Only On Sunday

Despite spending my formative years during a time when every true American was searching for pinkos in the shadows and 1 in 3 were digging up their backyards to install a fallout shelter, I never developed the prerequisite fear of ‘The Bomb’ required of that age.

In grade school, they would periodically conduct these Nuclear Preparedness drills. Similar to fire drills except you ducked under your desk and tucked your head between your knees instead of going outside, and nowhere near as much fun. The point of these drills was to protect yourself from imminent nuclear destruction. Right. I had seen the nuclear testing newsreel footage and knew in my young heart that this was about as useful as holding out your hand to stop a bullet. I always thought of this duck-and-cover move as bend-over-and-kiss-your-ass-good-bye drills.

‘The Bomb’ was a force so beyond my comprehension that I never saw the point of fearing it. And, as a skinny, shy kid growing up on the streets of west side Detroit, there were so many more immediate threats to consider. Those deities enamored of making a young boy’s life miserable had outdone themselves when populating my neighborhood with bullies.

‘The Bomb’ was developed in Los Alamos, located in the Jemez Mountains about an hour northwest of Albuquerque, and tested down at the Trinity site in White Sands, two plus hours southeast of here. White Sands is a desolate landscape of rugged canyons and foothills, rolling grasslands, ever shifting sand dunes and forever frozen lava flows. Snakes, scorpions, a lone hawk or buzzard overhead, the occasional coyote or oryx on the ground are about the only signs of life. Like most everyplace in New Mexico, both locations are pretty much in the middle of nowhere, which, I suppose, made sense since the Manhattan Project was this big secret. Even today, sixty years after the fact, it would be easy to keep a big secret in New Mexico.

I visited the Trinity site last year and have to say I was impressed with it despite my lack of any significant feeling about ‘the Bomb’. There is a sense of history there, an eerie sense that something big happened. The site itself hasn’t changed much. The twisted steel roots of the tower jut out of the ground. Several bunkers for test equipment poke above the flat land like the crusted shells of giant turtles. The house, several miles away, where the scientists and technicians stayed, was open for the tour.

There are still pieces of trinitite scattered about, formed when the heat of the first atomic blast melted the white sand, hardening it and turning it green. The military removed most of it years ago, buried it in some cave and sealed it off. There are warnings all over about collecting what small pieces are left, which, of course, most everyone ignores, including me (the radioactivity is minimal, about what you’d get from a watch with a glow-in-the-dark dial). About the only thing that has changed over the years is the fence that surrounds the site and the stone obelisk that marks ground zero.

At the other end of the Manhattan project is Los Alamos. I’ve driven through, and pretty much ignored, Los Alamos several times, mostly on my way to or from somewhere else. It’s a modern city now and not the sort of place I’d choose to live. I’m into funky and there ain’t a lot of funky in Los Alamos.

The Los Alamos Historical Society and the Atomic Heritage Foundation put on a little to-do last week called Legacy of the Manhattan Project: Creativity in Science and the Arts. What interested me about this was the tour of the original project sites, most of which are hidden behind the high security shadow of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

In preparation for this, I read a book called Los Alamos by Joseph Kanon. It’s a murder mystery set during the time of the Manhattan project and Mr. Kanon captures the dark and desperate mood of the time - the bleak landscape, the near total isolation, the fervor of the scientists, the stifling blanket of secrecy. It’s all there, beautifully rendered, page after page.

As it turned out, some amorphous security glitch truncated the tour, eliminating a visit to those parts of the original project hidden behind LANL’s razor wire fences. Sad, as they would have been interesting to see, but I found out something that changed my opinion of Los Alamos. I still wouldn’t live there but I see it now in a different way. It turns out that much of ‘downtown’ Los Alamos is part of the original site. There’s Ashley Pond pond (Not a typo. The pond is named after a man named Ashley Pond.), Bathtub Row, Hilltop House, the bungalows where Oppenheimer, Teller, Fermi and the like stayed while working on the bomb, all the places Mr. Kanon painted so well with his words, right there in the middle of town.

Funny how a well written book can do that to ya, change your perspective and all. I highly recommend his book.