Perchlorate Heaven

Mead Party Boat & Hoover Dam

I have this picture of me and my sister standing in front of Lake Mead, and when I get my scanner working, I’ll upload it.  We look really happy.  It kind of reminds me of a photo my friend had of her dad.  A Navy guy, he was sitting in the ocean at the edge of the water at Bikini.  This was not long after a ‘nuke test, but he’s totally oblivious.  Needless to say, he died of some awful cancer.

In my own picture, there’s oblivious me, swimming in about 1000 pounds a day of perchlorates that Kerr McGee Chemical was dumping into the lake.  By the way, perchlorates are used to make rocket fuel.  Needless to say, my thyroid ballooned up when I was in my late 20’s.  I’m still on meds.  It’s way better than cancer, even though my heart palpitates from time to time and my hair will fall out on occasion (thankfully, I have a lot of it). I used to like to think that the chemicals came from Area 51, that maybe the rocket fuel was from reverse engineering on a UFO project, and at least my thyroid problem would be from something cool.  But the government isn’t ‘fessing up on that yet.

Last year, (missing that perchlorate dose, I guess), I went back to Mead.  We liked Mead when I was a kid. For a couple of hours, my parents wouldn’t fight. Sometimes, we got to drive the speed boat, a cheap wooden model that my dad put a really big motor on; if you didn’t accelerate, it would start to sink. My sister would be nice to me. Mead was the happy place.

So my spouse and I rented one of those blue party boats with a canopy to putter around in.  Yes, despite the rocket fuel issue, I love Mead.  It’s huge, beautiful, and scary (in ways I never suspected when I was younger).  The waves can get ocean-sized. There’s a town that was covered by the water when Hoover was finished. You can get up pretty close to the water side of Hoover Dam.  The water level is much much lower than when I was younger.  The day we went, it was late July and the temperature was about 105 degrees, though we couldn’t feel it much out on the water.  By the way, know what 105 feels like?  Sort of like someone is squashing a hot waffle iron down on your head.

Overall, our trip was great, and toward the end, before we brought in the boat to gas it up, we stopped for one last swim close to the bay where we were headed.  There was this weird brown lumpy stuff floating all over the place, and we thought it was algae.  A few days later, I looked at a map of Lake Mead and found out that we had been swimming near a place where Las Vegas dumps its sewage.

There’s a moral to that story, somewhere.