Photograph by Patricia Voulgaris for Harper’s Magazine © The artist
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Two years after my father died, our childhood home in California was finally empty and my brother and I made plans to clean out the garage. Our backyard adjoined that of the house around the corner, where our father had grown up; we called that the Old House. My parents eventually came to own the houses on both sides of ours as well, forming a tiny L-shaped kingdom, with a tidy complex of workshop, woodshed, and garage nestled in its crook. Our father was a high school industrial-arts teacher, and he moonlighted as a radio and television repairman. This was his sovereign territory, entered at one’s own risk. We took it apart.
The garage was crammed with the dense sediment of decades. We found the expected debris: a rusty saw, decades-old utility bills, years of National Geographic issues molded together into bricks. My brother and I held long silences as we cleaned. Now and then, holding up an old plane model: “Oh, come here!” “Look at this”: a pinup calendar from 1965. I knew my father’s story: a teacher, collector, firefighter, inventor, alcoholic. But there were glimpses of a story neither of us knew. Brass knuckles. A box of Super 8 pornography. Several large, long-expired checks from banks whose names we didn’t recognize.
I had arrived the day before, a beautiful September day. I got a late start from my home in Portland on the three-hundred-mile drive to my brother’s house. The radio played doleful music behind the news. My brother opened the door, tears on his face, and all evening we watched the slow, eternal fall of the towers over and over again. The firemen, I whispered, the firemen, going in. We had grown up with fire; many of the men we knew were volunteer firefighters, and our father had been the assistant chief. The town had a great whooping siren that we could hear for miles, letting us know to get out of the road. We had an alarm and a radio at home, too, to wake him in the night. In the dark we could hear the piercing whistle, curses, a thumping run out the door, and the pickup peeling hard out of the driveway to the station a few blocks away. He kept a set of turnouts by the bed, thick protective pants with suspenders that he could pull up over his pajamas. The bedroom always smelled slightly of sour smoke.
Our father kept fighting fires after our mother died, and when they wouldn’t let him go in anymore, he just drove the truck until they gently made him stop. After that he sat on the couch and let the house collapse around him. His workshop burned down one night, and he retreated even more. He died himself before he had to watch the towers collapse. Watching that might have killed him.
A child’s chemistry set from the Thirties. A giant set of calipers. His first teaching contract. Then, on a shelf covered in dust, I found a small, heavy bottle made of thick brown glass. I went out to stand on the rutted dirt I would dig up and fill in with my Tonka bulldozer when I was a little girl. I unscrewed the tight lid and saw a shivering mirror. I knew it immediately, though I had seen mercury only once or twice before, when a thermometer broke. Does anyone forget its strangeness? I stared at the trembling wave of silver for a long time, all brightness in a world suddenly ashen and gray.
The little bottle sat on a shelf above my desk for more than twenty years. I resisted opening it, but did now and then, to see its ceaseless, shifting radiance. One day last summer, I found myself idly thinking about house fires, as one does when one has grown up around firefighters, and I imagined the little bottle exploding. The vaporous cloud, a dreadful gall. The firemen. It had come to me, and it was my charge to figure out what to do with this thing. I have no idea where my father got the bottle, but he liked his curiosities. I began to study how to get rid of it.
I started with the Environmental Protection Agency website, which has a helpful page on “What to Do If a Mercury Thermometer Breaks,” with instructions on “What NEVER to Do After a Mercury Spill,” which is followed by “Prepping for Clean up of a Broken Mercury Thermometer.” (Have everyone else leave the area. . . . Open all windows and doors to the outside; shut all doors to other parts of the house. DO NOT allow children to help you clean up the spill.) These instructions are followed by a list of nine “Items Needed to Clean Up a Small Mercury Spill” (among these: an eyedropper, duct tape or shaving cream, and a flashlight). The page “What to Do If You Spill More Mercury Than the Amount in a Thermometer,” such as a small glass bottle’s worth, is more insistent. “Call your local health department as soon as possible. If it is after-hours, please call your local fire department.” And if you spill more than a pound? “It is mandatory to call the National Response Center.”
Humans have coveted this bizarre substance for thousands of years. I want and fear this weird metallic life; I like to pick up the bottle just to feel the weight, the rough slosh inside. As I sought to be shed of this dangerous thing, I kept running up against my real wish: to keep it.
Mercury is found in every age of rock. It is rarely free in nature, instead stabilized in various compounds and inorganic salts, especially cinnabar or mercury sulfide. One of the only significant natural sources of elemental mercury is volcanic eruptions. When mercury vapor is released into the atmosphere, it usually comes back to earth and forms compounds again. An alloy of mercury is called an amalgam. One of its eccentricities is how easily it reacts with other metals. Airplanes are mostly made of aluminum, and mercury combines with it as a fragile alloy so readily that mercury is generally not allowed on planes at all. One exception is iron; elemental mercury is often kept in a steel flask.
Mercury begins to evaporate at even very low temperatures. It generates heat in amalgamation, has odd melting and boiling points, is brightly reflective and highly conductive. Mercury is thirteen times denser than water—a single tablespoon weighs nearly half a pound. The surface tension of elemental mercury is so high that the liquid beads up rather than puddling and doesn’t cling to much of anything, ceaselessly vacuuming into itself. A man can sit on top of a pool of it, and a man does in a 1972 photograph from National Geographic. He looks tense, as though he is asking, “How much longer?”
To the alchemists, mercury was ur, a fundamental substance of the world. It could eat other metals and pull gold out of dirt and reflect light like the moon. Alive, mirrorlike, refusing to be tamed: of course it became medicine, a balm for everything from constipation and venereal disease to hepatitis, gout, and gynecological disorders. In the Renaissance, Paracelsus, who was something of a lunatic and one of the world’s first modern chemists, claimed to cure many illnesses with mercury. He cautioned against taking large doses, because mercury had a “concealed winter, coldness, and snow.” His homeopathic recommendations had little effect; the amounts used were sometimes lavish.
In the Age of Sail, mercury was used on ships to treat fever, scurvy, constipation, and more, often in the form of calomel, or mercurous chloride. Most patients died—but they tended to die anyway. The hatmakers of Europe, buried in the pelts of otters and beavers from the lush New World, experimented with various substances to create felt. They tried camel urine, then their own. A group of French hatmakers noticed that one man’s urine produced a better felt. He was being treated for syphilis with calomel, so they switched to mercuric nitrate. Hatmakers across Europe began to go mad.
Mercury found its way into thermometers, mirrors, telescopes, paint, and the pendulums of grandfather clocks. It was used to treat Louisa May Alcott’s typhoid fever and Abraham Lincoln’s depression. During the Civil War, the new surgeon general, William Hammond, thought calomel too dangerous and banned its use in 1863. He was court-martialed.
As much as people love mercury, they love gold more, and the history of mercury is a history of gold. When mercury is added to pulverized gold or silver ore, it combines with the metal flakes into a separate, heavy compound. When this is heated, much of the mercury boils off, and relatively pure solid gold or silver is left behind. If you capture the vapor in a condenser, it can be used again: a perpetual motion of transmutation. But to get a lot of gold this way, you need a lot of mercury, which means a lot of cinnabar. With large deposits of cinnabar, gold, and silver in the Americas, a global economy began to take shape in the sixteenth century and expanded again with the gold rushes in the American West.
Our small town in northern California was born of such a rush; I grew up at the corner of Gold and Miner Streets. California’s gold industry grew alongside a thriving mercury industry, and between 1850 and 1981 the state produced more than 220 million pounds of it. So much was dug up that the U.S. exported mercury for years. Two of California’s mercury mines are now Superfund sites.
My father was an only child, and one afternoon when he was not yet seventeen, his father had a heart attack in the living room and died a few hours later. Suddenly he was alone with his mother, Estelle. I knew her decades later as a chain-smoking Catholic with five siblings, a silent third husband, and a venomous dislike of children. A year later he was an electrician’s mate third class on the USS Oak Hill, sailing to Saipan, to New Guinea, to Luzon, and finally to Japan. He never talked about it.
I have a photograph of myself in my father’s arms when I was only a few days old. He is in his usual T-shirt and slacks, in his usual recliner. I am balanced in the crook of his elbow. He has the strangest look on his face, a mix of alarm and puzzlement, as though he has no idea what he is holding or why. Perhaps he is surprised to find himself alive at all.
After the gold, my hometown depended on logging and ranching. Self-reliance was built in. We rambled on our own for hours, going where we pleased, doing what we pleased. Feral childhood had its risks. A few of us drowned or broke our necks falling out of trees, and one boy I liked was electrocuted while doing farmwork. Someone gave me a baby alligator—I kept a series of odd creatures as pets—and when it died, my father got some formaldehyde from his friend the mortician so I could embalm it. I never wore a seat belt, and we usually rode to our family’s cabin in the back of the pickup. We swam in the river alone. I knew to check for black widows before sitting down in a latrine. That my father had a bottle of extraordinary toxicity in the garage did not surprise me.
He taught electronics, drafting, and wood shop, and subbed in for metal shop and welding. The industrial-arts department was housed in a building separate from the rest of the school, a gap as much psychic as physical. The boys who drifted toward my father’s classes longed for car engines and power tools. Dad had a fierce reputation, and I never heard the end of it. (Once, I had a brilliant inspiration for his birthday and gave him a baseball cap emblazoned with the warning known to firefighters everywhere: stay back 200 feet.) I imagine he might have used the mercury in class, for some arcane demonstration: the greasy-fingered boys huddling around a workbench to watch my father mixing up a little danger.
I can hear him now, barking orders.
Elemental mercury, considered pure at 99.99 percent, is sold in a standard flask of seventy-six pounds for around $2,500, despite a worldwide stock of about 600,000 tons. It’s valuable in so many ways: mercury is found in laboratory thermometers, lamps, barometers, manometers, electrical switches, and relays. Mercury has been used in the manufacture of chlorine and caustic soda, in cement production, as a coolant in nuclear reactors, in fungicides, reagents, embalming, batteries, preservatives, antiseptics, and cosmetics. Many of these uses have been phased out in the United States and other Western countries but remain common in the developing world. Americans still use around sixteen tons each year, and about half of our domestic use goes into teeth. (A few people are so disturbed at having mercury in their fillings that they have them replaced, though dental amalgam has been shown to be quite stable. Until cremation, that is. One study estimated that about 7 percent of total mercury emissions in British Columbia came from crematoria.)
Mercury is contained in fossil fuels, especially in coal, and vapor is released when they are burned. Hydroelectric dams and wildfires both disrupt the soil and can release the mercury sequestered there. Since the sixteenth century, humans have increased the concentration of mercury in the atmosphere by sevenfold. When mercury vapor condenses and enters water systems, it is taken up by microorganisms to form an organic compound called methylmercury, which climbs the food chain through bioaccumulation. It concentrates in rice, and finds its way into Adélie penguins, frigate birds, the American alligator, the Nile crocodile, beluga whales, dragonflies, frogs, kingfishers, and especially fish. Many American health authorities recommend strictly limiting how much freshwater fish one eats. Almost every human being has at least a trace of mercury in their bodies. It can be distributed throughout the body, crossing the blood-brain barrier and the placenta easily and potentially causing severe birth defects. Chelation is the only available treatment, and it is not entirely effective. Mercury doesn’t go away, and it never gets safer. It is locked within, woven into the fabric of the body, cell by cell, like family.
Mercury in small amounts isn’t particularly dangerous to swallow; in its elemental form, it usually passes through the gut. Rubbing mercury ointment into the skin, for centuries a common treatment for many ailments, is dangerous over time. Mercury-vapor inhalation can be acute and serious, causing everything from pneumonia to hearing loss, brain damage, and respiratory failure. But skin contact and inhalation are largely voluntary ways to get poisoned. The rest of us are just downstream.
Mercury wasn’t designated as a dangerous material in the 1972 Ocean Dumping Act. The U.S. ban on industrial-waste dumping didn’t pass until 1991; the EPA didn’t set comprehensive standards for mercury pollution from coal- and oil-powered plants until 2011. In 2008, under President Bush, the Mercury Export Ban Act passed. It focuses on elemental mercury, not mercury-containing products, compounds, or waste—and as is usually the case with industrial rules, it didn’t take effect for years. That gave time for manufacturers in the West to sell large quantities on the global market, mostly to countries with less robust standards. (One painful example: because mercury inhibits melanin production, it is often included in skin-lightening creams.) The best we can do now with what remains is store it away. Over the next few decades, the federal government is projected to manage 10,000 metric tons.
Modern industrial-scale gold mining is done almost entirely with cyanide, and the United States has not had a designated mercury mine since 1992. But mercury is an inextricable part of the equation. Most American-mined gold comes from Nevada, and last year its production resulted in more than a hundred metric tons of mercury byproduct and waste, much of it in the form of calomel. According to a 2005 report addressed to the EPA about these mines, their mercury emissions were not regulated, because “the imposition of regulations was seen as costly to both the regulating agency and to the mining industry.” What happened to the waste? Says the report:
The calomel is captured as a precipitate and transferred to a mercury recycler who presumably converts it to elemental mercury and sells it into commerce. . . . We were unable to obtain information on byproduct production in other states.
(The italics are mine.)
In 2013, after three years of negotiations and following what must have been one wild all-nighter in Geneva, 140 nations adopted the first binding treaty meant to reduce global mercury emissions. It is known as the Minamata Convention on Mercury, after the widespread mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan. The treaty addresses mining, along with everything from fireworks and ritual uses to pesticides and cosmetics. Chlor-alkali production using mercury is due to be phased out next year. Primary mercury mining is supposed to end “in known producing parties” by 2032. Drop by drop.
Meanwhile, the price of gold has more than doubled since 2009, which has led to a new and often illegal trade in mercury. One of the main concerns of the Minamata Convention is artisanal and small-scale gold mining, known as ASGM. Its rudimentary methods produce about 15 percent of the world’s gold and more than a third of the human-caused mercury pollution in the world. Millions of people of all ages bend to this labor, bare-handed, bare-chested, without masks. They clean out sluices, smash ore with rocks and hammers, haul buckets of muddy water up slippery hills. It is filthy work. In the videos I’ve seen, workers show unmistakable signs of mercury poisoning—flickering eyelids, tremors. A boy feeds ore into an enormous pounding drum, his face shining with sweat. He glances back at the camera, holding one hand to his ear, and I imagine he is clutching a talisman.
ASGM is simply Minamata on a global scale. Irresponsible artisanal mining is rampant in Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Mali, Ghana, Guinea, Madagascar, and elsewhere. China is the world’s leader in mercury mining; Mexico has a thriving black market. The largest exporters include Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates. All these countries have ratified the Minamata Convention.
Dad could whistle birdsong as lovely as the real thing. Sometimes our grandfather came to the cabin with us and went fishing in the dawn light, when the mist floated off the river in fine wisps. We breakfasted on the trout he caught, eating whole fish like corn on the cob, trying to get every fleck of the succulent flesh. Dad built a clever cage for my pets, never complaining about the creatures I collected. Sometimes I joined him on his rounds: the fire station, the hardware store, the meat market, the Elks Lodge, and the sporting-goods store, where I stared down the mounted heads of mule deer and mountain goats. When I was ten, he made me a pair of water skis and sometimes took us to the reservoir to jump the boat wakes in the sun.
As I got older, we clashed more and more: His casual conservatism, my righteous indignation. His reputation and my juvenile delinquency. Most of all I blamed him for settling, the gravest of sins to me in those years. How could he resign himself to this imperfect world? I can see now that my growing complaints about what I saw as his resignation, his life, landed like a slap across his face every time. It is possible to be ashamed of one’s good luck, none of it of one’s own making. Do we ever understand the streams of danger that slip by, never seen?
I was fifteen when I first saw the photos of Minamata’s broken bodies. In 1972, Life magazine published W. Eugene Smith’s photographs of villagers in the Japanese fishing town. The Chisso Corporation, which made fertilizer and acetaldehyde, a chemical used in plastics, had been dumping mercury directly into Minamata Bay for many years. But in 1956, children and adults began falling ill with convulsions, delirium, loss of muscle control, drooling, and tremors. On autopsy, the children’s brains looked like soft sponges. Fifty years later, hundreds have died and thousands have been poisoned. Large-scale mercury poisoning caused by contamination is still known as Minamata disease.
Chisso continued to dump mercury into the bay for another twelve years after the first case was diagnosed. A group of victims eventually sued the company, and the trial lasted almost four years. Meanwhile, in 1965, another company dumping mercury caused the same disaster in a nearby area called Niigata. About 690 people were poisoned there. In Iraq, a few years later, mercury-treated wheat intended for planting was instead turned into flour; at least 6,000 people were poisoned and 459 people died. From 1962 to 1970, a chlor-alkali plant in Ontario dumped around twenty-two thousand pounds of mercury into the water system traditionally fished by the Grassy Narrows and Wabaseemoong First Nations. The local fisheries were destroyed, and many people were sickened. In the early Seventies, Aileen Smith, W. Eugene Smith’s wife, went to Canada to meet with the victims. The government had taken years to begin testing. “What more do they have to know?” she wrote. “We have already had our Niigata and Minamata. Must we have more? When will people realize that the world is not made of compartments?”
I held adults responsible for a world full of crises and disaster. That most of the real disasters were taking place far away from my safe little town didn’t matter. I spent years angry and determined to fix a broken state of affairs. And over time, I grew less insistent and quieter, and gradually I forgot about Minamata. I forgot about a lot of things. I was able to ignore my little bottle of danger for twenty-two years. And all this time, the permafrost, which holds the largest reservoir of elemental mercury on the planet, has been melting.
It is illegal to send mercury or most mercury-containing products, including antiques, via the U.S. Postal Service, but shipping companies can just charge extra for it. The laws regulating private use are weak. You can buy high-purity mercury from reliable chemical and science-supply companies. You can also buy mercury on eBay or get a small vial from Luciteria Science, which serves the niche market of element collectors. A metal scrap company offers to send it to me by airmail; their website helpfully answers the question “What is Mercury?”
Mercury spills happen fairly often; perhaps this should not be surprising. In Portland, a man tried to create a hydrogen fuel cell from a mix of mercury, sodium, and powdered aluminum. The vapors escaped and sent several firefighters to the hospital for chelation therapy. A decade ago in Michigan, a man tried to get gold out of jewelry by heating it with mercury; he nearly died, and his house had to be demolished. Last year in Missouri, mercury droplets were found throughout a USPS processing center, disrupting mail delivery in the area for months. And on a hot August day in 2023, a woman who lives a few miles from me found mercury thrown across her parked car. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and the EPA blocked off the site for four days; her car was a total loss.
On YouTube, I watched a man toss a cannonball into a giant tub of mercury. A man tries to balance an anvil on it, and stands in the tub, struggling to reach the bottom. I watched a brief compilation video called “15 Completely Hazardous Mercury Experiments,” and then a video showing what happens when a few drops of mercury fall on gold leaf. The gold quickly crumbles, shrinking, until the mix can be swept into a small silver globule. “I was so amused with it, I did it twenty-three more times,” says the narrator, “with every other gold leaf that I had.”
I visited a chemist at a nearby university. Her department keeps mercury around to check the purity of other metals and will sometimes collect small amounts from the community—“mainly dentists who are retiring,” she told me. She offered to take mine. Then she told me about a few casual but harrowing mercury disasters she had survived—broken flasks, small explosions. Droplets splashed about. But she also told me I didn’t really need to worry. “Elemental mercury is not very dangerous,” she said. House fires are really the main concern, she agreed. Just don’t handle it too much. “And,” she added, “don’t spill it.”
I grabbed the bag of dead batteries and old fluorescent light bulbs from under my kitchen sink and headed to my county’s hazardous-waste center, on the Willamette River. A lanky middle-aged man in white coveralls and tightly fitted goggles came to my window. Would they take a small bottle of mercury for recycling? I asked. Sure, he said. He told me to bring it inside a plastic bag in a box with foam packaging for safety.
“It’s in a laboratory-quality glass bottle,” I said. I handed him the bags of batteries and light bulbs. He glanced at them, and then handed the bag to a silent young woman in identical coveralls.
The hazardous-waste center is dwarfed by ships unloading at nearby terminals, the acres of enormous oil and natural-gas storage tanks. My stash seemed so small in comparison. My mother sweeping the thermometer into the trash. My father gripping a chain saw in his dark, farmer-tanned arms, squinting over smoke rising from the cigarette in his mouth. What would he say? He taught teenagers how to use power tools and weld and wire electricity. He pulled bodies out of fires. Maybe he would have snatched the bottle back and told me to leave it alone.
In my early notes I wrote, He was an angry man. It isn’t the first time I’ve written that sentence. And why not? His father had died when he was sixteen, leaving him alone with that woman. He lost the boat. His stepfather sold our beloved cabin to strangers, without a word. Widowed again, Estelle moved in next door to us and never left. She was just there, on our sofa, at the table, crooking her finger, making demands. And I embarrassed and scared him in a million ways. His temper, his fists—his drinking. I have been thinking of Dad as the mercury, but really, he was the fish—a carrier of poison magnified through generations of pioneers and failures, strivers and lost boys. When a watershed is laced with mercury, individual fish are not cured. The system can recover when the old fish die and new fish are born. It is the work of ages.
I didn’t see my father very often in the last few years of his life. He was still drinking and still angry, and the house was slowly filling with unopened packages and piles of magazines and unpaid bills. My sister tried to keep him afloat. For a few good reasons, I was hundreds of miles away. I had not exactly turned into vapor, but I did drift.
I am my father’s daughter. Not a victim, not of anything. I want to keep it all, and I don’t really have a choice: the fire trucks and the river and the rages and the water skis and the bottle. And I want to keep—I have to keep—a little of the anger. All I’ve learned these months, I can’t forget; the idea of mercury, if not the thing itself, is lodged in me now.
“Where did you get it?” the waste-center employee asked.
“I inherited it from my father,” I finally said. “My crazy father had a lot of wild stuff.”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We do a lot of business with crazy fathers.”
And so, on a cold winter day in a cold room near an open door, I sit on the floor and open the bottle over a big piece of cloth. I pour it into a glass bowl and weigh it: just over a pound, about two and a quarter tablespoons. A layer of fine black grit rides the surface. When I gently roll the bowl, the powder clings to the glass and builds up into a tiny black dune on one side. The mercury clings to nothing but itself, seeking only itself. When I touch it, my finger bounces off; I have to push in, and it is cold. But no, not cold: heavy. Squeezing, its density like a clamp. And when I pull away it is as though I have touched nothing. No sign. The sun strikes the surface like a slap of light, as bright as a star’s flash.
I don’t spend much time with it before pulling the mercury up with a syringe and returning it to the little bottle. A few droplets fall onto the cloth, and I chase them carefully. They run like lively aliens, catching each other and magically disappearing until I have chased them all back into the bottle, where they slide away like ghosts. I put the bottle back on the shelf.
