G.I.: A brief history of the weird battle raging inside me

Chapter 1

It was a slow news day.

I spent the morning going through the Syracuse Post-Standard looking for something to localize, but there was nothing. It was late summer, Cortland's state university was quiet, the city council and county legislature were even quieter, and all the pissing and shouting over low-level radioactive waste had all but died down.

Cortland, a small city in central New York about thirty minutes south of Syracuse, wasn't exactly a bustling metropolis even on good news days, but this day I was really struggling. The bureau where I worked, located in an orange-carpeted room above an ice cream shop on Main Street, looked out on the brick turn-of-the-century post office. I watched people come and go, and saw an old man in a station wagon almost back into a guy on a ten-speed he didn't see who yelled, "Look where you're going, asshole!" I also saw some young co-eds in shorts and tanned thighs going to mail some letters. It was all fine and dandy, but none of it was newsworthy.

The steel desk where I sat was littered with the blank sheets of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven newsprint I used to take notes when I was in the office. Stacks of unused reporter's notebooks were jammed into one drawer, another drawer was crammed with used ones with some good pages left. An IBM personal computer - one of the very original ones with the steel box, two large floppy drives and green monochrome monitor - sat nearby, unused, the flat cursor blinked, waiting.

It was long before the Internet, so I couldn't do a Web search to pick up a lead on a story. Instead, I went through the Post-Standard again, read my own bylines, then flipped through the Cortland Standard, the local daily, and tossed them both in the pile of papers that lined the wall.

"Balls," I said to no one.

The police scanner on the shelf in the corner rasped every few minutes, but there were no tones indicating an emergency. Just police chatter. Lately, there had been quite a few car fires on Interstate 81 just out of town, but nothing today. It amazed me how many cars caught fire tooling down the road. Fire trucks were dispatched three or four times a week.

Nothing today, though, and I decided to look through my files for some notes on a story I might update. If I could rustle up an idea, find two good sources and get twelve inches out of it, I'd be home free. I needed at least two stories a day to meet my quota and keep my editor happy, but I'd settle for one and maybe some art.

In my files were notes about New York's Low-Level Radioactive Waste Siting Commission, but the news on that had all but died out. In news terms, it was great while it lasted. In human terms, far less so.

When the federal government told states like New York they could no longer ship stuff like lightly radioactive hospital waste to other states that actually wanted the revenue they earned from it, states like New York worked frantically to find safe backwaters where they might dump the stuff. It was as popular as siting a nuclear reactor. Though the radiation wasn't very strong as its name might suggest, the idea of trucking a bunch of low-level radioactive crap to a landfill somewhere close to where people lived their lives made people go nuts. I didn't blame them. After all, I lived there, too.

Turns out, one of the places New York's commission narrowed the state's list down to was a rural town in Cortland County called Cincinnatus, a rural town where cows outnumbered people by about three to one and school buses wore out their clutches as often as they wore out tires.

All hell broke loose when the state commission made its announcement, and as a reporter, I had stories to write about every day. First, about the environmentalists screaming bloody murder. Next, about the farmers looking to sell their land for big bucks and move away rich. Then, about the town-hall meetings with the commissioners, who sat in nice suits and took shit from people in blue jeans. Finally, Gov. Mario Cuomo flew in by helicopter from Albany with an army-sized entourage, the pushy press corps, and a stately manner that called for - and actually got - calm.