Day Eighty-four, in Which the Narrator is Irradiated

"This is a unique experience; I don't think they usually let people into uranium mines."
"For a pretty good reason, right?"
"Well, they aired it out yesterday."
"Aired it out? Can you do that with radiation? Just air it out?"
"I'm not sure."
"I really don't think you can."

And so we descended into the invisibly pulsing mines of Jáchymov. Map:


The world has Jáchymov to 'thank' for about five things:

• The word dollar, which came from thaler, which came from a hip twist on Jáchymov;
• eleven tons of silver, give or take a few million dollars' worth;
• the element radium, which Marie Curie discovered here before it killed her and claimed its rightful place as the most ungrateful of the alkaline earth metals;
• a couple hundred Soviet nuclear weapons; and
  
• this blog post.

So: sort of a mixed bag. That's a metaphor I try to stay away from, because it's tired and pallid, but I also try to stay away from uranium, so. Also, I think if we take the metaphorical vehicle as a burlap sack stuffed with uranium ore, fine silverware, and an ICBM, it can't help but illuminate the point.

Before we were standing in the wet, narrow shaft listening to the (divinely affecting and directly told--imagine Vonnegut's sensibility for sincerity in the face of apocalyptic horror) stories of a former political prisoner made to work in the mines, we visited the camp at which the ore was processed. It was also staffed (word choice) by political prisoners. The thematic and visual center of the camp was Věž smrti--the tower of death. In it, prisoners were tasked with grinding down high-quality uranium for shipment to the USSR. The air was continually saturated with impossibly poisonous uranium dust. A short time in the tower was more than enough to forever conclude one's prospects for leading a healthy life; scoliosis and cancer filtered out of the tower in neverending waves, borne by the workers' frail bodies.

Afterward, we went and saw a castle on a cliff.