FORBIDDEN FRUIT

Written for The Planet Magazine

Four sisters and one nurse who grew up in Cashmere, Washington, during the era of agricultural DDT use tell their stories of developing breast cancer.

Story by Regan Bervar | Photos by Nick Pinkham and Regan Bervar

An aging yellow house sits at the top of a hill in Cashmere, Washington, overlooking hectares of orchards in bloom. Laughter echoes through the branches as children duck through apple trees, now speckled with pale pink blossoms. A sweet smell floats in the air, reminiscent of the beginning of spring, but there’s something synthetic about it. The roaring engine of a plane is heard in the distance.

The children in the orchard pause for a moment to look up at the sky, then resume playing. Their feet patter loudly on the dirt in their outdoor wonderland. As its metal body breaches the valley walls, the plane showers down a shroud of white dust on the trees. The light, airy powder engulfs the little farming town in a cloud, blanketing everything in its path.

IF THIS HAD been a rain cloud, perhaps the children in the orchard and many others in the valley would have had very different lives. The dust is DDT. The children, Pamela, Charlton, Trudy, and Tina Tarver, who each recalled this scene from Cashmere in the 1960s, would each be diagnosed with breast cancer decades later. The diagnosis came so long after the exposure that the distant threat of DDT could almost be forgotten as a possible cause.

“I remember that best Golden Delicious tree just off the yard — it was huge,” said Trudy, who is now 64. “I was up in that tree and they just sprayed me. They were white apples, they had a film on them.”

The apples themselves were coated in a layer so thick, the crystallized outline of pesticide droplets could be seen by the naked eye, said Charlton, nicknamed ‘Peach’, who is now 70 years old.

“You’d just wipe it off on your pants and it would look like the apple was clean,” she said.

The youngest Tarver, Tina, was born in 1957 and remembers the notorious mist in the sky.

“It was kind of cool, really, to see the planes go over and the helicopters have all the stuff fallout,” she said. “It was kind of pretty. It would be like a cloud of mist that was falling. Everybody called it ‘spray dope.’”

As a woman in the Tarver family, cancer is a constant threat gnawing at the back of my mind. I chose to investigate this story for my mother, Tina, and my aunts Pam, Peach and Trudy because of the way it has affected our lives. The link between DDT and breast cancer is not set in stone, and possibly never will be, with its discontinued use in the U.S.

“I always think that cancer takes a long time to grow in your body,” Tina said. “So I think about what was happening all throughout my life and what I was exposed to. I always go back to the orchard.”

Heidi Sitton is a friend of the Tarver family who grew up with a very similar childhood down the road. She is now a nurse and lives in Monroe, Washington. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003.

“We literally would ride our bikes through it. They’d crop dust and it’d land all over us,” Heidi said. “We didn’t think twice to run for cover.”

Heidi said she and her friends thought of the spray as mosquito repellent because of its smell and would rub it into their skin in the summer to prevent bug bites.

“I can remember that if we were on our bikes and we’d see them starting to spray the orchard, we’d run our bikes right up to the back of it, so then we’d get the first sprays as it was coming out,” she said. “We didn’t even think that later on we’d be going through cancer treatment.”

Out of all the breast cancer survivors I interviewed from Cashmere, including my mother, aunts and Heidi, similar stories and trends appeared that I couldn’t ignore. Each woman told me they had been waiting for someone to tell this story.

When bees began disappearing and birds were struggling to reproduce, DDT was suspected to be a cause. The chemical was used in the orchards for several decades starting in the late 1940s. But because of its chemical structure, it stays in the environment for years. It replaced the use of lead arsenate as a pesticide in 1948, which was found to be carcinogenic and persistent in the environment. Lead and arsenic can still be found in the soil in Eastern Washington today.

“There’s this thing that we call regrettable substitution,” said John Kissel, a professor at the University of Washington and member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chemical Safety Advisory Committee. His research focuses on human exposure to environmental contaminants.

“You have a problem so you fix it, and then you learn later that the thing that you fixed it with is also a problem,” he said.

In this case, the regrettable substitution was DDT. By the 1960s, scientists were beginning to notice its long-lasting effects. The pesticide began to show up everywhere in ecosystems and made its way into the food web. It is known as a persistent and bioaccumulative toxin, because it degrades very slowly in the environment. DDT was found in livestock, fruits, vegetables and bodies of water — ideal places for it to make its way into the systems of humans and animals.

The pesticide wasn’t found to have any immediate effects on humans. As a result, very few took precautions in the presence of the spray when it was used between 1948 and 1972, Kissel said.

“You could tell when somebody was spraying. You could smell it before you could see it. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell but it definitely had a bit of chemicals in it,” Peach said. “I remember one time when Pam and I were riding down to the pool in the summer on our bikes and a sprayer came around the corner and we were just saturated with the spray.”

The chemical accumulates in fat cells, allowing it to linger in the body for years, and even decades, after exposure.

“With all of these things, if they don’t have an immediate acute toxic effect then we tend to think it’s fine,” Kissel said. “And then we find out later. It takes decades for people to resolve what’s going on and in the meantime lots of people get exposed.”

Scientists are finding the timing of exposure to a chemical is very important to determine the extent of its effects.

“[DDT didn’t] affect other people around the community, but it’s affecting those who went to Cashmere,” Heidi said. “That’s the weird part to me… It should have been affecting more than just Cashmere High School.”

America witnessed the heaviest use of DDT from 1959 to 1967, when my mom and aunts were young girls. A recent study found that high concentrations of DDT in the body were associated with a five-fold increase in risk of breast cancer for women who were exposed under the age of 14 or while in utero.

“You only heard ‘you have malignant cancer’ usually from a phone call from the doctor’s office,” Heidi said, recalling the moment when she learned of her diagnosis. “You just put the phone down and go, ‘Oh my god.’ And then you go hysterical.”

Heidi has connected with more than 30 people from Cashmere High School who graduated between 1969 and 1989 and have been diagnosed with cancer. Whether or not it is linked to DDT can’t be proven, so the evidence sits, left to interpretation.

“I mean, none of us were smokers. We weren’t heavy drinkers. None of us were obese. We lived clean and we had cancer,” Heidi said. “It’s a one in eight incidence of breast cancer in women. In Cashmere, it’s one in five.”

Out of those who have done genetic testing, she has heard of none with the BRCA gene, which increases the risk of breast cancer. Scientists suspect DDT could be linked to developing advanced-stage tumors because it is a synthetic estrogen and possible endocrine disruptor, according to a 2015 study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. After entering remission in 2003, Heidi was diagnosed with cancer again in 2014, this time at a more advanced stage, like Trudy, Peach and Pam’s.

“They would have sent me home had I not said, ‘but there’s a lump there,’” Heidi said after she heard her mammogram was clear. “Then they came back and said, ‘We’re really sorry.’ So I ended up with a bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction.”

The valley where Cashmere lies is the best place on earth to grow pears, said orchardist Scott Milne, because of the way the mountains surround it. Every successful orchard sprayed DDT from 1948 to 1972, Milne said. It’s just what people did because it wasn’t known to have negative side-effects until animals and ecosystems started suffering. Milne has been working for 42 years on his farm in Cashmere, and grew up in the same area as Heidi and the Tarver sisters. He is now making the transition from conventional to organic farming, which takes a few years of not using synthetic pesticides. Since he began this three-year transition, he has noticed wildlife making its way back to his farm.

“Because we’re not using as many harmful pesticides, we’re getting animals back in here,” Milne said. “We’ve never had those in here before. We used to just have coyote and deer, mainly.”

He walks through rows of pear trees on his 18-hectare farm. The tree bark is a beautiful, bright white under the afternoon sun, but not from chemical sprays.

“For codling moth you’d have to spray like every 21 days throughout the year in the summer,” Milne said. “You’ve heard about stuff like Round Up, that it’s killing people, but the verdict is still up in the air so that’s another reason for me to step away from [pesticides].”

Though no longer used as a commercial pesticide in the U.S., DDT is still used today in Africa as a mosquito repellent to combat malaria.

The yellow house where the Tarver sisters grew up still sits on its plot of land in Cashmere, overlooking the valley of fruit in full bloom. It looks as if time stood still, conjuring images of the Tarver girls over 50 years ago at their childhood home.

“Even when I go back over there today, if they’re spraying anything that’s toxic they’re dressed in hazmat suits,” Heidi said with a chuckle. “I’m laughing only because it was just so common. We just didn’t think about it.”

The Tarver women, a family of four sisters, may never know what caused their breast cancer. Cancer doesn’t need a reason to strike, but the way it affected a whole slew of sisters and the population of Cashmere seems uncharacteristic to my family.

Hearing each of my aunts and my mom, one by one, face breast cancer diagnoses doesn’t get easier. None of us will ever be immune to hearing the word ‘cancer.’ They are lucky to have the support system to rely on each other through chemotherapy and radiation, but every diagnosis is a reminder of the cancer haunting our family.

Some lost their hair, others bear radiation tattoos. My aunt Pam was the first to be diagnosed in 1996, the year I was born. The most recent is my aunt Peach, who was diagnosed in the beginning of 2018 and is currently contemplating a double mastectomy. Over a span of 22 years, the women who had left Cashmere behind were still getting cancer.

The presence of DDT still haunts the beautiful orchards of Cashmere, even though it hasn’t been regulated for use in the United States since 1972. DDT can be found in the Wenatchee water basin today and where orchards grow. It sits deep down in the soil, tangled up in a web of tree roots, lurking under ruby-ripe apples, too tempting not to pick. And though it no longer rains from planes flying overhead, DDT’s harmful effects persist in the present.

“I thought we were really lucky that we escaped a lot of that stuff,” Peach said laughing. “Maybe not.”