Because I didn’t want to be guided by preconceptions, during the exploratory period of my place education, I at times allowed chance to have a hand in my itinerary. Perhaps my most purely random choice of destination was Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, a destination based almost entirely on the attraction of its odd name. In the course of getting to know this dusty desert town and its surroundings, I did my usual—pursued little stories, talked to people, got to know some of them, got up-to-date on local issues, and read old newspapers. The town had originally been called Hot Springs, for supposedly curative waters in which I soaked in a very plain hot-tub establishment, where the dour attendant handed me sandpaper towels. Tongue-in-groove partitions were painted a dull green, and daylight came in through high windows.
I also went to the Geronimo Springs Museum. There I learned about the Apaches who had lived nearby and used the springs, too, and that the town had been renamed in 1950 after a radio show, in the hope of sparking its dead economy. The show, Truth or Consequences, was modeled on an English parlor game, called Forfeits, that became popular on the frontier. A recurring phrase in Forfeits was “Heavy Heavy Hangs over Thy Head.” Ralph Edwards, the radio show’s founder, had learned Forfeits as a boy in Colorado and later took it to radio as Truth or Consequences, which it may also have been called in Colorado. In 1950, with the tenth anniversary of the show coming up, he made an offer: if a town changed its name to Truth or Consequences, he would broadcast the anniversary show from there. Hot Springs, in desperate economic shape, went for it. Six months later, Edwards took the show onto television. There were clips in the Geronimo Springs Museum. Contestants were asked a question of fact, and if they answered wrong there would be “consequences.” In my favorite clip, a participant was asked what the average yearly rainfall in Colorado was. He gave the wrong answer—that is, didn’t tell the “truth”—and as a consequence was handed the tail of a stuffed tiger. Then he was asked another, equally obscure statistical question, and he got that one wrong, too, whereupon he was handed the tail of a real tiger. Now that’s good television! Ralph Edwards returned to the town renamed for his show yearly until the end of his life to participate in a monthlong festival in which he was lionized long after the show had faded into the past. Whether in the long run—or even the short run—the name change helped the town is hard to say.
In the course of my investigations, I interviewed an old rancher. It was fun for me, an easterner, to talk to this rangy old guy. I enjoyed his home, too, long and low, a true ranch house, not a suburban one, and the way in which older items having to do with the work of ranching—I remember, in particular, an old, very beautiful western saddle—were around, as specific mementos as opposed to thematic décor. In recalling his life, the rancher told me that, when he was a young man, he had ranched in the foothills of the Fra Cristobal Mountains, just east of town. It just came along naturally in his recollections of those days that, without any warning, at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, he and others—ranchers got up early—saw a blinding flash behind the mountains, in the direction of the Jornada del Muerto desert. They later learned that the flash was the Trinity atomic test.
I had had no sense of the proximity of that momentous event. I had come across no mention of Trinity in the Geronimo Museum, or in chamber of commerce promotions. The place usually associated with Trinity was Alamogordo, which I knew to be far to the southeast. In fact, sometimes the test is simply called “Alamogordo.” Nor was Trinity mentioned in stories about Truth or Consequences, though the town, struggling as ever, was pumping up every other available scrap of its history that might distinguish it, as well as creating an old-fashioned western Main Street that had never existed.
I asked the rancher where the Fra Cristobal ranch was, and went out there. Flat sagebrush extended into the foothills, terrain desiccated and monotonous at your feet but entrancing in the distance, especially in the direction of the mountains. This land had been ranched since the area was settled. Miles of range was needed to support a single steer. The long blue shadows of clouds on the foothills looked like bodies of water for sure—a cobalt gleam, the almost flagrant wetness of mirage. Though New Mexico was the site of several major events in the development of atomic weaponry, I had had no plans to visit those places, almost on principle. Many had made pilgrimages to such places, including writers, and to me there seemed to be a willful romanticism, even a pitiful desperation, in the hope that place could help us understand the release of a force that could swallow place as we have known it altogether. I got my map out of my car and then, as I stood there, began to understand that, in part, the absence of a sense of nearness to Trinity had to do with the separation the mountains created. On the map a dotted line indicated some sort of a road, but not one in present use, through the mountains into the Jornada del Muerto desert in the Tularosa Basin. Maybe it had been closed by the government as the Trinity test approached and never reopened. In any event, there was no other road across the mountains. To get to the site of Trinity from Truth or Consequences, you had to drive south about seventy miles to Las Cruces, get around the southern edge of the San Andres range, and then drive almost that distance northeast to the White Sands Missile Range, then north through the Tularosa Basin to Trinity. It was early evening, and the shadows were long. Jackrabbits loped off in their outrageously bare-bummed way. You can’t adopt a random method of place selection and then ignore Trinity, if that is what turns up. Standing there, I knew that I would, after all, be joining my fellow place-pilgrims to the site of the first atomic explosion.
At the White Sands Missile Range base I was assigned a guide, who drove me the many miles up to Trinity in a big red SUV. She was irrepressibly chatty, spewing miscellaneous facts about the landscape around us: the presence of a rare breed of shrimp in the saline groundwater; the introduction of oryx, an African antelope that, having proliferated, is subject to a yearly hunting season; the “yield” of the Trinity bomb; how the site is open to the public on one day a year: pacifists to bomb enthusiasts attend. The route up through the basin had been called Jornada del Muerto by Spanish settlers. A small volcanic range up ahead was called the Oscura, for the skirts of black lava on its slopes. Evidently the government had dropped secrecy in favor of what seemed to be random running-off-at-the-mouth, a series of non sequiturs before which the mind of a listener soon blurred, and which was therefore almost as obscuring as secrecy in its effects. To me, my guide’s jumble reflected our disorientation. It’s as if we don’t know what anything means anymore. Just a Dumpster of everything. I missed secrecy.
We drove straight to the Trinity site. It was fenced off, but we went in, and in the center was a monument that had been erected in the 1960s, smack in the middle of the Cold War, at the height of the arms race. It was a twelve-foot obelisk, squat looking in that environment, made of black lava from the Oscuros. Black lava is a horrid material, matte, soft looking even when hard, conveying a spill even when shaped. It was to me ugly, subhuman seeming, a stunted grunt, as from a prelingual layer of consciousness. Still, there was surely a romance of place in this choice of a local element: a choice that seemed to be imploring place to somehow endow this spot with encompassing meaning. In this the government had abandoned its usual façade of confidence, of having it all well in hand, so essential to its posture where the Cold War was concerned.
White Sands had by then become a landing strip for space shuttles as well as a missile testing ground. Given that by the 1960s missiles were the “delivery system” for nuclear devices, maybe the artist’s idea was that lava, the stuff of the molten core of the Earth, was of a piece with the sun, the exploding stars, that energy native to space but not to our earthly nature—even though it’s secreted away inside it. Maybe the monument’s maker wanted to convey with the lava that earthly nature is bracketed by this energy in both outer and subatomic space from which it has spilled into our hitherto protected in-between domain. The name Trinity was Robert Oppenheimer’s choice, but my guide didn’t know why. Later I learned that it is said to allude to a poem by the seventeenth-century poet John Donne that begins “Batter my heart, three person’d God” and, a few lines later “bend / Your force to break, blowe, burn, and make me new.” There is a sense in which this spiritual poem rises to an emotional intensity that is the equal of the predicament created by the release of atomic power, but I did not have it in hand on this trip. There was instead a mildness, and the slight sadness of an abandoned site—an old rusted-out furnace casing lying to one side of the gate. There were wildflowers at Trinity and my guide knew their names: mallow, alyssum. Elysium! The sand underfoot had been crystallized by the explosion. My guide said it was illegal but if I wanted to take some home as a souvenir, I could. In a fit of high-minded dudgeon touched with hypochondria, I declined. Would I want radioactive glass on my desk among my little beach stones?
After that we went to the place where the “device” had been assembled. This was the McDonald Ranch House, which, my guide told me, was a sheep farmer’s homestead built in the basin in 1913. The ranch house was small, simple; adobe, a single story with a sloping, four-sided roof. Two sheep-farming families lived there in succession, eking out a living in the desert until the federal government decided to use the basin as a bombing and gunnery range. The McDonald Ranch House was two miles from the Trinity site, and the explosion blew out its windows and bowed the roof inward. After the experiment was over, no one took care of it. Rain came in, and the wind got under the house and destabilized it, and sand blew up through the floorboards until 1984, when some preservation measures had been taken. The measures restored it to its pre-explosion state. I never oppose preservation, because there is no telling what we will need in the future, and once something is gone it’s gone forever. But the very idea of preserving the venue at which the possible annihilation of everything was inaugurated had its own contradictions. The damage to this humble structure was hardly instructive as to the power of the atomic bomb. Still, I wished I could have seen McDonald Ranch House with its roof stove in and its interior sacked by sand and rain over the course of half a century. That would have offered a direct connection to the intrusion of the Trinity experiment, into the passage of time before and after. The McDonald Ranch House in that state would have conveyed the vulnerability, the humanity, and the animal time-boundedness of the physicists, the government, and indeed us all.
Inside the doorjambs were square cut and painted brown, the doors green, with lighter green panels. The latches were in small black boxes affixed to the doors, with brown glass doorknobs attached. The floors were of two-inch boards, brown, varnished, and worn. The walls were adobe, painted light blue, and had cracked, and fortunately not been repaired. The ceilings were twelve feet high, the guide told me. A naked bulb on a wire hung from the middle of the ceiling in every room. In one front room the moldings around the ceiling were a greenish blue and above them were faded alternating stencils of a daisy and a candle. An aesthetic touch to sweeten a lonely life on the desert range. The rooms were empty. Between rooms were wooden thresholds. One room, plainer than the others, was labeled the Plutonium Assembly Room, and there was a handwritten note attached to the doorjamb: PLEASE USE THE OTHER DOORS. KEEP THIS ROOM CLEAN.
The windows in the Plutonium Assembly Room were deeply inset in the adobe walls and through them I saw a stone wall and beyond it the range, flat as the ocean floor it had once been, bright desert, low mountains in the distance, and sky—a setting that puts one in mind of geological time. It looked as if you could just walk forever and then expire. The mountains at that moment were shadowed by clouds and I could hear the wind about the house.
It was only later that I got a few moments to myself, going out a back door just to see what was there. This evidently wasn’t in my guide’s guidebook: she had no interest in following. With relief I stepped onto a wooden porch. While I had been inside, a very light rain had fallen, and the smell of the desert was strong. Clustering near the farmhouse was a crumbled dwelling with a chimney, the ruins of sheepfolds, corrals, barns. They had been made of local stone and timber, neither plentiful here. The scale was scrimped, pre-picturesque, reflecting the brutal hard labor entailed in turning a wilderness to human purposes: extracting something out of nothing with mingy returns. Because the structures had not been preserved but had deteriorated naturally over time, the continuum was completely intact, and shocking. This little frontier sheep ranch had been built only thirty-two years before Trinity. Barely a generation and a half had passed since the building of the ranch house, and the way of life it represented had gone on more or less the same right up to the time of Trinity. You could sense the hardship of quite recent times, but there also remained a quality of established agrarian place that suggests there is no point in going anywhere else, in which you are here and here only while the rest of the world barely exists; the hominess of the tiny domesticated nook where cacti grew quietly and butterflies came out and fluttered whenever the wind momentarily stopped.
Mostly the wind blew, buffeting my ears. On one of the wooden window frames there was a loose piece of wood swinging on a nail, tappety-tap-tap-tapping in the wind. My notebook fluttered, and then the wind sounded as in pines, though no pines were around, and the sun warmed my back, and there were hawks in the sky, and then when the wind got still stronger there was a deeper sound in it. With the deeper sound, I noticed more clearly the scraggly bushes around the ruins, the shards of crockery on the ground, the crooked posts of what had once been a pen of some kind, become so wind-worn, so honed, that they had acquired a twisting grained expressiveness. A system of gutters on the house collected rainfall and deposited it in a cistern in which the physicists had taken swims, as I had seen them doing in a photo inside. The meaning of the site notwithstanding, I liked this place in the same way I had liked Canebrake: a pooling of time, an enlarging warmth, a sense of human presence past—sheep husbandry, the young men in the cistern.
In response to the situation that arose out of the test at Trinity, we have developed, perhaps, our fiercest, most diligent habit of deflection. While the Cold War was going on, we may have had no choice but to push this actuality away, to sanitize it in jargon and otherwise live as if it were not true. Who is to say that this choice was not the right one, especially after arsenals were built up to a possibly life-annihilating level? After all, we did muddle through intact. But muddling through does not necessarily lay a good foundation. Though the geopolitical situation and its terrors have receded, we go forward without an important part of our education: a fully felt and imagined response to a radically altered context—brought about by a new understanding of the physics of the world and the powers that knowledge had put in our hands—without a concomitant change in ourselves.
In other words, we might be missing an important piece of psychic development in never stopping to look back to understand this experience free of self-preserving deflection. In the 1990s, though the Cold War was over, part of an exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington that included the Enola Gay, the plane from which the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, was eliminated because of pressure from conservative legislators and veterans groups objecting to material that revealed disagreement among leaders as to whether to drop atom bombs on Japan, a well-known fact. As Kai Bird has pointed out in Hiroshima’s Shadow, a collection of pieces about the controversy over the exhibition—as well as denial surrounding this subject—the controversial material did not represent that the choice to drop the bomb had been wrong, though it did not indicate that it was right, either. But, to some, to introduce choice at all was to question the brittle, good-versus-evil morality behind which we hid the enormous, unprecedented moral questions implicit in the Cold War. The best argument for using the bomb was that the war would be ended quickly, saving lives on both sides. The argument against it was that using the bomb would open the way to an atomic arms race and ultimately the possibility of a true Armageddon. I don’t think our past leaders can be held responsible in retrospect for the scale of nuclear armament that eventually evolved. But I do think that we are now responsible for looking directly at where the course we chose led us, as well as where alternate courses might have taken us, and the stakes implicit in both. A consequence of the choice we did make, at which we have never dared to look directly, is that when the stakes became life on Earth, no human value was worth the risk—not democracy, not freedom: indeed, all beliefs fell before this risk. In this, there was a kind of moral annihilation, itself almost impossible to bear given there was no solution in sight, which we handled by going forward as if the stakes were no different from those of former confrontations with evildoers, such as Nazis—as if the main issue was democracy versus fascism or, as it had become, communism.
Oppenheimer, one of the physicists responsible for the device tested at Trinity, did understand the stakes. Famously, on the successful completion of the test, he said, “Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.” He was quoting from the Bhagavad Gita. The speaker is a god. As it happened, during my first visit to Truth or Consequences, a series depicting the drama at Trinity was showing on PBS, with Sam Waterston playing the part of Oppenheimer. The ads for the series, on television but also radio—I heard them often in my car as I drove around—included a sound bite of Waterston speaking Oppenheimer’s words: “Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.” He delivered them in a way that expressed inconsolable sadness but nothing of the paradox contained therein. We could call it Oppenheimer’s paradox: that though we had acquired this power, we were not gods and therefore did not have alternative worlds on which to stand while we destroyed the one we had. The tone in the isolated phrase suggested the allegorical wisdom of a much older civilization, as directed to the innocent young one that had gotten itself into this predicament of footing. Hearing the words over and over, spoken in exactly the same way, was grating, because the tone suggested that we had the needed wisdom, the depth of moral understanding to cope with this predicament when we didn’t. Well, you can’t get everything all at once. That the show was aired at all reflected a good change, surely. Indeed the restoration of the McDonald Ranch House by the government was in itself a good change in the direction of facing reality, although, judging from the fracas over the Air and Space Museum’s exhibition, it seems possible that conservative legislators may not have noticed the plans for this preservation project. Then again, there was no curatorial material in the presentation of the ranch house that raised doubts as to our moral infallibility or capacity for true responsibility—the requisite depth and imagination—with respect to the weaponry inaugurated at Trinity.
Just three houses up from my Rensselaerville cottage, the village ends and a path leads into the woods, into the narrowing gorge along the stream, then up to the top of the falls, and beyond to a lake above. This is part of a preserve—a funny word for something wild, as if it were jam, something boiled down to intense sweetness on a stove in a kitchen. But, when I think about it, the word is just right for a protected wild place that has become intimately known through many revisitations, in multiple seasons, at all times of day, in rain and under the moon and in the extraterrestrial brilliance of a June summer morning. One walk that stands out took place many years after my visit to Truth or Consequences, on a day when the sky was lowering and the light in the space above the stream below the falls was green. The path up to the ledge at the top of the falls goes through hardwood forest with birch mixed in, and some of the birch was down: white slashes in forest floor. Farther along a gleam announced the lake ahead, and then the path led into the open, down along the shore, where mature oaks in long grass lean over the water on one side and, on the other, wooded land climbs steeply. On this particular walk, just as I came to the lakeshore, a light rain set in and a surge in the breeze indicated an imminent change in weather.
The oak boughs stretching over the path protected me from the rain, and then they didn’t, so I moved into a deeper spot near the trunk. I could hear the patter of rain on the leaves, distinctive, almost assertive. I listened, and then, as the rain increased, a tiny rustle of rills coming down the slope behind me joined the patter, and the soughing of the wind became deeper, which reminded me of the McDonald Ranch House, and there I was: the sense of psychic largeness, warmth, the sense an agrarian place can convey that everything is where you are; that you need go no farther. The rain let up a bit, but a bottle of ink had been spilled in the sky above me, though the far end of the lake was already bright again. To escape heavier rain I hurried homeward and just as I got to the woods there was a big crack of thunder, and then torrents, so I took a shortcut to a road that pitches steeply into the heart of the village.
When I came to the crest of that pitch, I saw below me the rooftops of the cluster of houses. This was a sight I knew well. But rising behind them—what can I call it? Surely “rainbow” is too thin, a Crayola word. The prism broken out, and unembarrassedly Crayola it was, and gargantuan, and really bright, almost neon, powerfully upthrusting. It looked like the lower portion of an enormous column, except that you could just begin to see the curve before it disappeared into low clouds: a different architecture from ours. The village roofs huddling, the pot of gold down on the floodplain behind—the rainbow was a picture-book joke. The village does that every so often, testing our sense of humor—to see if we have become too grand, or too ironic for simple wonders. One day Santa will be on a roof. Well, the rainbow was funny, and it was cute, but I had just been listening to the wind behind the McDonald Ranch House, so I was feeling more naïve than ironic, a stranger in a strange land of enclosure, with which the rainbow was of a piece, outfolding, as it did, the spectrum of bright colors hidden in seemingly ordinary light, our rose window.