"Thirty-eight years old, fit and handsome, John Blackburn was a former Air Force pilot and evangelical Christian. His wife, a veterinarian, healed animals and homeschooled their five children with the Bible as their textbook. The coming end of days was certainty, not poetry, and for John, the end did arrive--cancer. The healing hands of his community hovered over growing tumors in his torso, but his disease continued to progress. At the time, no one knew that the Ogallala Aquifer, the giant underground sponge of wet rock that irrigates the High Plains, was awash in PFAs--carcinogenic residuals of firefighting foams. The deadly chemicals seeped into the wells of Lubbock and the water of Reese Air Force Base, and from there, the blood of John Blackburn. Kathleen Blackburn was a teenager in 1998, when her father was diagnosed. For fourteen months her parents pursued a miracle through faith healing instead of traditional medicine, and Kathleen wondered why her own prayers did nothing to stem her father's decline. Helping to care for her dad and with responsibility for her siblings, Kathleen feared that her faith was simply not strong enough--that any misstep could kill her father. But the family's resolute vigilance was powerless against the ravages wrought by contaminated water. Now, in beautiful but anguished detail, Kathleen writes the truth. An arresting portrait of the pernicious creep of decline, and a powerful cry for environmental justice, Loose of Earth captures the desperate futility and unbending religious faith that devastated a family, leaving them waiting for a miracle that would never come"--
An arresting memoir of love and unbending religion, toxicity and disease, and one familys desperate wait for a miracle that never came.
An arresting memoir of love and unbending religion, toxicity and disease, and one familys desperate wait for a miracle that never came.
Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn was the oldest of five children, a twelve-year-old from Lubbock, Texas, whose evangelical family eschewed public education for homeschooling, and wove improbable scientific theories into literal interpretations of the bible. Then her father, a former air force pilot, was diagnosed with cancer at the age of thirty-eight, and, it was like throwing gasoline on the Holy Spirit. Stirred by her mother, the family committed to an extreme diet and sought deliverance from equally extreme sources: a traveling tent preacher, a Malaysian holy man, a local faith-healer who led services called Miracles on 34th Street.
What they didnt know at the time was that their lives were entangled with a larger, less visible environmental catastrophe. Fire-fighting foams containing carcinogenic compounds had contaminated the drinking water of every military site where her father worked. Commonly referred to as forever chemicals, the presence of PFAs in West Texas besieged a landscape already burdened with vanishing water, taking up residence in wells and in the bloodstreams of people who lived there. An arresting portrait of the pernicious creep of decline, and a powerful cry for environmental justice, Loose of Earth captures the desperate futility and unbending religious faith that devastated a family, leaving them waiting for a miracle that would never come.
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