A Well of Pain

In one, a large notebook is visible, a statement in bold black letters scrawled on its cover: "I want this country to hear my pain."

A Crusade Begins

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Her husband, Corey Orsted, 38, gave her "Erin Brockovich," the 2000 Oscar-nominated movie about the busty and bodacious self-made environmental activist. The film offered some good pointers, except that Holt-Orsted, as a breast-cancer survivor, can't show off cleavage the way that Brockovich did.

"Mine's all scarred up," she says. "Looks like a railroad track."

She is not as reticent as her father. He was more private, more old-school proper, didn't want to publicly discuss his prostate cancer and his fears of how he got it.

"I think when my dad was first diagnosed, I was like, if this was me, I'd be shouting," Holt-Orsted says. And then it was her. And she started shouting.

That was back in 2003, when Holt-Orsted received her diagnosis and her crusade began. She opted to have her treatments in Tennessee, where she could rely on extra family support. Between treatments, she mustered the energy to fight those she believes responsible for her family's illnesses. She transformed her parents' home into her command center, there in the semi-rural community where she grew up, where her family's only wealth was the land.

When she wasn't throwing up from the chemo, she dragged herself to government offices to search public records. She researched environmental issues on the Web, sometimes falling asleep at her computer.

A former high school and college athlete turned bodybuilder and fitness trainer, she schooled herself in TCE, one of the most prevalent contaminants of drinking water in the country. It had been dumped at the Dickson County landfill in the 1960s and 1970s.

She reached out to environmental justice activists, including Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. She called him so often and for so long that he finally gave in and called her back. "She sounded desperate," remembers Bullard, who is now advising the family. "She was doing this by herself."

When she heard Danny Glover would be at a Nashville walkathon, she ignored her family's advice and showed up to chase him down. She even tried to jog. But, weak from chemo the day before, her wig sliding off her head, she gave up in tears. "I was a sight," she says, able to laugh now at the memory.

Another time, at a meeting of the Dickson County Commission, she stood up and accused county officials of lying to her family about the safety of the Holt well water, warning, "Whoever in this community decided to let us drink this water, there's a place in Hell for you if you don't find God."

In January, she carried her fight to Capitol Hill, speaking at a panel on environmental racism. Her family's attorney, Matthew Colangelo of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, attended to support her. She had buried her father only days before. Her usual ebullience was gone, as she read, flatly: