Downwinders Trust Feisty Advocate Mayo’s Hanford-Related Work Not First Bout With Adversity

David Mayo walked away from his lucrative 11-year career as an attorney and onto a sailing ship that could have been cast for “Mutiny on the Bounty.”

The 70-foot boat, supposedly a contender in the 1989 Yamaha Cup Race from New Zealand to Japan, hit a squall the first night out. The storm took two sails and sucked Mayo overboard. He was saved only by a lifeline.

“That set the tone for the whole trip,” Mayo said.

It also sets the tone for Mayo, whose skills at navigating adversity are equally necessary in his current enterprise - running the North Idaho branch of the Hanford Health Information Network.

The network tells downwinders about the doses of radioactivity they received from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation’s accidents and experiments.

A spare man of 45, Mayo is not related to the Marine from Osburn who fell off an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea last November, although he does have a brother who is a naval admiral.

His adventures at sea are equally unsettling. His eight-man boat crew was assembled only an hour before race time.

A riot nearly erupted after the crew learned the captain had used the food money to buy high-quality meat to resell in Japan.

“We were stuck with bread and butter and some foul liquid concoction,” Mayo said.

When the ship docked in Guam two months later, the crew scattered after a run-in with the captain over their passports.

“I thought that race was going to be a real test of my sailing skills,” Mayo said. “It was much more of a psychological test - how to interact with people.”

Mayo seems attracted to squalls.

He is the only official from the Hanford Health Information Network that many downwinders trust because they say he’s willing to buck the bureaucracy. They’re amazed he’s survived.

“I know from past experience with whistleblowers, when somebody as good as David appears on the scene he’s in danger because he’s not one of the bureaucratic robots,” said Lois Camp, who started Hanford Downwinder Health Concerns.

Irv Sisson, a downwinder from Cataldo, calls Mayo a man willing to go against “the whole (Hanford) whitewashing process.”

“When he’s mad at the administration, everybody knows it,” added Natalie Ednie, chairwoman of the local network advisory board. “When David sees something absolutely crazy in the bureaucracy, he gets on the phone.”

Mayo is more critical of himself.

“I can be a pain in the…” he added, gesturing candidly from one of only three chairs in an office so sparse it is decorated only by a map showing population centers where winds took Hanford’s major radioactive releases.

“There have been shouting matches over whether certain actions should be taken, but I’ve never received an admonition,” he says.

The Coeur d’Alene office is one of eight strung across Oregon, Washington and Idaho and reaches 30 percent of the network’s clients, although it has only 8 percent of the funding the U.S. Department of Energy provides.

Mayo has staged the only conferences for downwinders on thyroid disease and auto-immune system problems and those have attracted sizable crowds.

Mayo agrees his style isn’t conducive to living well in a bureaucracy. No problem.

“I took this job without expectations of advancement or long-term employment,” he said.

That’s not easy for a man raised to believe that being goal-oriented miraculously would provide happiness.

It also helps explain what pushed him out of his cushy role as corporate counsel for a large New England insurance company.

The practice of law was too much money, too much adversity, too much focus on what was good for the individual no matter what the cost to society.

“I felt that quiet desperation I think everyone feels in his or her life that they have chosen the wrong path,” Mayo said. “And they either capitulate and decide to be miserable or they make the jump.”

Jump is understatement. He abandoned lawyering at age 37, took on the sailing adventure, then went for a master’s degree in public health.

He topped that by volunteering for the domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps, Volunteers In Service to America. The first job that came open was at the Panhandle Health District in Coeur d’Alene.

After working on child health here, and maternity clinics for low-income people in Oregon, he was hired in 1993 to run the local Hanford health information office.

The next road is unknown. That makes his bold steps sometimes feel shaky.

“My God, there are times I regret doing what I did because I don’t know where I’m going,” Mayo said. But “the key to life is giving…. I’d like to figure out a way to do that 24 hours a day.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo