The windshield’s a scrum of snow, white-swirled black, no way to tell up from down and headed for the ground at 170 miles an hour, the plane shaking hard, going fast, and this gyroscope measures direction in exactly the opposite way from the instruments the pilot had known before. What does it feel like? You can’t trust your senses when you’re this beat, this far from home, and all you know for sure is that your bones hurt from hunching into the cold. One day you’re playing the opening of a car dealership outside town; the next you’re leaving the movies with your friends; the next you’re on The Arthur Murray Party, standing in front of a girl in a strapless ball gown the color of winter wheat. She’ll stand there the whole time, swaying gently, looking over your shoulder at America and wearing a little smile that says there is nothing better than this, to be here in this place, young, feeling this song in your body, warm inside the theater while outside the wind blows, louder and louder, sneaking its way in through any crack it can find and shrieking now in your ear, higher and colder and harder and harder until finally it stops.
Amen! There’s no more time for prayin’! Amen!
—The Searchers, 1956
The second hand on the watch’s round face ticks toward vertical: three, two, one. A great flash, then peals of thunder, and a wall of sand radiates out from ground zero. When the heat hits the house, its paint smokes but doesn’t have time to catch fire. The shock wave rolls over it, the roof lifts off, and the whole thing collapses. Two and one-third seconds since detonation.
There’s a lot of atomic film out there; you can watch the bomb explode as many times as you can stand. But although the different cameras and jump cuts can make the clips hard to follow, the View-Master parcels out a single image at a time. Push the reel home with a click, and put the eyepieces to your face. All of the images on this second reel are colored yellow, everything lit not by the sun, but by the bomb. A bomb with a twenty-nine-kiloton yield, about twice as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima. “Observers are silhouetted by the Atomic Flash,” reads this caption. I stare at the dark shapes of the people, the bleachers, and the telephone poles behind them, everything outlined in a gleaming yellow that could almost be mistaken for a very bright sunrise, but the color’s all wrong. Like many other shots, Apple-2 was detonated before dawn specifically so that the photographs taken of it would be better. And I have to admit, this is an image I can’t forget.
Next slide. Here’s our house, the one with Father and Big Sister in the living room. As “the heat burns the surface of a two story house,” smoke issues from the roof and from the car in the driveway, a ’48 Plymouth. The house’s front windows, blank and white, reflect the fireball. Click. By the next image, when “the shockwave slams into the two story house,” the window glass is gone, the roof canting back as the siding dissolves in granular smoke. Support beams fly up as the trunk shears from the Plymouth, and already the light has changed to a pallid yellow, the black sky less absolute, greasy with smoke and sand, carpet, copper wire.
Click. On this house, a one-story rambler, the roof goes first. Smoke rises from the gravel drive, the portico, the power lines. “The house is blown to pieces from the shockwave,” says the caption; I click back to the previous slide and can’t find anything I recognize. Click. When “an aluminum shed is crushed by the shockwave,” the roof and sides crumple inward in a swirl of dust. Click. The last slide shows a stand of fir trees, brought in from the Siskiyou Forest in Oregon, maybe, or the Willamette. Soldiers implanted them in a strip of concrete, a fake forest built of real trees. There’s a rim of low mountains in the background; in the middle distance, this strange forest, bending in an unnatural wind; and in the foreground, no seedlings or fallen logs, just the flat expanse of desert, covered over by what might be choppy water, or snow. And if any stowaways were hiding in the trees, bagworms in the needles or termite colonies under the bark, they’re vaporized like everything else, flat gone.
Live a bucolic life in the country, far from a potential target of atomic blasts. For destruction is everywhere. Houses destroyed, mannequins, representing humans, torn apart, and lacerated by flying glass.
—Las Vegas Review-Journal, May 6, 1955
It could be any cornfield, any stretch of snow. What’s left isn’t recognizable as a plane, and the dark shapes on the ground don’t look like bodies, although they must be. The coroner’s broad back is dark against the white as he leans over to take their measure. The thin snow crusting the ground makes everything look even colder. There’s a shape a few yards distant that looks like someone trying to crawl away. You know it’s a lie. They didn’t have a prayer.
Time to clean up. Down in Las Vegas, employees at car dealerships sweep up window glass that had been shattered by the blast, sixty-five miles away. Someone dumps the pieces in a barrel and starts charging for them: atomic souvenirs. They sell out by day’s end. In Doom Town, cars lie flipped onto their tops or burned where they stand. Telephone poles are snapped in half, their lines a snarled mass.
I watch a clip from “Test Film #33.” A camera pans down a line of mannequins staked to poles in the open desert. Their clothes wave in the breeze. “Do you remember this young lady?” the narrator asks. “This tattoo mark was left beneath the dark pattern.” As she speaks, the hand of an unseen worker lifts the skirt a modest few inches, smoothing the slip to show how the heat seared a design onto the fabric beneath. “And this young man? This is how the blast charred and faded the outer layer of his new dark suit.” The same worker’s hand, a wedding band gleaming on one broad finger, pushes the cloth back to reveal the lapel shadow seared on the mannequin’s chest. Then he smoothes the lapel back in place. For a brief moment, he presses his ungloved palm to the mannequin’s shoulder, as if to say, There you go. You did your best. Such a slight gesture, here and gone—he probably didn’t give it any thought. But it moves me, his moment of pity for even this mute copy of a man.
He never said hardly a word but “thank you.”
—Daniel Dougherty, of Buddy Holly’s banter during the Winter Dance Party at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa; February 2, 1959
Corn or soybeans, the field gets replanted every year. A beaten path runs along the fence, and at the site, there’s a memorial, metal records and a cutout guitar with BUDDY HOLLY RITCHIE VALENS BIG BOPPER 2-3-59 etched on the aluminum. People leave things: flowers, quarters, a red model Corvette, guitar picks, pairs of glasses, ticket stubs from the State Fair, a CD with WE LOVE YOU and RIP written on it, a WAYLON tour button, a small American flag. In winter, snow covers the offerings, and the metal records look like pie pans left out to scare the crows.
He died young and far from home, and snow drifted around his body all that long dark night. Damn cold in February, but at least it was over quick. At least you can say what caused it and nobody will argue with you. The reporter who wrote about the “honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching” wrote another article that scoffed at the threat of fallout, writing that “some of the scare talk is simply a matter of individuals’ basking in the limelight of public attention for the first time.” The woman who crouched in the trenches thirty-five hundred yards from ground zero—“the closest any Caucasian women have ever been to an atomic blast”—told of “the normal feminine excitement” in the air, but insisted that “I didn’t feel that my life was in any danger.” The leukemia clusters in downwind towns would emerge over the next three to ten years, but the government would fight the link between testing and disease for far longer. “Hysterical,” the reporter called a letter writer who claimed cause and effect.
I can’t stop thinking about the bare-handed worker showing the mannequin to the camera. About the newspaperman in the tank they nicknamed Baby, and about the soldier driving the tank, who was twenty years old, and from Bellefontaine, Ohio, the town where I was born. About the workers serving lunch at the test site the day after the shot. “I particularly remember some roast beef,” says the narrator in “Test Film #33.” “It was done to perfection
