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Show the surf, was the wheeze of the reel as line was given and reclaimed, given and reclaimed. The eighty-pound marlin resisted with all it had. When the marlin broke the surface for the first time none of us were prepared. Spiraling up from the water, he hung for minutes in the air, his sleek black body pressed onto the background of sky like a gallery painting. His long nose pointed up, out, and beyond. Without a splash, he plunged back into the ocean, a perfect dive. The boat fell silent. In February of 1998 the BBC interviewed a former Chief Petty Officer of the British Navy named David Hobbs who spent his career on a Polaris submarine. Cancer was consuming him. What he wanted the public to know was all that he was not told. The British Navy had said there was no danger in working that close to, in being imprisoned with, a nuclear reactor, and he believed them. Nuclear submarines derive their energy from a pressurized-water nuclear reactor that powers the steam turbines. Like all nuclear power, the reactors on a submarine "control" the nuclear reaction. I have always imagined the reactor to be a giant well, a steel shaft that glows green like kryptonite and empties into the ocean. While my father has been in the reactor room, I have not. Hobbs, though, had been in and around split atoms for the length of his career. He had, in fact, drunk tea every day that was brewed from the water that cooled the reactor, water contaminated with radioactivity. Now he was dying. In the same year, 1998, residents in the township of Apollo in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania successfully sued Atlantic Richfield Company and Babcock and Wilcox 176 |