Our Nuclear World

I am in the midst of reading a piece for another class written by a man who grew up on a nuclear Arsenal in Ohio. It is somewhat ethnographic and the beautiful creativity of his writing has moved me to the point of feeling a constant ache somewhere in the back of my throat. I feel like I am with him as he explores the contaminated land of his isolated home, as any young child would. He captures the innocence of his childhood with simple words and contrasts it with what he now knows he was actually exposing himself to in an ironic and almost casual way. Here is an excerpt:

"Whenever I stole past those fields of bunkers or whenever they drifted like a flotilla of green humpback whales through my dreams, I imagined fire leaping from one to another, the spark flying outwards to consume the whole creation. This poison I also carry in my bones, this conviction that we build our lives in mine fields. Long before I learned what new sort of bombs had devoured Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I knew from creeping among these igloos full of old-fashioned elopsives that, on any given day, someone else's reckless step might consume us all."
-Scott Russell Sanders from At Play in the Paradise of Bombs