Boom: A Story of Erasure, Accident, and Exposure in the New Mexico Desert

Abstract

Boom:A Story of Erasure, Accident, and Exposure in the New Mexico Desert Tyler Mills (bio) Mountains curtained the sky ahead of us. Spring hadn't arrived, but the sun blasted the paling road, the finch-feather grass, and the torches of evergreen all the same. Time seemed suspended—but not in seasonless sunshine. Instead, I passed through something like time on the Safety Corridor on 502 to Los Alamos. As I rounded a cliff, light splashed over my shoulders, and like hose water, all over the hood of the car. Oppenheimer vacationed here in what he thought of as "impossibly remote" terrain. Before the shock wave. Before the light became something more than light, visible only the instant the blast cooled just enough for the cameras. Cameras captured the images we know: the bulbs, the mushrooms, the turrets of clouds. When you are here, in New Mexico, where the potential for infinite destruction all began, you feel like you are in a photograph. But seconds still tick at the wrist like blood sluicing through a vein. Before a tower dropped the Trinity bomb in what is now the White Sands Missile Range, boys put frogs in each other's beds at the Los Alamos Ranch School in cabins that would later become ad hoc labs and workshops for plutonium. This was before the facility became a campus, before the town gridded into housing developments and grocery stores. Before we burned our way into a new geological epoch. Before everything changed. [End Page 79] On your way into town, the landscape leading into Los Alamos opens up to cliffs that frame the sky like a shag haircut. An ice cream scoop could have carved the rock out, and all the trees clinging to it in the wind hardly move—gnarled, twisted. Here, beauty is a word that arrives in the mind slowly, the way water boils an egg. Except for the make and model of the cars swerving past you on the corkscrew turns, and maybe except for the oddly warm winter—hardly any snow since January, which will mean more summer wildfires—the charged quality of the air tricks you into thinking you're back in time seventy years. If there is one spark, one cigarette, one blue pinprick of static at your sleeve, one open can of gasoline, could all of this vaporize? The name "Los Alamos" means the poplars, more specifically the cottonwoods that pour into the sky. The nuclear facility hums here, though you can't hear it. Everything around it pushes you away gently. You can enter the small science museum for free. You will not be tempted to purchase a book because the bookstore went out of business before you arrived. One rare afternoon, the Los Alamos National Laboratory's presence announced itself in Santa Fe. That winter morning, I was sipping mint tea in front of my laptop screen hoping to settle the question mark curling in my stomach. All of a sudden I heard a roar. Everything became part of the sound, its color a deep blue. My mind smeared like light between the stardust whorls of the Milky Way. Did a massive engine blast past my building then vanish? I thought about guns. Military jets. I went to the window and touched the glass. Cold. Sun grazed the roofs of the cars in the lot below me, and beyond them, the field where prairie dogs burrow into the earth stretched out emptily. No one in a puffy vest and neon hat wandered down into the arroyo. The mountains rose like a stage backdrop, this time peach under a pale blue sky. Nothing. January was January, and I returned to my desk. The shape within me had grown a silky pelt of hair. I shivered and wrapped my cape-like synthetic sweater tighter around myself. Nothing stirred. The size of a pea pod, my secret could open and close its mouth and fists. Out my window overlooking the road, a U-Haul swerved around the bend, broadcasting the graphic of another state on the side of the truck. Colorado, a bighorn sheep. And so the New Mexico mountain town became ordinary again...