freeway to Albuquerque, past adobe houses and mitt-shaped buttes, anvil clouds and remnants of Route 66, and pull over at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. The exhibits there explain the preparations involved in the making of the first atomic bomb, with thumbnail biographies of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project. One of the most interesting things on display is an old copy of the Los Alamos newspaper. Dated June 25, 1945, the Bulletin lists the movies to be shown at the compound’s theater; it scolds the mystery person who’s been pocketing the knives from the mess hall and promises that no new ones will replace those stolen.
None of this would be all that noteworthy were it not for the fact that the Trinity test is less than a month away. There will be a blinding flash and rolling thunder, hot wind and shock waves, but in the meantime someone on the base has lost a “long-haired black Persian cat with yellow eyes, wearing a collar with bell”; someone else misses “a Buick hub cap,” offering a reward for its return. The list of items FOR SALE includes a “Large, strong, varnished clothes basket. Used 1 month as bassinet. $3.50.” This bears out what I’ve read about the growing Los Alamos maternity ward, as does the WANTED TO BUY list, which includes a request for a “Good baby buggy. Call 496.” Trinity’s plutonium core will arrive at the test site three days early; someone will drive it down from Los Alamos to Jornada del Muerto in the back seat of a ’42 Plymouth. A good family car.
AND WE ARE IN A STRANGE NEW LAND
—“The Atomic Age,” Life, August 20, 1945
Does Rock City show our past or our future? Without the ultraviolet light, it’s the past—nursery rhymes, fairy tales, a garden static as blooms preserved under glass. But the ultraviolet light shows the future, a place radiant with garish color. The familiar fairy tales are transformed by this luminous color scheme into something peculiarly atomic-age. I read about the workers, mostly women, who painted the glowing tips of alarm-clock hands. They licked their paintbrushes to get a fine point; at night, their skin, clothes, and hair glowed. The radium in the paint gave them bone cancer, and they filed suit in 1927. By court day, they were too weak to raise their right hands. This strange light makes innocent stories sinister, recognizable but changed. The atomic calves who grazed in the desert during Trinity look normal but for their dusting of white. Swept with fire and steel as with a broom. Seared everywhere the fallout touched.
Before Trinity, the scientists at Los Alamos made a wager. Would the bomb set the Earth’s atmosphere on fire, and if it did, would the consequences be local or global? They liked betting, those physicists; in another pool, each of them guessed how much power the bomb would have, as compared to tons of TNT. The man who won happened to come in late, after all the reasonable figures had been taken. Out of politeness, he guessed what seemed like a ridiculously high figure, and it turned out he was the closest. (Twenty thousand.)
At the moment of detonation—July 16, 1945, 5:29:45 a.m.—a passenger was on her way to morning music class. She saw the bright flash of light and thought it was the sunrise. What was that? she asked her brother. She saw the explosion, this woman—even though she was stone blind. Hadn’t it seemed like any other morning? Maybe the brother drove a little too fast through town, running late, past the still-dark filling station, radio dimly on. Suddenly a blast of light, unlike anything ever seen, and what must he have thought, the brother?—blind too, at that moment, and too stunned to steady the car. No word for thought, not at first, silence then thunder and hot wind as not far away, the physicists lifted their faces from the ground, and Oppenheimer thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita: I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
It smelled funny, the rancher said, standing in the desert as the fallout rained down. Was that the vaporized jackrabbits, kangaroo rats, greasewood, killed at the moment of detonation, falling on him? Rip woke from his long sleep and staggered out from under the mountain to a world scrubbed bare, glowing gray in dull light. Slept through the revolution. What if he were the only one left? Even Wolf long gone; every dog gone.
THE FUTURE BELONGS
TO THOSE WHO PREPARE FOR IT
—Advertisement, Prudential Life Insurance, Life,
September 24, 1945
After Trinity, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, it makes perfect sense: you go underground, a place of safety, but also a place of ancient, subconscious threat. Go where the dead go and make your home there. Where ants and blind worms tunnel, where moles stroke smoothly through the clay. You will beg the mountain to cover you, and the rocks to hide you. It will not be enough. By August of 1945, the bomb no longer secret, an editorial in Life read, “For if there is no defense, then perhaps man must either abolish international warfare or move his whole urban civilization underground.” Fallout shelters (suburbia below ground) are grottoes lined with hoarded goods. Hollow out a place and fill it with the stories you used to know, but even the light is changed here, and things shine as they once did not, setting your glowing teeth on edge. Continued Life, “Constructing beautiful urban palaces and galleries, many ants have long lived underground in entire satisfaction.”
Paging through these old magazines, you want to shake the people in the ads for Packards, frozen peas, Campbell’s Soup. Wake up! But the draught’s been drained; done is done. What can follow the photos of the Trinity crater? An article about the new Miss America, flutist, a tall New Yorker. Ads for underwear and Arrow dress shirts. Mamma, use Swan soap. Free cake of soap to any baby born in 1945; write away for coupon. The business of living has fairly begun again, wrote Taylor; said Mom and Dad, Try not to worry about it too much. Good advice, if you can take it. At breakfast, just after Trinity, physicist George Kistiakowsky sat in the dining room at the Los Alamos Lodge and said, “That was the nearest to doomsday one can possibly imagine. . . . I am sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence—the last man—will see something very similar to what we have seen.”
Who knows how Jessie Sanders felt about the bomb? She was busy in her studio, pouring Hydrocal; a survivor, building a new world. How do we live with this new knowledge of how the Earth will end? Set it aside. Keep on working. Said journalist William Laurence, witnessing Nagasaki—of which Trinity had been a test—“We removed our glasses after the first flash but the light still lingered, a bluish-green light that illuminated the entire sky. . . . As the first mushroom floated off into the blue it changed its shape into a flowerlike form, its giant petals curving downward, creamy-white outside, rose-colored inside.” It’s an artist’s description, filled with color and comparison, and yet this is light unwholesome, strong-armed into something never before seen. If Fairyland Caverns is a memento mori, it is unlike the Renaissance ones, where sculpted skeletons reach from caskets to claw the air. Here there are no bones—vaporized instantly—just the glowing circles of Baa Baa Black Sheep’s wool, hanging in the darkness like an afterimage. What made me think of Trinity as I walked through Fairyland? Light spoken in a new tongue; a cave peopled by children with glowing faces. But the truth is you find what you look for. Maybe not the exact specimen, but once the scales fall from your eyes you must see the world, strange and dark. A red moon floated above a stadium on a noisy Friday night. I could have read there a sign of doom, or atmospheric dust, or both. Just the same, once I saw Trinity I would see it always, everywhere.
Imagine the world deserted. The raven did not return to the ark, but lit on the bodies of the floating dead. Under a photo of the Trinity crater, the caption reads, “The first atomic bomb’s crater is a great green blossom in the desert near Alamogordo.” The heat from the blast fused desert sand into a greenish glass, trinitite; how I would, as a child, have loved to find a piece of that poison glass. Imagine a desert rasped clean of every living thing. The bomb’s crater, shallow to start with, fills in a little more every sundown when the wind kicks up. Now, sixty years out, you wouldn’t know anything had happened there if not for the plaque, though there’s rarely anyone around to read it. Bits of trinitite pocketed years ago, ground
