Scout Mountain

By J. D. Patterson

Charlie Harrison, a former hobo, in his late fifties is settling down to work as a janitor at Idaho State College in Pocatello, Idaho. He has built a cabin on an acreage near the top of Scout Mountain, ten miles south of town, and lives there with his dog Colby. His nephew, Jim Harrison, is intrigued by the Idaho Stories of his Uncle, and upon obtaining his Ph. D. takes his first job as a physics professor at Idaho State.

At first to earn needed money, Charlie also has a weekend job on a potato field. Jim discovers that the soil that his uncle tracks in from the field is radioactive and that starts Jim wondering about the possibility of the nearby National Reactor Testing Station (the "Site") polluting the neighboring country side with stray radioactive waste. Jim becomes even more interested when his Uncle takes a job a the Site because it pays more than the two jobs he had.

Pressures to develop research lead Jim to visit scientists at the Site, where Jim becomes convinced that an employee there has been intentionally following him. Investigating this, leads Jim to have adventures that become increasingly complex and involve the CIA.

One evening while visiting his uncle on Scout Mountain, Jim and Charlie are shot at by an unknown person. However they both suspect that the person driving the car that has followed Jim on several occasions is the shooter.

It slowly becomes evident that the shooter is possibly a Soviet spy who Uncle Charlie had briefly encountered in his wandering past. It seems possible this spy is engaged in trying to sabotage the US nuclear effort during this time of the cold war.

A CIA operative advises Jim as to the dangers of his inadvertent involvement, and the story reaches a crescendo when the spy again tries to shoot Uncle Charlie on Scout Mountain. Colby takes the spy down.

These events lead Uncle Charlie to become disgusted with his settled life and he goes back on the road, leaving Colby with Jim.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781456828363

J. D. Patterson

James D. Patterson’s early life was as a farm boy in Missouri. He has an A. B. from the University of Missouri, an S. M. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph. D. from the University of Kansas, all in Physics. He taught and did research in Physics at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, The Florida Institute of Technology, and Idaho State University, among other universities. JDP now lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota. This fictional story’s origins come from his observations while attending a cardiac Rehab group in Rapid City.

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Copyright © 2010 by J. D. Patterson.

ISBN: Softcover    978-1-4568-2835-6

ISBN: Ebook        978-1-4568-2836-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

1.    Radioactive Potato Fields

2.    Uncle Charlie’s Cabin

3.    Talking Trouble on Scout Mountain

4.    The Draft

5.    Radioactivity Problems

6.    The Site

7.    A Shot in the Dark

8.    The Trap

9.    A Christmas Present

10.    Monica

11.    Dead Man’s Tale

12.    Colby Gets it Done

Epilogue

Appendix 1: Essays by Charles Henry Harrison

Appendix 2: Radiation, Nuclear Reactors, and Nuclear Terms

References

Map

Dedicated to my father

John Francis Patterson

(1897-1944)

The real Uncle Charlie had great respect for him.

Acknowledgment

My thanks to Mely Rahn who has read this and found many grammatical errors and narrative inconsistencies. All remaining errors are my own.

We are biological machines. A machine having free will seems to deny logic in that it denies causality.

Charles Henry Harrison, Pocatello, Idaho, 1962

Chapter 1

Radioactive Potato Fields

Good God, Uncle Charlie, I said. You’re radioactive.

What the Hell are you talking about? What’s that damn clicking noise anyway? Uncle Charlie said as he removed his feet from my desk.

Uncle Charlie was the janitor in my building. Everyday when he emptied the waste basket and did a little desultory cleaning, he was in the habit of having a little chat, and resting in the chair by my desk with his feet up. Irritating perhaps, but he was my Uncle. I think the janitor’s work bored him. He could work hard if he was interested, but he was more of an outdoor than an indoor man.

That’s my Geiger Counter doing the clicking and I’m going to use it for a demonstration in class today. I just turned it on and was getting ready to crank the sensitivity up, to see if it was working. Then you put your feet on the desk. That’s when it started clicking. Where have you been anyway?

Sure, I forgot you birds have radiation detectors. But I wonder why I would have any radioactivity on my shoes. I tramp around my cabin on Scout Mountain; maybe there’s something up there. Or maybe my dog Colby dug up something.

My Uncle was a six foot two inch rough looking guy in his late fifties. He was losing both hair and teeth and putting on some weight, but he was still plenty strong and not bad looking when he wore something besides his bib overalls, shaved his slightly round face, and combed his hair neatly.

He had been a hobo for years and followed the rails until he got off one day in Pocatello,[1] Idaho and decided to stay. He had written my dad about how well he liked the country around Pocatello. He had been a kind of a hero to me since I was a kid, so when I got my Ph. D. in Physics at the University of Kansas, and an Assistant Professorship at Idaho State College, opened up I applied. I rode out on the Union Pacific’s Portland Rose for the interview and was charmed by the surrounding country. I was offered the job and took it. A little later I found out there was a janitorial position open for my building and told Uncle Charlie about it. He had been doing odd jobs and this was steady money. He got the job, and that allowed him to get a loan to purchase materials to finish his log cabin on Scout Mountain. How long he would stick, I had no idea. The upshot of this was I saw him at least every work day when he stopped by to clean my office.[2]

I don’t think there is much natural radioactivity up on Scout, I said. My boss is a Nuclear Physicist and he has been hiking around Scout for fun and often carries a geiger counter. He tells me there isn’t anything out of the ordinary on Scout or even on the old lava flows nearby. Where else, besides Scout, have you been?"

I didn’t tell you. During the harvest, I took a weekend job helping a company get in their potatoes.

You working for Simplot? I asked.

Nope, they asked too many questions. I’m working for a smaller operator. J. R. Simplot’s not the only guy in Idaho that grows potatoes you know.[3]

I thought getting in the potatoes was done by machine. What do you do?, I asked.

Digging potatoes is mostly done by machine, sure, but they hire stoop labor to work the edges, corners and look over the fields to get what the machines miss. I do that. I drive the harvester sometimes if they are missing a driver, but the part timers, like me, mostly get the stoop labor. Are you trying to tell me their potatoes are radioactive? Uncle Charlie asked.

I don’t think so, but who knows, at least the soil on your shoes seems to be. Where are you working? I asked.

Over near Burley.

OK. When you get a chance bring me a couple of potatoes with plenty of soil attached. In the meantime I’ve got to talk to a geologist and somebody who has worked at the Idaho Reactor Testing Station. That’s what you call the Site."[4] The radioactivity could be natural or something could be leaking into the Snake River from the Site. They do use the Snake for irrigation, I think."

Yep, sure do, Uncle Charlie said.

One more thing, I said. Don’t say anything about this to anyone till we get some facts. Don’t want to go off halfcocked and get people mad at us for nothing.

OK, boy, Uncle Charlie said, but let me know. I don’t want to get cancer just for earning a little extra money.

Uncle Charlie paused and then added, This irritates me. Ain’t nothing works out right. Looks like when you’re sober the world is full of crap, and when you are drunk, you are. Hell.

OK, OK, take a bath when you get home. Wash out your clothes and clean your shoes. I’ll find out what I can and we’ll talk tomorrow.

OK, kid," Uncle Charlie said as he stomped out.

I went back to getting ready for my lecture. I had a lot to do before tomorrow.

The first thing I needed to do was prepare for an introductory physics class that I had to teach later in the day. Actually that class was fun. You not only could tell jokes, you needed to in order to keep the class’s attention. My strategy was to first get their attention with a story or joke, then try to motivate them by showing an application of what we were going to talk about. Then I would teach them just a little so they got the hang of the idea. This would be followed by a simple homework problem intended to nail down the concept. In order to be sure they did the homework, I usually gave a broad hint as to the solution of the problem. I also enjoyed the class because there were pretty girls in it, although I guess that was not professional. Sure they were only eighteen or nineteen, but I was only twenty seven myself. Uncle Charlie said it best:

You can’t touch, kid, so better not look too much. Anyway, remember that young girls develop into figitin’ women and Lord preserve us from figitin’ women. I had me one once, and I finally had to leave her. Just too much figitin’. She’s still figitin’, I guess, but probably with another husband. I think she got married again, but I don’t know.

After class, I got Frank Pursley, a geology professor I knew, on the phone.

Frank, this is Jim Harrison, I hope I didn’t catch you just heading for the door.

No, I got a few minutes, what’s up?

I got interested in whether there’s much natural radioactivity in the rocks and soil around here—do you know anything about that?

The phone conversation went on for longer than I expected as things were complicated. The Geiger counter registered counts per minute of gamma, beta and alpha particles. But I was interested in a radiation count of absorbed dosages of significant amounts of radiation. So right off the bat, Pursley could not give me a direct answer, as to what my Geiger counter clicks meant.

I later stopped in to see the other theorist in the department besides me. Branford Jensen or Branny, was becoming a pal, and he gave a simpler but useful suggestion about how to interpret the Geiger counter readings.

Branny was a prematurely balding, six-foot, open-faced Texan. He was very well-read and brilliant in a way, but reticent to work on things he could not quickly understand or which promised to not be very significant. This meant, in my judgment, he was unlikely to ever do anything really important or useful. He was a very warm human being, however, and well liked by most.

One friend said it best, The trouble with Branny is that he always tries to astound you with what he does.

Jim, tomorrow walk across the grass and then use the Geiger counter to get a reading from your shoes. Do the same with the soil your uncle brings back. If his reading is say ten times your reading—you need to worry a bit and do some more investigation. If they are the same order of magnitude forget about it.

That sounded OK to me so I left for the day. I headed over to the Lariat, a restaurant across 5th Avenue from the campus,