Contrasts

I’m sitting in a lounge chair on the top deck of the Disney Wonder cruise ship. I will refrain from commenting on the name of the ship, which is presently docked at Ketchikan, Alaska.

The snow topped mountains and densely forested slopes stand in stark contrast to the lingering images in my mind from an outstanding book I’ve just finished — Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham. It is one of the best books I’ve read recently, a compelling account of the nuclear disaster at a nuclear power plant in Russia in 1986 when it was still the USSR.

As a soft wind blows into my face, I find myself wondering if it contains radioactive particles from one of the peacetime nuclear “accidents”, including Chernobyl, that humans are responsible for causing. This triggers in me a fear I’ve lived with practically my entire life. It also raises a question central to that fear: can human beings be trusted with nuclear power?

In 1947, when I was seven years old, I worried almost every day that the Russians would detonate an atomic bomb above Los Angeles, creating a human disaster larger than those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

I wonder if Micky Mouse, patron saint of the world of Disney (and a little older than me) has ever shared my concerns.

Robert Frost wondered if the world would end in fire, or ice.

As I sit here on vacation, reading and contemplating nuclear disaster, I think that I should probably go join the rest of my party for some good-old, light-hearted fun. But instead, I find myself indulging my natural inclination to think about problems and try to solve them.

On this week-long trip I’ve also nearly completed reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Am I lucky, or just a glutton for punishment?

At any rate, I’ll end this blog simply by sharing the poetic thoughts of Frost writing about Fire and Ice.

“Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.”

Hopefully I’ll feel more cheerful next week and won’t succumb to reading Grimms Fairy Tales).

Alan