Columnist Logan Jenkins

By Logan Jenkins, San Diego Union-Tribute

Sunday, July 4, 2010 at 9 p.m.

Three years ago, my sister died in a cancer cluster.

Or so she and her fellow teachers believed like an article of faith.

As it almost invariably does, the California Cancer Registry debunked the plague that gave my sister’s terminal illness meaning beyond herself.

If she died from something evil in the ground, air or water, my sister would be transformed into an innocent canary in a coal mine, not a loser in a lottery of random chance. Her long illness, if dramatic environmental causes could be found, could save others from the same fate.

As in the vast majority of reported clusters — and there are hundreds, if not thousands, every year — state epidemiologists concluded that statistical chance caused the appearance of a cancer cluster at La Quinta Middle School.

At last count, some 18 La Quinta Middle School employees contracted cancer over a 15-year period. More than a dozen former students have been diagnosed.

In the past few years, my sister’s colleagues have retired or transferred. To those burdened by memory, it remains a sick school, a Love Canal with classrooms that the state would never acknowledge.

The prohibitive odds are that the cancer cluster around Carlsbad’s Kelly Elementary School will, in time, also fade from the news pages.

The harsh truth is that cancer occurs often and for any number of complex reasons. Finding a specific cause, a carcinogenic smoking gun, is terribly rare.

…

“Don’t let anyone suffer the way I have.”

Those were among the last words of a 16-year-old Carlsbad boy to his stricken parents.

In the last six months, Stacey and John Quartarone have dedicated themselves to find out if Chase, who passed away last December of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, died because he was exposed to something toxic in his neighborhood.

“My mantra, my life, my goal is to be true to his request,” John told me.

A grieving father can’t discover a cure for cancer, but the retired librarian has collected information like a Nobel Prize winner. He’s turned the mining of ominous data into a part-time job, growing Chase’s death into a well-publicized cluster, pressuring public health officials to hold packed meetings, pressing politicians to take notice of the ominously high numbers of cancer victims.

John Quartarone doesn’t know exactly where the evil lurks — in the nearby Encina power plant? the Agua Hedionda Lagoon? the pesticide-rich farmland upon which houses have been built? — but he won’t rest until every test has been conducted, every environmental factor ruled out.

“When the scientists report that everything is standard, I’ll be content,” he told me.

Until then, he’ll push for expensive tests. Local politicians like Supervisor Bill Horn and Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Solana Beach, both facing re-election, have heard the call.

…

In his story on the most recent public meeting in Carlsbad, Union-Tribune reporter Keith Darcé quoted a UCSD psychology professor suggesting that the belief in cancer clusters is often a result of the human refusal to believe that a loved one died from chance, from an inexplicable act of God, if you will.

“It’s hugely comforting to think that the world doesn’t just strike people down, especially innocent children,” Nicholas Christenfeld said.

There is, however, another way to view clusters that does not patronize believers as either mathematically dense or psychologically bewildered.

In a sense, I’m living in a cancer cluster. You are, too.

It is undeniable that the whole country is one gargantuan cancer cluster. Think about it. Almost half of us will contract the disease before we die. If that’s not a cluster, what is?

Examined from 30,000 feet, the Earth’s atmosphere is polluted. The ocean is full of metals. Processed food? You know it’s a horror story. Not to mention cigarettes, alcohol. And now we learn that cell phones could be microwaving our brains.

I could go on, but you know all this as well as I do.

In the infinite goodness of his heart, Chase asked too much of his parents. There are no perfectly safe zones. There’s no catcher in the pesticide-laced rye.

Even in a dark coal mine, however, it’s the nature of canaries to sing and fly toward the sky.

There’s a healthy garden underneath the global oil spill if only we can muster the will to scrub it clean and keep it well-lighted.

Before he died, Chase was on the verge of making Eagle Scout. His final project, which he did not live to complete, was a quiet sanctuary at his beloved Kelly Elementary School, ground zero in the suspected Carlsbad cancer cluster.

Chase’s idea was to create a place where a black Lab, an unflappable and very patient therapy dog called Rosie, would be on duty to listen to students read out loud.

The project is just about finished, thanks to Chase’s family, volunteers and local businesses that donated materials.

Rosie’s Garden will not save children from cancer, but it’s good for the heart.

Logan Jenkins: (760) 752-6756; logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com
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