The Story of Cheesequake

I used to hike with the Sierra Club and the Appalachian Mountain Club (AKA “the Hiking Nazis”) on weekends. Once I joined a hike into New Jersey. It was led by a geologist who told us the town we visited (from the top of a mountain, surrounded by trees) was called “Cheesequake.”

“Gosh,” I said, “that’s a funny name!”

He replied, “The locals called it that because it gets so many earth tremors.” Then he said, “Look: this is a wild geranium!”

Guess where they put a nuclear reactor?

In our immediate area, we have Shoreham and the Brookhaven National Lab. At Brookhaven, they were burying spent nuclear fuel rods in loose shale. Geologists discovered that a plume of radiation was spreading underground. This, as you know, is an area with many homes.

When I was a little kid, my father used to buy his gasoline at a Gulf station on Montauk Highway. The owner, who lived in North Shirley, was battling cancer. There is, of course, a local cancer cluster.

In 1979, we had a scare at Three Mile Island in Harrisburg, PA. (Some wits call Harrisburg “the town that glows in the dark.”) In 2011, the reactor in Fukushima, Japan, exploded. In 1986, the reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine, exploded. The area is now uninhabited. By humans. Scientists say “the dogs are evolving at a different rate.” Godzilla, anyone?

During the Depression, people wore wristwatches with glowing numerals. Companies hired ladies to paint the dials with radium. Most of these women developed radiation poisoning. A site in Moriches where a former watch plant was located got condemned for this reason.

A former governor of New York announced plans to make Long Island “a nuclear park.”

For hundreds of years, the Netherlands and Scandinavia have utilized their wealth of wind energy (windmills!). All over Europe, in traditional countries, they use water energy (watermills). The Northerners have harnessed marsh gas/geothermal. China has already gone largely solar, as have some of the Middle Eastern nations. This is called “renewable energy.”

None of this stuff glows in the dark.