampoos and plastic water bottles. We’re exposed to decayed plastics emitting carcinogens and hormonal analogues suspected of causing cognitive and behavioral problems. Fertility rates are nosediving. Our endocrine systems try to make sense of it all, even when they’re getting hit with contradictory instructions. Gender identity, ADHD, addictions, life satisfaction, autism, wealth, poverty, divorce: these all may be impossible-to-trace side effects of the thousands of synthetic chemicals that we absorb from our world.
A chemical gestalt unimaginable to Charles Darwin has forced the origin of a new species. The next few decades will tell whether that species is or isn’t viable.
Free and conscious choice? I didn’t have it in the womb, neither did my stillborn siblings, and neither do you.