The image that occupies the header of this blog is of particular significance. Snapped in the Spring of 2008, facing northwest in the Nevada desert, it captures a moment in which the sun was rising behind me, and the moon was setting in front of me. The lights on the highway in the bottom left are the cars of workers, heading for this gate:
Welcome to our Nuclear Homeland. Exhibit A: The Nevada Test Site, where nearly 1000 nuclear weapons have been detonated since 1951, many of them two, three, and four times as large as the nuclear bombs we dropped on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This photograph was snapped the day before the others, in roughly the same location. Its me, and friends Jon, Steve, and Jerry, moments before my first arrest, for what I'm proud to say was my first major act of Civil Disobedience: trespassing on the Nevada Test Site, which is technically the property of the Western Shoshone, not the United States military. (That's me in the middle, holding my sandals and an envelope full of photographs. Going barefoot into the highly toxic Nevada Nuclear Test Site was kind of a dumb move. But I'd been walking for six days and sixty-five miles, and my feet hurt.)
There's more to this story.
So much more that I wrote a book about the place. I finished it in October, and called it As it Turned Out, There Were People In All Those Little Communities: A Folk History of the Nuclear West. Still waiting to hear back from the first publisher I sent it to.
Stay tuned for more stories of our Nuclear Homeland and my first arrest. (Yes, I'm planning a second one).
